VLVL Ditzah

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

Your reading is a farce, surely. "Flashy" does not appear in the text.
Please keep your quotes and that of the text separate. Ditzah's 
"workshop in the back" is clearly active by its description. But
her politics, although still sympathetic to those being hunted by
helicopter gunships, etc., for which she could easily be arrested,
are irrelevant to my point, and, to her strong feminine character,
manifested by her current demonstration of warmth towards
Frenesi's kid. If anything, the text suggests that DL knows
precisely where Ditzah lives. It occurs to her mid-sentence that 
driving over to Ditzah's is what would help Prairie- not something 
she would risk saying, considering Prairie's precarious position, if 
she wasn't certain about Ditzah, her workshop and the availability 
of the films therein. 


In a message dated 12/30/03 7:33:54 AM, jbor at bigpond.com writes:

<< None of these alternatives are mentioned in the text. What it does say,
however, is that she has a half-hour commute to "work", she keeps a flashy
vintage car, she lives comfortably on the "high-rent side of Ventura
Boulevard" (and the implication of the word "solvent" is that she owns the
house and car), and she dresses up and acts like "your average suburban
mom": she's not "down and out in LA" by any stretch of the imagination.
Nothing intrinsically wrong with any of it, of course; but the immediate
context which Pynchon has constructed with his narrative is that it's now
1984 under Reagan and Ditzah's no longer dressing up as an "anarchist
bomber" as she did back in the late '60s, and she's no longer politically
engaged as she once was, or pretended to be. And neither, for that matter,
is DL, if she ever was.

But there's no evidence in the text to suggest that DL has kept in touch
with Ditzah or that she knew she was kids-free for the summer. In fact, it's
insinuated at a couple of points that DL and Ditzah haven't seen the film
footage in a long time, perhaps since the '60s in DL's case (196.11,
199.27), and the reunion actually seems as though it's a one-off. All DL did
know is that Ditzah had the film. She could as easily have looked her up in
the phone book. I don't think the feminist spin holds much water either: any
evidence?

best>>