"We need candidly to chat re potential problems with my application, they and I, he is beginning to say" (6). Could anyone explain this? I didn't know if that's what the Dean was actually saying or if the language was scrambled in Hal's head.

It's interesting how all of the books we've read connect somehow. Orin and Hal's mom, for example, really reminded me of Sister Edgar on page 11, "she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth."

I thought it was really interesting how DeLillo explicity connects Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover as "Sister and Brother. A fantasy in cyberspace and a way of seeing the other side and a settling of differences that have less to do with gender than with difference itself, all argument, all conflict programmed out." Both characters exist in insular worlds without outside contact, yet cyberspace ultimately links them together albeit as only a "single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information" (826). I'm not entirely sure as to what DeLillo means, but the ending seems very ambivalent, maybe intentionally so in order to mirror the increasing lack of a divide between what he calls cyberspace and the world.

Here were just some things that stood out to me during the first part of this reading...

I thought it was oddly fitting that Sister Edgar was described like death/some powerful force in the game of "Tag, You're It" that damns children forever. (717) On page 720, Matt also describes her nun's habit like something the Grim Reaper would wear: "It was her after all, habit and hood. The cloth was daunting. She was all cloth. She was a wall of laundered cloth. A woman of the cloth."

I also wondered about those dogtags that the kids have to wear so that their bodies could be identified "following the onset of atomic war" (717). Wouldn't the dogtags be destroyed, as well? What's the point then?