First thing we do, let’s make sure the Author is dead.

“[P]ink…” he says, “You have a lot of pink!” —And of course the first impulse is to point to all the (rational, ineluctable, situational, explicit, plot-derived and -dependent) reasons why there’s so much pink—the emblems, the nickname, the false dawns of sodium-vapor streetlights, or sunsets too, the hair, but: all these now crowd out any other meaning that might be made from all that pink. Might have been made. By other readers. —Don’t kill your darlings. Kill that which insists these things, or those, must be darling.