It was the summer of sheet lightning and red wine, those deep Bordeaux that resemble lion's blood, and she stood on the rooftops and terraces and wondered how all these things could been here so long without her ever noticing.
Don Delillo Underworld p. 379
When I had trouble with the spectral narrowing from red wine to deep Bordeaux I put it down to my lack of culture. One day, I thought, when I go out to all these dinners with cheery intellectuals and I select the correct Bordeaux to go with my some-type-of-fish and then smell it to detect something, I will understand this reference and it will resonate within me because I will know the exact type of muddy red that is being referenced and will fully understand appreciate how it fits with the sheet lightening and it will be like savoring a fine... But then I came upon the lion's blood.
And I still don't know what to do about it, I'm either going to have give up on this sentence or kill a lion. I've thought about just Googling for some images of lion's blood but this seems foolhardy- with initial lighting, camera considerations, on one side and jpeg compressions, monitor calibration, and incadescent lighting on the other any hope of understanding...
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I just endured the nigh-five minutes of crud to post this. I now am the proud owner of a myza vera owna persona' blogga! With my own pre-designated blog-ground- clearly representing in an agile and colorful summary my tastes, convictions and quiddity at large to other bloggers.
At any rate, Seth, with Nabokov it is understandable, feeling inadequate and insecure. But one grows from the encounter... With Delillo… Well, what can one say… One's soul is not filled from an encounter. One is diminished. Literally. Reading Delillo makes you go short! I've seen the studies, man! I've see ht white-walled hospitals where the hide the unsuspecting victims! He's not even a fiction writer- perhaps nominally, but nothing more than that. The 'writer' tag is mere garb: it's protective coloration enabling him to blend in and hide the fact that his novels are clumsily disguised preening academic blather. The man is a whore. His corpus is one massive blow job for Graduate Level English Courses.
If the world of tendentious lit theory posturing were a bland sales convention of unimaginative balding overweight schlubs (an apt metaphor in my mind) Delillo would be the motivational speaker. His novels exist so that the post-modernist pseudo-pedants collecting their ill-gotten tenure can have something 'edgy,' or 'subversive,' upon which to comment. He is the low-water mark of the polluted shores of literary hubris: where baby seals and pelicans flip about coated in the viscous residues of Rushdie and Ellis and Foster wallace…
BUT. There is one thing that makes his works bearable: They can be utilized as a litmus test.
The G. Romero Guide to D. Delillo's World
Just follow these instructions: If someone bookish that you know or care for likes or recommends a Delillo novel to you, quietly acquiesce. Take the book in your hands and smile looking pensive and considerate. Then, once they've turned their back to infect some other sucker you should crack that person in the back of the skull with a fence post, an axe, a stale baguette, a rock or a police baton and RUN!!!!
…and count yourself lucky: You just narrowly escaped being eaten alive by the living dead.
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