ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

 Joseph T:

              I see Lake as an abuse vicim who gives up her identity for 
              numbness, misery and sex, because otherwise she is married 
              to a chickenshit hired killer who murdered her Father. Loyalty 
              doesn't seem like the right word. I see a lake  colonized by lies 
              violence and abuse and being filled with the poisons of 
              industrial runoff, fucked from all 4 directions. I care about her 
              but her "loyalty" is her misery.  I guess this just shows how 
              differently 2 people can read any character. But I think Lake is 
              a kind of example of passivity, complicity, victimization.

              Paul Mackin:

              I did enjoy the way Lake was able to finally shed her old man. I 
              liked Lake. There was something very touching about her loyalty 
              to that marriage made in hell she'd gotten herself into.

Loyalty isn't the word that comes to my mind---addiction gets a lot closer.

What turns me on (ahem) concerning Lake Traverse-Kindred is her deep
connection to the Frenesi Gates tale: 

                   And here came Frenesi Gate's reverse shot. Prarie felt the 
              two women shift in their seats. Frenesi's eyes, even on the aging 
              ECO stock, took over the frame, a defiance of blue unfadable.
              "Never," was her answer, "because too many of us are learning 
              how to pay attention." Prairie gazed.
                   "Well, you sound like our own Action News Team."
                   "Except that we have less to protect, so we can go after 
              different targets."
                   "But . . . doesn't that get dangerous?"
                   "Mm, in the short run," Frenesi guessed. "But to see injustices 
              happening and ignore them, as your news team has been ignoring
              the repression of farm workers here in this country who've been
              trying to organize----that's more 'dangerous' in the long run, 
              isn't it?" Aware at each moment of the lens gathering in her own 
              image.

Obviously, something of paterfamilias Webb Traverse is retained in Frenesi:

              When DL had known her back in Berkeley, Ditzah and her sister Zipi
              were going around in battle fatigues with their hair in matching 
              oversized Jewish Afros, spray-painting  SMASH THE STATE  on
              public walls and keeping plastic explosive in Tupperware 
              containers in the icebox. "Pretending to be film editors." she told 
              Prarie, but we were really anarchist bombers." . . . .

But it's Lake's attraction to "Political Inversion" (if I might be so bold as to 
interject yet another cross-reference to "recherche", this is a Jones for 
somebody on the wrong side of a Family's political divide) seems to be
the real link/kink. Frenesi's mother---Sasha---was the daughter of Jess 
Traverse and Eula Becker, both far Left radicals, and Sasha's attraction
to Hubble Gates (and as far as photgraphy cross-references are 
concerned, deep-space's the limit here) had as much to do concerning
Hub's uniform as anything else. That attraction carries over to Frenesi,
as though it's something carried in the blood, a genetic predisposition.
I'm going to hunt down references/examples in Vineland. The
connections and relations are obvious , vines and webs everywhere.