# Lara of _There_are_Doors_

*The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 20 Oct 1998*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1218>

> Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright
> in each message remains with the person who wrote it.
> Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original
> archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than
> retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.

---

### John Bishop
*20 Oct 1998, 16:59*

In his interview, Wolfe said that he saw Lara as what a
pagan goddess might be like if paganism had survived to
the modern era.

    ...Laura is my idea of what a pagan goddess might be
    who survived into the Christian world...

                 http://world.std.com/~pduggan/gwjbj2.html#fem


This was only a phrase to me until I saw the July 9-24
issue of "Rolling Stone", which featured Madonna on the
cover as a blue-eyed blonde.  "Aphrodite!" I said to myself,
or Wolfeanly, "Lara!".

There was the beauty--the desirable beauty--combined with
intelligence and power, and a kind of super-human aloofness
which tells you that you can desire but you can't hope to
dominate.  There was the mutable Idea of creative female
power: reinvented as a blonde, a brunette, as Marilyn Monroe
or the girl next door.  There was the immortality of a 
creature outside our moral rules.

I don't mean to imply that the real Madonna is either a
goddess, a Nietzchean super(wo)man or a living icon; I do
mean to say that I now understand how Lara could dominate
the world of _There_are_Doors_, and how her image might
vary, and how there is a mental niche into which Lara could
fit (and part of which Madonna is now exploiting with great
skill).

Am I just a nut for blondes, or does this make sense to anyone?

	-John

---