Starving Artist

The Hodder Fellowship  is now receiving applications at Princeton, and I am entertaining the idea of applying for it, even though I would surely lose. I am no Muriel Spark, no Doris Lessing in the bud, nor Wallace, able to detail psychic pain with preternatural ability, especially when it comes to dogs. I am certainly not Mitchell either, but as profound as Cloud Atlas was as a reading experience, there were chinks in its armor. Not grave chinks, and I could never do anything like it, even though I conceived of a narrative like Lost in the late eighties, and got well below the curve; if I do ever finish this novel, I can hear the critics accuse me of being an Abrams imitator, though my ideas were not exactly the same, and would have not involved the Dharma Initiative as a critique of the Me Decade self-absorption, but my idea did involve an island, and characters disappearing to it. I am also not in the early stages of my career, but I could twist my words and say I am in the early stages of trying to save it, despite my hostility to homosexual culture, which counts against me, and I have not fully tackled here, not quite; this is not entirely due to lack of courage as much as it is realization of the complexity involved.

Can I live the last third of my life with the acceptance that I am a failure, returning to dire poverty because I am no longer strong enough? Because I hold grudges and yet failed to act within a range of timeliness out of shame for losing control and allowing the relation to mean too much? What is my metric for success, and what material do I have that could be competitive? Everything I have written on Live Journal, when I was site active,  merely probes, exploring the reactive, and curbing it, as I have never entirely let myself go, curious if LJ would keep me if I did, moot in the present post transfer, mid-2012.

I am leaning heavily toward submitting an application before the deadline, and never did. The energies of a half-century divest. It might be a waste of time, but I would also be reintroducing myself to academic systems that were valuable in my past. None of these posts are finished products, but even if I could fantasize winning, the stipend itself would not be enough for me to leave the grid and feel safe taking my risks in the private capital market. It would come out to two years salary, given my age and my earnings when I was an obstinate fool. Some of you no doubt feel I still am an obstinate fool. None of my pitches have panned since I've attempted reactivation, and the last time I published anything? Three years ago. I do not buy shoes, clothes, furniture, vanities of any sort. I sold my university ring for fifty dollars, which hurt, and went for postage stamps, some food. I have a vicious streak in relation to my grievances which on bad days is a challenge-- not so much for what I would or could do, but for what is does to me, the vengeance lust, even while I still mourn the better part of that bond, and its original value.

I cannot recreate what past relationships were in my future. In the movie Revenge (1990), Madeleine Stowe dies from the scars Anthony Quinn inflicts, rather than braving the world, once broken. This is the ease, Freudian comforts, of symbolism. Most of us do not live according to character arcs.

Ethereality of Age

Not studied enough in shoot and capture, I am not sure what Goyer should have done to create an edgier sense of disembodiment for Chatwin and Levieva to play off, but what he chose to do to set off the intertwined juxtapositions of the life death cycle make The Invisible interesting if also a terribly bad film. Nick might have been attending his own funeral as much as a graduation party his tiger mother orchestrated for the opening sequence, and Annie might have also just as easily been shot on that dam crosswalk spanning water, and was dying on it, the subsequent narrative merely a shield to mask the banality of a fiercely troubled Judy Bloom girl bleeding out.

Presupposing a blind arbiter that indifferently balances the scales, even lacking anthropomorphized attributes, is still a fallacious comfort food, to be consumed because we want to believe that the evil we do buckles under its own weight. Is justice in and of itself an independent force? We instinctually intuit that evil exists in such a manner, whether personified through a Satan, or turned into a morality tale where hell is a repetitive experience that the human soul forgets to remember. This is what happens when we are trapped into reliving our pain; it is what makes Annie vicious as much as it makes Nick a troubled poet whose metaphors nevertheless are meant to touch its audience with a nimble veracity. It is what returns each of these characters to a frail and dying humanity, only temporarily caught back in hand in conclusion.

I'll leave this there for now. Next post we shall return to the present, and The Brothers Rico, leaving the unpolished gristle, as well, that might be too sharp. I am not proud of the fact that savagery is one of the few consolations of the dowager. I am not the last in the Qing line, however. Only equally obscure.

Comparative Interstice

The performances of The Invisible cast are stronger than the lazy adaptation of the Mark Davis screenplay, and I hope if I do ever chance on the Wahl novel, that the author deploys more credible imagination toward metaphysical need. Limbo may possibly have some foundation within verifiable science, because mind and body do not always die in synchronization, and the modern upgrades on medieval allegories in regard to "the inbetween," interest me, whether it is The Lovely Bones, or Terry Gilliam's use of escapism when those who wish to cease engaging in complicity are tortured to death via the demands of extraction.

This post is being scheduled in the back archive because Wahl drew an introspective mention on my earlier account. The hyperlink interlock ongoing, hopefully to return with more detail later on.