VLVL concluding chapter 7

[Terrance]

> 
> However, Prairie breaks out of that arrangement. Isaiah, "a huge hand on her
> shoulder", says: "But I promised your dad--" (104). This is indeed "a
> paternalistic claim", as Michael suggests; and Isaiah's gesture indicates
> that he intends it to confine her. What is perhaps interesting is that it
> now seems so wildly inappropriate. The setting would seem to confirm such
> relations; and even DL will be asked if she's married (105); yet Prairie, in
> alliance with DL, has made such an arrangement obsolete. 


Right, remember that Prairie wanted to go camping with the Vomitones,
but it is Zoyd who takes her camping, sleeping together in the Smurf
Mobile. And, as Zoyd hands over his side of beef or pork to I-24 (the
boys just don't get it, big joke to them) he is not able to embrace his
daughter because of comments she has made about his jail-baiting.
Prairie  can read the messages Zoyd can't. Or at least she's getting
closer to solving the puzzle. Of course so many of her clues are
provided by and infected with the Tube, so she thinks DL means Disable
List because of her Brent Musburgerism. .. she begins her quest after
watching Clara Bow Story ...  the movie IT features a welfare parent and
child hounded by corrupt and obsessed government agents with warped
personal/politics ideology )  as long as she's got another spin (another
turn of the Wheeler, now DLer), another yarn, another story, she's keep
playing and take her chances. What will Prairie find in the Girl's
world? 

Note that the text
> draws attention to the same physique that dwarfed Zoyd in Ch2: is Prairie,
> albeit for different reasons, also intimidated by Isaiah's proximity? She
> has already asked him: "So you'll be heading back to Vineland now?" The
> adventure would appear to be over for the band; they can see no further than
> a job as house band at the Cuke (which in itself is understandable). For the
> band, this gig has been no more than a commercial break.


Oh, well the rules for men marring in the Patriarch include: 

Marry someone smaller, younger, with no property rights, who accepts
patriarchal religion. 

But of course, Modern Capitalist Society undermines all of these rules
and norms. 

Children are no longer assets but liabilities. So in this novel Prairie
will imagine that she has been aborted and haunt her mother. In Novel
One Paola (the central figure of the novel) is nearly aborted, as is
Benny, not to mention Esther nd Shoemacker's pregnancy. 

Some here think I'm nutz because I'm a city boy and that my reading
exploitation into RC & Moonpie's family farm is just ignorance, but
what's important to that brief scene is that wages have replaced
familial forms of production and distribution. People don't work or live
on farms and they don't own farmland. I have a big farm in Montana,
ain't never been there, they tell be it's grand. but Zoyd and Frenesi
get married on  a "farm" but  since there is no family farm to pass down
to McDonald Jr., sexuality has been disconnected from marriage and
property. Wanta see me portfolio, baby? 
The big union or family has got only one kid to take care of and she's a
girl. Well there is Frenesi's other kid. That kid is raised by the Tube
and Ray-Gun. And Barbie next store helps out. Prairie is passed around,
everyone helping out the single Mr. Mom because Zoyd is Working Class
poor. If Z had money, professionals would take on the old family
functions. Mom and Dad, Prairie will discover at novel's end, are as
irrelevant in advanced techo-capitalist states to the kids as the kids
became some time ago. 

Marriage is now a business. What ain't? Love In the Western World
survives on the Tube and in the Movies. 

Why does Zoyd go into the Log Jam to piss of the bad ass workers? 



> 
> So we catch up with the band, which has survived the occasion, unlikely as
> that might have seemed at the outset: anyone for realism here? At this
> moment of transition, readers might anticipate some kind of narrative
> progress. In one sense that has indeed happened; the boys are no longer in
> fear of their lives. However, to look at it from Prairie's pov, the band,
> and her relationship with Isaiah, represents the past she has just emerged
> from. To go back would be a retrograde step.
> 
> Prairie reasons that she'll be doing them a favour: "[The] longer I stay
> with you guys the more I could get you in trouble". Which effectively puts
> her, no longer one of the crowd, centre-stage. Not bad when you think that
> DL has done nothing but let her down.