Kick-Ass Thank You: on Laura on Lake

[rich]

come on dave, achilles heel?  I strike it up in the case of Lake of having
somewhat difficult relations with her Dad, Frenesi as well.  Them Traverse
families, eh?
would u say the same about Cyprian's choice in the Balkans with the
double-crosser dude--cyprian's choices ain't that too good either. the heart
is inscrutable remember

rich


On 6/4/07, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know about the specifics of representative roles of Lake (and
> others) in AtD, but I suspect some sort of political and/or
> psychological dialectic is at work.  How else can one explain
> characters behaving so incomprehensibly?  I'm sure that's also why
> I've never been able to understand Frenesi's motives in VL (and why
> her character seems such a dead-ender).  In both cases I think they
> represent a massive Achilles heel in Pynchon's fictional world.  His
> theories can produce characters and scenarios that leave one cold and
> scratching one's head.
>
> Beyond that, though, this exploration of third-party intermediaries
> between two other partners and/or opponents is a fascinating
> development.
>
> David Morris
>
> On 5/27/07, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Laura,
> >
> > I like this......Lake as the thinnned-out, shallow "entropic" end of
> what one p-lister---Mike Bailey?--called 'muscular anarchism'.   Maybe this
> is why she is so uninteresting, so shallow [to some of us]
> >
> > Lake---a still body of water created where rivers flow into a
> declivity.!??
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> > All right, maybe this is over-extrapolating, but if the Western
> sequences of ATD are "about" America:
> >
> > Webb represents anarchism, rebellion, militant labor. Lake represents
> the death of all these. Where Webb was busy dynamiting the powers that be
> and their interests, Lake passively gives herself over to Deuce and Sloat,
> hirelings of the mine owners. In Europe, the socialist parties capitulated
> to nationalism and capitalism at the advent of WWI. Lake does the same. The
> militant Wobblies at the beginning of the 20th century devolved to the
> current US union movement, hobbled (like Deuce and Sloat hobble Lake) by
> punitive anti-strike clauses and the Taft-Hartley Act, to become one of the
> most passive and non-militant working classes in world history. When we last
> meet Lake in the book, she's a bitter, helpless, sterile old woman. John
> Sweeney, anyone?
> >
> > Laura
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > >From: Tore Rye Andersen
> >
> > >
> > >Laura: Your comparison between Lake and Gottfried as passive
> intermediaries is a great one. I still think Gottfried is much more
> interesting than Lake, however: His passivity is part of a larger,
> historical framework, namely Pynchon's examination of the (German) mentality
> which made WW2 possible (Pökler is part of this same examination, as is all
> the Kracauer-derived stuff about German movies). I can't really find any
> such validating framework for the shallow portrayal of Lake in AtD. It might
> be there, but I've yet to see it.I absolutely agree about the difference
> between Lake's and Cyprian's intermediary roles, BTW.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070604/4c20114d/attachment.html>