If life is an ongoing process of self-actualisation, DeLillo realises his fullest, truest self through the act of creating sentences, paragraphs, spectacular worlds of language.
"That barley was spectacular," is not a sentence I ever expected to hear from my co-luncher Harry.
He uses the word "spectacular" in almost every sentence, and has spent his career taking things that are "on the edge" and trying to bring them into the mainstream.
I want the actual telling of the story to be bigger, freer, riskier; the prose to be as shambolic as the band's most awful, room-clearing shows and also its most spectacular performances; I want the sentences to swing open, the words to be as soaked in cigarettes and beer as the trashed Econoline tour van the 'Mats moshed in as it sped down the road to the next gig.
You aren't allowed to go back and edit it at all until after November (if you choose to do so), and not every sentence will be spectacular.
Mr. Huang's sentencing officially closed a spectacular rise-and-fall saga that had led the Chinese press in 2008 to crown him the nation's richest man, with an estimated net worth of $6.3 billion.
Resigned to the maximum sentence, Peltier delivered a spectacular personal attack on the sitting judge, and an eloquent contextualising of his own story within the unhappy history of America's relationship with its native peoples.
His newest model is Rudy Giuliani, a spectacular failure at running for president whose sentences Vice President Joe Biden once said consisted of "a noun, a verb and 9/11".
To wit: would George Eliot have written this spectacular, and justly famous, forty-one-word sentence if Elmore and V.S. had got hold of her?
