I'm engaged with The Wasteland in another class and one thing we've talked about is the multiplicity of wastelands that inhabit that poem. Underworld, though it may not name TS Eliot (or hasn't yet) is also deeply concerned with wastelands. One way to read the title "Underworld" is physically, as in the buried world of nuclear waste. These underworlds are, in a way, an evolution of the Eliot's WWI battlefield wastelands. Both are products of the military-industrial complex though the nature of Cold War- its technologies and secrecy- have driven the wasteland underground. While lilacs bread out of the dead land of Eliot's Modern wasteland, the Postmodern underworld/wasteland is specifically toxic, carcinogenic, and must be isolated from the natural world.

Within the novel we see various physical wastelands.

Along the lines of the east-west division that Brittany presented on, we are given too very different physical wastelands for Arizona and the Bronx.

In the southwest: "...the sense of knowing he was headed into remote Sonoran waste, where the interplay of terrain and weapons was a kind of neural process remapped in the world, a hollow sort of craving lifted out of the brain stem, or wherever, and painted over with words and sky and diamondback desert" (p.451) This is Matty as he drives out into the desert with Janice.

In the bronx: "a landscape of vacant lots filled with years of stratified deposits..." (p.238). This is the description of the Wall.

Both wastelands, east and west, recieve tourism. Matty and Janice are recreational tourists and there is, of course, the Surreal Tour bus. Though not quite the theme parks that Detwiler envisions, these American wastelands are attractions.

We get literal wastelands from Nick, Sims, and Brian's job. Wasteland as mountain at the Fresh Kills landfill; wasteland as abyss at the pit the Nick and Sims visit.

Another wasteland in the novel is the Triumph of Death painting. The Wall clearly mirrors this painting at during the subway fire scence. Look at the lower right corner of the painting for the oddly modern subway doors.

Anyways, I've named some physical wastelands, but there are also spiritual wastelands. The emotional topography of waste is easily navigated at an apocalyptic wasteland like the Triumph of Death, but what does Fresh Kills or the Sonoran suggest about the human spirit? What "kind of neural process remapped in the world" do we see in these wastelands? And what about non-physical (marriage? suburbia? memory?) wastelands? It is abstract wastelands that Eliot is mostly concerned with in his poem. I hope for some insightful comments as I've found it much easier to identify physical wastelands than deal with these questions...

Also, on a totally different note, did anyone else think of American Graffiti on p.453? "...they realized the coyote was Wolfman Jack on the transistor radio, a howling disc jockey vectored into the desert from some bandit station below the border." I don't know why Delilo presents Wolfman Jack as fictional or coming from Mexican bandit radio. He was real and very mainstream. Nevermind, wikipedia has helped clear this up: "Larry Brandon then made a deal with attorney Arturo Gonzalez in Del Rio, Texas, who operated the Inter-American Radio Advertising, Inc. sales agency for XERF from his law office on Pecan Street. XERF was one of the Mexican border blasters that transmitted with power far in excess of the licensed commercial radio stations in the United States which were limited to 50 kW on AM. XERF had a 500 kW RCA transmitter that broadcast on a clear channel from Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, just across the Rio Grande from Del Rio." Thanks wiki.