nTaking a break from my need to do activities, I just finished balancing my checking account to the nearest estimate, and listened once again to the pleasures of Swimming to Cambodia. Spalding Gray had a vivacious wit, and an apparently vibrant life, and yet his doom was encoded within his abilities, and his presumed suicide posits relief as opposed to the outrage I have had to tunnel through regarding David Foster Wallace. I suppose that is odd, but Spalding's suffering was of a different timbre, and had qualities of manic saintliness, more along the lines of an affectuoso. The thought occurred to me, in the back of my mind, that Greg Zacharias responded to my post to the James list the way that he did because he thought my phrase "a collusion of peers" had a whiff of the anti-Semitic about it.
That was not my intent, however, and he did not respond to my email. Though normally I would make a caviler comment at this point, I do not like being on the wrong side of terminal degree scholars whose connections could be of use, assuming I do not kick the bucket from my deterioration, though I feel slightly indignant, as I am not his student, and wasn't disrupting a lecture. My assumptions about the Jamesians have backfired on more than one occasion, but the reason this latest round of cattiness troubles me is because Greg recently surprised me by passing my proposed thesis along the pipeline, and this led me to speculate that perhaps I had erred in seeing myself as an incongruent fit. Like James himself, I chaw on slim pickings, and for all I know at this point, maybe the entire community of lively intelligent invalids lurks on the James list so that we don't, to steal from Rosy's exit in The Princess Casamassima , "blow our brains out." James was fond of that phrase in his middle period, when he wrote the novels no one particularly likes.
Ah well. If you were a man so inclined I'd hide a knowing smile in a sprig of violets, but this is what it comes to for potato pouch unhappy women, worrying about internecine back bites.
No comments:
Post a Comment