with a slight delay and a significant headache, i've finally joined in the conversation for real.

i hate baseball. the only reason i would go to a game now is to spend sometime with someone i haven't seen much. i used to be into it when the AZ diamondbacks were first created, but it turned out i was just a fairweather fan and jumped off the bandwagon a season or two after the world series.

so 60 some pages of baseball should equal snoozefest for me, but given that i really had no idea where any of this was going or what the purpose was for this prolouge, i just tried to enjoy it, and it is pretty enjoyable, baseball or not (you coulda wrote about basketball, don!) (actually, that's just a joke, it really could only have been baseball, given the focus on american-ness and also with all those pauses tony pointed out, but seriously baseball annoys me).

so being as late to the party as i am to USFC, it means i get the sloppy seconds. but allow me to snack on the remaining sandwich rolls and li'l smokies that have been left behind:

i love love love that we just go ahead and get inside these people's minds, famous as the may be. i guess this shouldn't be a surprise from a dude who wrote a book about the JFK assination (right?) but i find it a bold and enjoyable choice anyways. the game is presented in numerous unique perspectives, and he uses that to slice open the culture(s) represented there.

my favorite little passage is on 39 of my book, where Frank is stuffing sheets of "Life" into Jackie's sick face, and DeLillo takes out a just a few sentences to highlight an interesting point, which seems reminiscent of the advertisement interjections in "White Noise" (although i read that a while ago so that might be a stupid parallel):

"In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance. Johnson & Johnson and Quaker State and RCA Victor and Burlington Mills and Bristol-Myers and General Motors. These are the venerated emblems of the burgeoning economy, easier to identify than the names of battlefields or dead presidents."

i would add something to that, but what? he nailed it. and now this sick kid is going back to bed before he pulls a gleason-on-sinatra's-pants move on my keyboard.