"No one talks about the Texas Highway Killer anymore. You never hear the name. The name used to be in the air, always on the verge of being spoken, of reentering the broadcast band and causing a brief excitation along the lined highways, but the shootings have evidently ended and the name is gone now. But sometimes I think of him and wonder if he is still out there, driving and looking, not done with this thing at all but only waiting" (807).

I keep coming back to this idea of history as presented by DeLillo, and even though this isn't exactly talking about "history," I feel like it's definitely talking about it, somehow. When I read this passage, it reminded me a lot of the whole Osama Bin Laden thing after September 11. Everyone was so freaked out and worried about him and what he was capable of, and capturing him was high priority (much the way it was with the Texas Highway Killer). But then, after time, slowly the fear wore off, and now it seems like Bin Laden (like the ficticious Highway Killer) is rarely even mentioned anymore.

This is partly in response to the "Maybe?" post from below, as well as a continuation of a thread from class on Monday. I don't know about the east-west / modern-postmodern parralel regarding Matt and Nick, but I think it'ss quite useful for unpacking the differences between Nick and Klara. Both moved westward from New York (allegorically, from modernity to postmodernity), but the two have reacted to the shifts in very different ways. The seeds of this theme are planted early. During their first encounter after so long, Klara wonders if life didn't "take an unreal turn at some point;" and "becasue [she's] famous," but because "it's just unreal" (73), to which Nick responds in swiftly modern judgment: "I lived responsibly in the real.

This actually doesn't really to do with the novel exactly, but I found it interesting

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/radio.htm

It talks about a chess game that the USSR played vs the US in 1945 just after the end of WWII. We lost by a LOT. What I found interesting was that it related war with chess with radio, all huge themes in Underworld.

So this is kind of a 3-am-feeling-sick musing, but I was thinking about what we talked about in class about modernism being the East and postmodernism the West and I was wondering if it would be possible to classify the characters into these 2 categories. Matt seems to prefer the East Coast, making him represent modernism, while Nick (and possibly Klara?) prefer the West, and therefore representing postmodernism. I don't know too much about the 2 (and wikipedia and my english major friend aren't helping, unfortunately) so I can't make real comparisons, but it does seem that Matt deals more with history and internal stuff (modernism) while Nick does embody the postmodern focus on language with his word obsessions.

On page 666 Albert remarks, "How children adapt, using brick walls and lampposts and fire hydrants. He watched a girl tying one end of her jump rope to a window grille and getting her little brother to turn the other end. Then she stood in the middle and jumped. No history, no future."

First I wondered if this ability to adapt was something that children had--that they are so single-minded that they have a problem and then they look for a solution. But then I thought that there are a lot of other characters that are adapting similarly. Marian is not feeling wanted by her husband so she looks outside her marraige so that she will be desired.

A friend found out we're reading Underworld for class, and asked if it's worth reading; if it's a "page turner." I replied that it isn't in the traditional sense of the word, but more of a sweeping American epic. "Like the Great American Novel?" she joked, having read far too many of those in her time here.

I've read that Underworld was, in fact, Don DeLillo's attempt at the Great American Novel. But what exactly is THE Great American Novel? Wikipedia says it "is the concept of a novel that perfectly represents the spirit of life in the United States at the time of its publication. It is presumed to be written by an American author who is knowledgeable about the state, culture, and perspective of the common American citizen."

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.

DeLillo ends the section of the alternating bits of storyline with Nick failing to call Marian because loneliness is "a thing [he] tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of, but sometimes even this was not means enough. He ultimately says, "I didn't call her because I would not give in, watching the night come down" (637). I think that although the story threads have great differences between them, for the most part, they involve characters who knowingly practice and in a certain sense have an addiction to brinksmanship. Lenny Bruce's ideas are dead on and by bringing it to an audience he has the potential to effect real change, yet his addiction to heroin and his paranoid need to please the crowd weakens his message. In spite of the overwhelming evidence of their inevitable decline, Edgar and Clyde continue to insist on shaping the world in their own way. In Clyde's case, he ultimately mortgages his individual identity and potential in exchange for the safety and security of Edgar's patronage. Worst of all, Nick fails to make the simple gesture of calling Marian out of stubborn opposition to feeling vulnerable even as he can see a window of opportunity closing before him.

sarawrs mentioned random connections. I'd been noting them as I read, so I thought I'd point out some of my favorites.

On page 515, Eric masturbates to a picture of Jayne Mansfield. This is the same actress that inspires Acey's collection (discussed on page 474 and 484)-- "you have copycat Jayne, the reproduced goddess, and she is all the more strong for being unoriginal" (490). A picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jaynemansfield5.jpg

On page 673, Father Paulus refers to a painting by Breugel called "Children's Games." Albert talks about the painting with Klara when he gets home: "I don't know what art history says about this painting. But I say it's not that different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a little sinister to me" (682). Breugel is the same artist that painted "The Triumph of Death," the painting that Hoover was so obsessed with. A picture:

When the blackout comes, Nick thinks about all the people that are trapped in elevators and on subways. Page 635: "The always seeping suspicion, paralysis, the thing implicit in the push-button city, that it will stop cold, leaving us helpless in the rat-eye dark, and then we begin to wonder, as I did, how the whole thing works anyways."

The idea of a "push-button city" made me think about the way that during the Cold War the danger was that a single button could launch mass destruction. The black out is a short term pause for the city, but in New York City, the city that never sleeps, it seems like it would have been sort of a scary omen.