Ross’ assistant and girlfriend.
Lorelei, a voluptuous blonde bombshell, is well-read, articulate and skilled in computers, but conceals her intelligence from Ross and Vera, to whom she adopts the appearance of a superficial fool.
As part of Ross’ plan, she seduces Superman.
RAW: Well, to start from Joyce. Joyce was probably the greatest anthropologist who ever lived, and it’s a scandal that he’s not taught in all anthropology classes. And it was through the study of Joyce that Joseph Campbell developed his unique approach to anthropology. The first book he wrote after “The Skeleton Key” was “The Hero of a Thousand Faces”, and that book would be impossible without “The Skeleton Key”; “The Skeleton Key” gave him the monomyth, the archetype behind all the other archetypes that he uses in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” and then develops in his later books like the four-volume “Masks of God”. But Joyce was Campbell’s guide, just as he’s the guide to quantum mechanics in many senses. Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize winner, got his three-quark model out of FW. The three quarks are the three major characters in FW: the two twins who are opposite, and the third who was both twins combined and still a third independent character. To understand thoughts like two twins who are the opposite of a third who combines both twins together, you’ve got to think in a Taoist way. Like the joke: how many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to change it, and one to not change it. Well that’s the logic of the Sham-Ham-Japheth relationship in FW, which is also the Bacon-Shakespeare-Raleigh relationship and the Tom-Dick-and-Harry and the many other types of trilogies in the human mind, including the Holy Trinity and Dogfather-Dogson-and-Co, which sounds like an English company name, but it’s actually Charlles Dodgson - Lewis Carroll - the two twins who are opposite, Charles Dodgson the logician and Lewis Carroll the fantasist are united in one body: a certain man, who was Dodgson part of the time and Carroll part of the time, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He wrote treatises on the pure mathematical foundations of logic with one part of his mind and he wrote “Alice in Wonderland” with the other part. So Dogfather-Dogson-and-Co is Dodgson divided up into three parts, like the holy trinity - the Father, the Son, and - Coo! - the Holy Pigeon.
I: That’s like James Keys and G. Spencer Brown. G Spencer Brown is a mathematician and James Keys is the expression that develops his anima. He’s from England - Oxford I believe - have you ever run into him?
RAW: No, I haven’t. But I’ve read “The Laws of Form”.
RAW : Joyce is so complicated. There have been books written claiming that Joyce hated women, and the reason such books can be written is that Joyce’s characters are so complicated. Every one of his female characters is marvelous and terribly flawed and full of imperfections, but that’s true of his male characters, too. And so even though Joyce, to me, appears one of the great male feminists, his female characters are certainly not idealized any more than his male characters. Joyce was the world’s staunchest enemy of idealism.
I: But they’re strong - the women are.
RAW: Yes, and they are tremendously flexible. In the symbolism of FW, the woman is the river and the man is the mountain, and the mountain seems strong, but it’s kind of frozen, and the river is alive and dancing. This is very much like the Yang and the Yin principles in the I Ching. FW is isomorphic to the I Ching; I have an essay about that in the latest issue of “Semiotext(e)”. It’s kind of hard to pursue verbally these mathematical symbols to show the full isomorphism.
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