Underworld

One of my favourite authors I discovered since I've been here is Don DeLillo. He writes a lot about American pop-culture, society, and suburbia, not necessarily critically but in an ironic and humorous way, and I get a kick out of it. I just finished his novel "Underworld" about the Cold War, and the following passage captures his writing style and unique take on American culture:

Rick was still in the breezeway, running a shammy over the chrome-work. This was something, basically, he could do forever. He could look at himself in a strip of chrome, warp-eyed and hydrocephalic, and reel some of the power of the automobile, the horsepower, the decibel rumble of dual exhausts, the pedal tension of Ford-O-Matic drive. The sneaky thing about his car was that, yes, you drove it sensibly to the dentist and occasionally carpooled with the Andersons and took Eric to the science fair, but beneath the routine family applications was the crouched power of the machine, top down, eating up the landscape.

One of Erica's favorite words in the language was breezeway. It spoke of ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not. Another word she liked was cripser. The Kelvinator had a nice crisper and she like to tell the men that such-and-such was in the cripser. Not the refrigerator, the crisper. The carrots are in the crisper, Rick. There were people out there on the Old Farm Road, where the front porches sag badly and the grass goes unmowed and the Duck River Baptists worship in a squat building that sits in the weeds on the way to the dump, who don't know what a crisper was, who had ice boxes instead of refrigerators, or who had refrigerators that lacked crispers, or who had crispers in their refrigerators but didn't know what they were for or what they were called, who put tubs of butter in the crisper instead of lettuce, or eggs instead of carrots.

He came in from the breezeway.

"The carrots are in the crisper, Rick."

He liked to nibble on a raw carrot after he'd waxed and buffed the car.

He stood looking at the strontium white loaf that sat on a bed of lettuce inside a cake pan in the middle of the table.

"Wuff is it?"

"It's my Jell-O chicken mousse."

"Hey great," he said.

Sometimes she called it her Jell-O chicken mousse and sometimes she called it her chicken mousse Jell-O. This was one of a thousand convenient things about Jell-O. The word went anywhere, front or back or in the middle. It was a push-button word, the way so many things were push-button now, the way the whole world opened behind a button that you pushed.

(From "Underworld," by Don DeLillo, pages 516-517)

Cattle Ground Homecoming

I am told that the better you get to know me, the more exact you know where I'm from. With strangers it's simply Portland, whereas my good friends eventually learn that I'm really from Battle Ground (not even Oregon).



I'm going home in about three months and starting to think about what life back home will be like. It will take a lot of energy to reintegrate into my former cow town, and after two weeks there I'll be ready to get moving on to someplace more interesting and exciting.



But then I realized it won't be that much different from Kampala. The Safeway, Albertsons, and Fred Meyer rival the shopping experiences at Shoprite, Nakumatt, and Uchumi. Both cities have a bowling alley, and although Battle Ground's Indian population is nonexistent, we have a delicious family-owned Chinese restaurant much like the one Nakasero.

Shopping for clothes and random accouterments will be easier than in Kampala's chaotic Owino Market, as the Goodwill opened shop in Battle Ground about five years ago. There isn't a place to pick up the latest bootleg DVDs (but I hear everyone is online now with smartphones and fibreoptics so that shouldn't be a problem). And the latest Hollywood blockbusters are offered at the Battle Ground Cinemas, although I'll miss the graininess and poor audio quality of the films at the Garden City theater.



Perhaps I'll feel right at home back in good 'ol Battle Ground after all. Though I don't think the police will like me driving on the left-hand side of the road (or, more accurately, weaving in and out of traffic). They'll have to get used to that one.



Happy 4th of July.