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.
