Cyborg Inclusion

I wish I could write science fiction, but I find the technical aptitude needed quite difficult, a caveat, and a bone, to all the satirical conceits in the genre that leave me impatient, but the saga of Pistorius reminds me of a conceit that I've clung to since Omni Magazine went out of business. At the rate I am moving my archives, I will have to extend my lifespan. Time for a break, even if *super cripple* is an oxymoron, it is not quite. I certainly have to work twice as hard as an able-bodied writer.

And in breaking, how strong can one remain?

Lupine Ponderosa

As decent as I am in creating contextual issues for this project, I may be faulted and rightly so, for my lag time, and my interest in saving Mike Nichols' ambitious mythology upgrade was left to lag during my transition out of LiveJournal onto Blogger, banging my skull against the wall in the median of moving my content, yes, Blogger is better, technically, but I am not there yet, and getting there would probably involve leaving Blogger as well. Writing is difficult enough, with more rivulets for authors than there are people, and I am a cripple too big for her britches who knows she can do TNR but is fearful of the scars this would entail, much like Walter Kirn, who fails to persuade me toward any sympathetic movement as far as LDS is concerned. Why write this piece? What Mormons deny, and what columnists like Kathleen Parker shrug off, is that Joseph Smith was a home grown psychotic who lacked the savvy of our contemporary spree murderers. Kirn cops out on giving TNR readers a hard look, and I've read better in dead independent ventures, like DoubleTake; it is hard enough, writing, and the digital age threatens depth, but to follow from my archive post, last paragraph, the critics of Nichols transitional literalism are correct, the shift from werewolf metaphor to dress animism weakens Wolf, because to take the camp in horror seriously, it needs anchoring with a gritty earthbound texture, and Nichols aims for a liberating mystique in the totem of the wolf pack, during the climax, one which cannot escape the entrapments of comparison that it tries to avoid, unlike An American Werewolf in London, a film not afraid to be playful, affectionate, and provides a rush in a great transformation scene. Is Nichols wrong in the implication, that certain aspects of primal aggression are liberating (Nicholson), but vicious without noblesse oblige, as in Spader's despicable foil?

On an aggregate level, I am not sure, but like Kirn, I cannot go full steam ahead for eighteen hours daily, and need a nap before I return to pushing deadlines, and still fucking around with my rage at Linda, and our vanquished disability center generation. Some might argue that I am too full of my own self-importance, and that may be valid, but at a basic level Liberty Resources stole the last and best of my strength, illegally, in the sense that I cannot reinvent myself at this age. Am I an asshole? Should I leave them alone with their grade school mentality over skills training contradictory empowerment within compliance paradigms? If I let it go, what this network did to me, next time the next spastic may not come out of it without more substantial injury. I am no longer young, and physical discomfort is also taking its toll; I genuinely want to spare another spastic of the future such a bitter pill, and those of you who know the inside like I do, and have been disillusioned, as I have, need to join me. We have to reform this.

Raptor Comity

While Japan and China have not fought a war against each other since 1945, they still really do not like each other. --straight American lingo

If the dowager viewed the original 1954 Gojira in her first childhood, making an apologia for the rough edges toward her second, she cannot remember the more sinister black and white, which degraded into camp and not very good modern revisions. The original rarely airs on the syndicated networks which rerun and rerun Polyurethane films into droll ennui, but Godzilla endures in part because of the psychological mechanism, like Jaws, which overwhelms human hubris, human complexity, with atavistic function of super predators designed to kill prey instantly, efficiently, technical prowess be damned. For the empire of Japan, specifically, Honda is placing blame for Japan's attempt to carve out its domain in the South Pacific, but is also indirectly bringing to life the admonition that the attack on Pearl Harbor woke the "sleeping giant" which caused such grievous psychic wounds. Killing Gojira is an abstract method of putting American barbarians in their place, with the franchise a contiguous volleyball game, Western and Asian values in conflict, even as liberal  social standards are mimicked.

The dowager feels Japan's modern passivity is misguided, and they need to start thinking beyond the United States as the victor who forced them into their outwardly docile contentment with the material world, and that the island's adversarial relations with mainland China need to be stoked, cleverly, perhaps in alliance with Vietnam. I admire the discipline of the classical Shogun era, and Japanese culture is better, superior, in fact, to the methods of Confucius.

While it needs to be conceded that the pre-Hiroshima Axis power bit off more than it could chew by drawing the US into a second front in the Pacific, all national aspirants make mistakes, and learn from them. We also need not forget Imperial Japan illustrated that Czarist Russia was no grizzly in 1905, as opposed to the proverbial paper tiger, as remains the case in the Putin era. Not that the Pentagon shouldn't worry. That's it's job, but the right pressure in the right places puts the Russian Federation back into its natural state of a people in chaos, bemoaning their inferiority. Hence, this points toward one's lassitude with Comet TV's cheekiness. It lets us all in on the joke, though it is a judgement as to which of the more stupendous superhero portions of the Rex Monday marathon will be skipped. Godzilla suspended in in space bubble was too much lacking in nutritional value, back when.

Uncertainty of Macro Imitation

Of all the trashy science fiction camp that exists in the last quarter of the 20th century, we owe the Japanese for putting an indelible stamp on human absurdity with the creation of Godzilla. For those of you wondering if I have a lighter side, Asian cultural anxieties as espoused by Ultraman. and The Space Giants encapsulate it. I kid you not that my first romantic fantasy was my prepubescent determination, at the age of five, to marry Hayata. It spawned my own operatic empire that I still write in my head today to drift off to sleep. Unabashed, with no apologies, I love this shit, even if I am not particularly fond of Thomas Pynchon's post-modern presentations, he did hit the right keynote making me snicker about the hybrid dino hero in Vineland. Of course I am a High Modernist, and the best that post modernism has to offer is like the fuck of the millennium, only not Pynchon. Perhaps because he forgot Yongary, but not really, and spastic is being facetious. Pauses, and of course knows Greg Zacharias will not drop everything to post a castigating rejoiner about the silly things I say. Less silly connections after I catch some Zzzz. No wonder we revert to childhood. Put a man in a polyurethane suit stomping scale models and this over educated cripple gets a small happiness, ja ja.

Wolf's Subversive Sniffer

Dick Wolf's modality undercuts the no pity exaltation by acknowledgment of cruelty within the matrix of disabity itself, as well as exposing the realism of our vulnerabilty to systems designed to help us. I know of actual cases of Paratransit users raped by minority drivers, and Wolf's SVU writers expose this by flipping the caste, but still exposing the fact that transit authorities hire criminals who hurt us. Saving money is more acceptable than our safety. CI nuances this more finely with both leads, D'Onofrio and Noth, and I give them credit for the honesty about the darkness in the bell jar of chronic conditions. "Conscience" is a great example of this. Heart disease feeds the original motive of the husband, who wants control of a trust fund and cannot, therefore, kill the wife, and, merely as a matter of technicality, puts her in a persistent vegetative state, which then triggers the opening murder of the doctor hoping to relocate the person within the damaged mind, which cannot be done, but fear of viability triggers the husband's admission of guilt that was meant to satisfy those convinced of something more sinister in the motives behind the battle between Schiavo's spouse and family. If Terri's husband had truly wanted her dead, the case would not have dragged on for fifteen years in which the woman's brain did not rewire itself. Josie Byzek sniveled to me over this meal I could not afford that "we [the activists] should have never gotten involved."

I'd like to ask what human being wants to languish like that? With rapid and sustained intervention, some PVS can be reversed, but disability activists need to grow the fuck up. Every dollar wasted on Terri's brain stem after the obvious became apparent could have been spent on helping those of us with living minds, and this is in part why Josie pisses me off, aside from burning me on a potential date. The woman refuses to apply herself beyond issues of empowerment. I am still consciously aware and dare to assert that I deserve better than living like this; if my brain implodes, then yes, let me decease under humane palliative care. I'd rather those dollars go to wheelchair users who might dare to dream of romantic adventures in Paris, Tuscany.

Kidman Arc

I hope that Nicole Kidman is not a Scientologist, like her unfortunate ex-husband, because her artistry is more interesting than Tom's, more sinister and intriguing, offering something for a contemporary woman to chaw, even in watered down vehicles like Birthday Girl, a story line too improbable, though she can be applauded for ambiguity. I myself have closer ties to Jodie Foster's man girl obstinacy, and Foster consumed many of my earlier posts on this project. I am not yet satisfied, but grew up with Foster, as opposed to Kidman. Nicole has had currency, more than a decade of it; my perspective on her is still that of a shiny coin, because I am rapidly aging beyond relevancy, and if I should make it to my 70's, like my dialectical rival, of whom I look nothing like, I will be worse, perchance gone baby gone, a freak show like this curiously ugly and gritty little Affleck vehicle, minus Harris and Freeman, and that, simply because these veterans are too well branded, this film is one of those that tells the truth about the hard core underside of dealers, perverts, steaming like hot dung, and thus, hard to watch even without an X-rating.

Is my ongoing battle a disease? Who knows? But if I do not wage it, I have only myself to blame, and my first protest missive has hit the postal service, so I cannot turn back. My father's sister raises her voice that I need to let this go, but I cannot, I am sorry. I want some justice for my old age, something, some small victory for a literary artist's autonomy, a cry for freedom, real freedom, yes, and I should have waged this war in the strength of my 30's. I may pay a price still more undeserved, I may be dismissed, and I am a little scared, but between Liberty Resources and PresbyHomes I have been forced to digest rust for 28 years, a vibrant woman of promise, I am now broken, and the system can break me more, I have no illusions about that, but I am not going down in compliant humility to Pennsylvania's social service system. I will not and I cannot. But by the same token, age marginalizes the marginalized more. I will not live much longer than Vassar. She died with a tube in her stomach. No one will do that to me.

Biel Amps

I did not place Jessica Biel's celebrity until Home of the Brave (2006) floated by my consciousness three, four times. With Jackson, Ricci, this should be a stronger ensemble than it is, and I paid slightly more attention to it last time when the realization dawned that Biel carried a hand amputation. What her post war beau said to her character about pushing people away is an applicable issue as it relates to body image, which is why my former manager, Linda, may have gone off on me about her convulsions during orgasm.

I cannot say what Winkler did that makes this movie drag past any tolerable hold, but I am of the position that mediocre work never really helps in pushing our moral centers forward; white noise is fairly easy to tune out, as evinced by the fact that the dramatic arcs here are so watered down, took so long to get my attention.

Chai Mongrel

I have to write really fast, which is difficult for me to do, but I viewed part of Slumdog yesterday while I was posting un galantuomo, an interesting disjunction perhaps. Should I have been horrified at the deliberate blinding of children beggars? I have seen so many films about the third world, about the horror of how cheap human life is on a daily basis. The petty vindictiveness of the Chinese, Japanese, and Cambodia, and Rio de Janeiro, and the US Mexican border, that no, I was not thrilled at the implications, but numb? Yes, which makes Jamesian modalities tenuous, which James seemed to know himself.

This dark side of crippling is not anything new in terms of a western conceit. There is Shakespeare's blinding of Glouchester in Lear, and the false cripples that swarm Pierre Gringoire in Hugo's Hunchback. This is the dirty laundry of disability, whether the condition is real or manufactured, pity is exploitive, and does not always work. Slumdog has a certain jazziness, nice jump shots, and tenacity, and yes, I will see it again, but at a visceral level, I am not coasting on enthusiasm for our tough little hero. Inarritu's Babel was the last film of this type to actually challenge my bitter and quite wilted conscience, but to what end, I cannot tell you. I am a powerless woman who hates homosexual advocacy, and yet is able to recognize the genius of homosexual subversion, who looks at African American culture, shrugs, and picks apart their quite tortured, sometimes great aesthetic capacity, remaining a failed product of diversity and progressive promise. Dana, the moderator of Poets & Writers Speakeasy who facillitated my ouster, indicated that I had a great deal of power.

Really.

un galantuomo

My editions of Henry James are all over the place: 4 LOA's, his travel writings barely penetrated, battered paperbacks with his strongest shorter works and novellas, free digital editions, and one paid. This is my Golden Bowl edition, purchased before my kindle buying spree:



I have always assumed the cover illustration reflects Maggie Verver lost in thought, losing her infantilism, to use Virginia Llewellyn Smith's term in her introduction to the text, an introduction written for the aficionado, not the novice. I am paused in James' opening, amid his worry about novel illustrations, no doubt a relevant concern to the replete literary mind at the dawn of the twentieth century.

I am very strenuous about my Henry James, despite the occasional laxity in application, and that strain may make the more applied scholars uncomfortable, because I want the revelation, "god fucking damn it to hell, !" and none is forth coming. I will confess that my first try at this nearly last completed work was almost incomprehensible. I was 23, foaming at the mouth for some of that zoological sociability, which, in Jamesian frills and lace, is always concealed. The reader can infer it, however, with as much irony or horror as he, or she, likes.

Richard Hathaway, here is one of his guidepost critiques, was one of my first Jamesian skirmishes in relation to interpreting The Golden Bowl, and my ferocity toward penetration in no way reflects any lack of respect for la bonne instructeur. The glass half full, half empty approach is what creates Jamesian fanatics in the first place. Dr. Hathaway supports his optimism by citing Adam's last words to his daughter about her "good things".  My pessimism is due to Maggie's last perception of Amerigo's pride, "...strangely lighted his eyes that as for pity and dread of them she buried her own in his breast."

I think James, near the end of his life, has had enough of refined mannerisms, and implodes the end of the Victorian age with the only weapons he knew how to deploy. I hear the critiques ringing that I over simplify, but I have only just begun.

And City Trees

Ron Livingston is a competent working actor, and handled his role as Jack Berger sprightly enough as a foil against the indomitable Sarah Jessica Parker; he does better in these small episodic character sketches, and I was actually entertained by him in the canceled Defying Gravity, now that Wiki toggles my memory. This series really had a sense of wonder about it, a promise of big ideas. I have no idea why studios cannot handle quality production values like this, which has taken off my train of thought, but not my primary concern. I did indicate, when I started this project, that even shows like Sex and The City would be relevant, but I am still turning that over. I also indicated that I was less inclined to deal with empowerment as an agenda when it sacrifices other aesthetic values to that message, and this remains the case with films like The Music Within, which I viewed, grumbling. Livingston could not really carry the lead, but this is not entirely his fault, as both the script and direction are choppy. Perhaps Pimentel wanted to aim for a pedestrian sensibility, and that's understandable, given what I am doing, but as a narrative trying to shovel it all in, it felt like the television had been on too long, rather than a story that pulled in the viewer.

A biography worth telling? Yes, but not this way. A respectful documentary in independent theatre might have been better. Was his life as tough as mine? You might ask what a quantifying comparison merits, and this is a valid criticism. Was his mother sicker than mine? Perhaps, but he had a fulfilling and nearly independent adulthood, and I have always been one or a few threats away from imprisonment, after my first sixteen years in the American gulag of homes, hospitalization, and then life long poverty. I may, however, try to contact him, if his best buddy was like me, then Pimentel understands spastic behavior. It takes a powerful art to change the world, and the art he did generate wasn't powerful enough.

I intend to tie this in with some of Todorov's critical concepts of symbiotic relationships, but my sensibilities need to pause.

Spaz take

I have read much more about Oprah Winfrey than I spent time viewing her show, and very little of that reading material does little more than kiss her chirpy narcissistic ass, including such material in The New Republic, though their analysis was the best in terms of the problematic nature of her influence in American pop culture, and at a later date I may pull it and snatch a few quotes. I never took to the persona, and if she tried to offer me a charitable gift, I'd actually have the gall to refuse her, and suggest that she ship malaria treatments to Uganda. One of her few shows I remember is the one with Chris Rock and his wife, where Mrs. Rock informed her spangled sister that her husband did not always have to be on. I mused over this in thinking about his social satire I Think I Love My Wife, which is not much for nuanced subtlety on the fusion of  upper middle class conventions with black norms, just as Rock himself is not much for penetrating wit, given that he never completed his education, and is no doubt on the bandwagon for the latest progressive mission to eradicate bullies, He is passive enough to be a facsimile for a white collar professional, but he lacks Cosby's gravitas, and represents, once again, the type of entitlement coasting that I have issues with. From 8th to 12th grade I was shunned; in university I had to fixate on a boxer an a war veteran in order to rationalize that I'd probably never get laid (and almost did not but got lucky), but I graduated, have degrees, and this little punk boy has money because he is a modern minstrel with some capacity for exaggeration. I can see why Daniel produced "Everybody Hates Chris". Meritocracy in the entertainment industry is elusive. Had I handled Schneider in more neutral terms, I am not sure if that would have gained me any purchase. I do not regret his elist, only my own naivete, and throwing a fit over the phone with my aunt, with Frank, because I was frightened that I pissed off a *personality*. Purple flesh tones are not particularly attractive, and it was only after this that salmon oil became a regular regiment. I take being an online cast off to heart, just like my dead cats.

Schneider also probably did not realize that I felt he was condescending to me, but this is what I felt when I asked him to be removed. I have a paying track record; of course, I have no data on how much Cosmoetica serves as a stepping stone for paying freelance jobbers, but after I agreed to write about Dune, after the little man offered me a byline, I  realized I just could not afford this. The assignment I procured, the one that tragically died on the table, was accepted on the basis of merit, which is why I do not complain about the editor, and still hope I can make it up to her publication. I am not conveying that either Daniel or myself are mind readers, but we did engage each other at cross purposes, and this is the problem with device as connection, device as shield.

I am sure real fame is a curse in the sense that Ted Koppel meant it in his latter day NPR pieces, but the right to pursue happiness is a tight bottleneck. If Rock had any real talent this would be a different post, but as an opium dose he has a lot of impurities, much the same as his erstwhile producer. Had I not joined his list, been quiet, would he have been a useful contact down the road?

Following the Headlines

I will note two things about the Aurora shooting: the merger of real life killing sprees with our entertainment industry, is, I find, a troubling indicator. The Dark Knight theater audience thought the gunman was a promotional stunt, just as the Virginia Tech shooter knew that television would perpetuate his legacy. I am not sure how we cure this rather peculiar American disease; it is not an issue of censorship, but one of boundary. I have written it before, and now I am writing it again: Targets, despite its dated technical applications, was eerily prophetic about how mental illness and the mass media would engage in the contemporary era.

Now I will restore my commiseration, and offer citizens of Denver my condolences. This has kinda put a damper on my desire to head toward a younger and more dynamic western metropolis.

Double Dosing

As fanatic and obsessive as I am about the work of Henry James, I am also as equally infuriated by the work of Henry James, in an almost interior form of begging the question, as in the evolutionary sequence of chicken and egg. I am reading a clean five dollar copy of Dove on kindle for two reasons: A sister Jamesian identifies Lionel Croy's *badness* as an avowed and active homosexuality, and I am comparing it, the text, to the film adaptation. I have already read this novel four times, and though it is an inversion of Portrait, it is not my favorite Jamesian masterwork. I am not partial to Milly Theale. Egads. To make matters worse, I am restarting The Golden Bowl this morning, and this link jammed my printer my first year online because I was trying to save money by printing Richard Hathaway's etext. Lot of paper. The Golden Bowl infuriates me so much that I can almost forgive David Foster Wallace his suicide.

Did you expect that? What does the one have to do with the other?

I cannot assert that GB is a fav, not in the context of a common reader liking a certain work best, but I'd say it is the Master's most difficult dark comedy, even though branding it that way is not quite right. The inane and banal trivia in our minds. I want to leave my personal library to someone, or to the right place. The very thought of my sister Stephanie throwing out my books, my manuscripts, is too much to bear. I have to get working on this. Will I ever publish in HJR before I am dead? Will I ever coax Gregory Zacharias into accepting my apology for trying to make a facetious joke?

The suspense! It's certainly killing me.

Rage, Of Angels, Out of the Dark

When? Probably sometime in 2011, I posted that I would incorporate what was relevant, and let my speculative, perhaps non-existent, followers, put the pieces together as they would, and I also wrote, in an equally speculative manner, about my first viewing of Paul Cox's 1991 A Woman's Tale, which ran the other day. I was forced to miss it, but will add here that it belongs firmly in any development of disability and fine arts, and I agree with everything the aging Ebert writes. or nearly everything, but I need to study Cox and Florence again before I diverge. I will also go as far as to quote him:

She is a woman of power and confidence, a woman who insists on her dignity when the world wants her to give up and admit she is sick and go off somewhere convenient to die.

This is who I am in a nutshell, brazen, uncouth, short-tempered, violating all known table manners. Now, do I condone the murder this petition protests? No, not quite, but as a victim of lesbian harassment, I do not think gay panic should be eliminated as a mitigating factor in sentencing those who kill in homophobic rage, because I understand the need to strike back when victimized, and I cannot defend myself against women who abuse their position, either as my client, my personal assistant, or my straight disabled supervisor who systemically humiliated me for somewhat over a year of my life in playing me against her homosexual colleagues and my former friends.

If gay activists find me hateful, well, those of you I've known have trampled my boundaries uncaring of the emotional pain you've caused, and despite my atheism, the religious conservatives are right, for the wrong reasons, not that the actions of Chris Cooper's character in American Beauty were justified, as that was repression that sprung a leak.

Local Stir Fry

How would you like to be a Penn State administrator in the aftermath of such a scandal? The only reason anyone cares is because this is the mammoth collegiate sports mill, a wobbling of the American triptych, the other legs of which are consumers and capital, so severe as to possibly involve the penalty of death.

Stock Options

If Tavis Smiley were to ask what gets me up in the morning, aside from two temperamental felines swatting each other over my naked stomach that has not known a proper male caress in a long time, I'd tell the intrepid, if grating interviewer, "Coffee." Humidity throws this already spastic contortion of flesh out of whack. Sinuses, which trouble the ablests among us as well, so limping along like a rag picker, barely eating, I could not bring myself to go to my Joe's today, but resorted to their instant coffee packets over brewing in my Krups. I do not really have a good reason why I do not complete my usual automatic drip cycle, maybe it is the secret lizard lurking in my primal brain that an old and wicked gypsy has not accessed, but the Trader Joe's instant travel packets are not bad for the price.

I opted out of seeing the dynamic Slumdog Millionaire this evening, choosing to stay with known formulas, which might surprise those of you who understand that I make demands of my aesthetics, but I wasn't ready to absorb yet more Eastern narratives to fill the empty vessel of Western materialism, so I stayed with what I knew. A small snippet about Stephen King's fantasy-horror constructs: As terrible as the movie Thinner is, the idea of physically wasting away due to moral culpability is interesting, and in better hands might have been a better tale. Joe Mantegna, always reliable on delivery, is the only actor here to put in a lucid performance; it is interesting that his brutality, pitted against extra-sensory ability, leaves his character unscathed.

Some of you may know I am not partial to King's work, and so what else is new? Junk food of the mind is just as bad as that which generate body toxins, however.

Freelance Maldoror

I am actually reading Les Chants on kindle, and despite the Dadaists, but for Ducasse's age and early death, I regret losing my money on this kind of hyper-romantic spleen, and do not see the allure in corrupting children, even in a fantastical mode. No use for children here, nor pederasts who stand in violent opposition to God as a character. There was a poster whose avatar on the literature network forums was Etienne. He was Ducasse's advocate during my active years. Pedophiles should be executed, if the predation is serial, and prolonged, though no one will pay me any mind when it comes to men like Jerry Sandusky; I'd lay odds he will be killed in prison. My failed ambition is rather like a dead crane shot out of the sky with pellets of the appropriate size, or Joey's dying face on my bathroom floor, frozen in place, which is in no way related to the arrested triggers of prepubescent arousal. I am a doomed failure, and do not know what to do about it. My lungs will kill me soon enough, even though one of my white collar professional sources got back to me, I am not sure how to save my article except to start rewriting it and then maybe pitch it elsewhere or send it back to this particular editor. I am juggling too many variables, in the article itself, in how much reading and writing and thesis research and viewing I can do in a day tending to cats I mainly do not want, and I have to go shopping. Charmed as I am that UpstateCP now follows me, of what use they are or can be to me at that distance remains unknown. I scanned Blogger earlier and found the mostly inactive accounts of little interest, but assume there must be a way to search for wonks of similar vent who are more active, and I need learn how to find.

The gradations of French social intelligence, particularly as Proust deploys it in his masterwork, is a good starting point for entering into my paradigm shift on the issues surrounding the cultural memes of same sex orientation; at least when I am feeling better.

Josie Byzek, LBGT, Disability Activism

Progressives need to realize they are front and center in this kind of backlash. I have been turning over my hostility to gay lifestyles for many years now, since I have stated that, in the past, I was intellectually with the left. What changed is that I've had far too much exposure to lesbian duplicity on the one hand, both of the secular Jewish and Gnostic Christian genotypes, represented by woman like Fern Markowitz, and Josie Byzek, and my personal sense that homosexual males are more unstable, and I take this view despite the removal of homosexuality from the DSM as a disorder. Am I indicating that same sex orientation cannot be as pedestrian as an HIV positive Briton like Andrew Sullivan, with his gnostic Catholic my sodomy is blessed sentiments would like it to be? No, but Andy himself is a contradiction in terms.

That charge might as equally by aimed at me, an atheist who thinks that American Christianity is about as equi-distant from its Bedouin roots as pagan river deities are to the Hoover Dam. It is complicated, and I cannot disentangle it all in one post, but I am convinced things will get uglier before we develop a new social paradigm my dried bleach bones would not recognize. Ironically, however, it was my nearly lethal email exchanges with Linda that destroyed my tolerance, because I let her twist me inside out to such a degree that imagining I could ever be anyone like Fern virtually annihilated any self-esteem I had left, in the time frame that these events occurred.

I am not quite stupid enough to let myself off easily with moral prognostications of the sort that Yahoo details, but I also will not condemn revulsion. It is a legitimate response, and I will build up my argument over time.

Josie did not, and does not now, occupy the same space in terms of what was once my regard and respect, admiration, for a woman like my former supervisor. The wounds that each inflicted on me carry nearly the same weight. I cannot write about my relation to Linda, not yet, because it triggers me like Amy Irving in De Palma's early and interesting, if overwrought, supernatural thriller, but as of the winter 2013, I can put my money where my mouth is in terms of Ms. Byzek. She is a managing editor and I am a freelancer who needs a contract, if not the (relative?) security her publication offers, but I am a powerful writer, and just how powerful, she is one day going to find out, with my metaphorical fist aimed right between the eyes. It will not undo what she did, but people like me know how to put full force and credit into the desire for retribution.

Blazing Counterfactuals

It may have been Friday evening, Little Vincento, now hiding in the catty-corner cabinet he likes, unexpectedly leapt onto my scarred shoulder, which, for those of you who recall, was the result of a hair fire in 2005 when I struck a match to light a last morning cigarette that might have conversely been my last morning had I not been such a shoddy housekeeper. He was all over me with rump bumps and head rubs and kisses. "Fuck that mom," he seemed to say, "you still love me and you're not giving me up, and you know it." Even if mother descends into dwindling resource insanity, well, then I do not know.

I was greatly influenced by the books of James Herriot growing up, which shows that sentimentality about animals has been a force in the Western Hemisphere for a long time, but also that men are surprisingly good chroniclers of feline stories. There were a number of such authors in the seventies, but amid this swirling empathy, and its decadent indulgence, there remains the issue of primate abuse to our domesticated species. Some of it by accident, as in my case with power chair mishaps, some of it due to mental defect, stress, aggression, which an observer might be able to find a shared identity, even if we do not cross those lines, but even I have lines, and we have had at least two instances of dogs set on fire in the Philadelphia region, and this is what I wrote in the comments section that did not deploy because I lack an FB account:

I can enter into a great deal of the triggers that motivate negative human behavior, but not this, and the sad fact is, animal torturers usually graduate into human torturers and murderers, and our justice system fails, in the first instance, to intervene early enough, with appropriate penalties and treatments. Not catching these perpetrators leaves us all in danger.

But, taking off my freelance cap, if these motherfuckers are caught, fry them. Deliberately doing this to an animal is beyond the pale, and when human wiring goes off like this, it needs to be eliminated.

Mighty Men

I have written about the Douglas'es before on LiveJournal, and when I finish moving my content and making revisions, this post may merge with those, since I'd like to probe deeper, but it seems that the only reason It Runs in the Family (2003) had to be made was to give the father and son a generational vehicle, and that is not good enough. To use David Denby's term for Demi Moore, Michael too often over defines himself for my taste, but papa bear Kirk, who is sad to see in this movie, always made his dramatic definitions work before the mortality crumple; I certainly find this relevant. I will note two things: physical frailty is handled with typical Jewish humor, a known conceit, and this is the only film in which Kirk's ethnicity seems genuine, and not under the careful and rigid control of the studio to make the actor's identity clean and tidy for Protestant America.

In conjunction with my last post, I think humanity has screwed itself, over-succeeded to the point that we're set to wipe ourselves out, give or take 2000 years, and when the crisis hits, diversity will kiss its sweet ass like the pipe dream it is. All these disaster movies, end of the world movies, or the apocalypse as played out on the Supernatural, I cannot say the drama of gloom and doom has no influence on my cynicism, but my dystopian sentiments come from environmental observation of the human animal. We are basically more stupid than we'd like to believe, and cannot rocket toward 11 billion without drastic consequences.

Urban Telemetry

In the ongoing battle of wills between Lady Rambo (a.k.a. kimmy would you like her?), little black panther Vincent, and human spastic mother, Lady Rambo has succeeded in setting the stage for global dominion. Vinne, for whom I have no picture, is nearly terrified of this kitten-sized female, and virtually refuses to leave the kitchen. I was advised to lock her in the bathroom, but this seems unfair. Vinne may be a small wing man, but tackled his brother daily, so I fail to see why he cannot stand up to a little girl; my fatigue is telling, and instead of arguing with my aunt, I may just have to circumvent her and do what I feel is necessary. Not immediately, as I believe in the no kill methodology even if I am slightly more ambivalent about TNR. I believe in the dignity of other species as much as you tend to believe in ours, and I am trying to help CK out. However, as much as we tend to ridicule cat ladies, suicidal or not, I meant what I wrote about Joey being the pet love of my life. My relationship with little brother is not the absence of attachment, but it is more mercurial, and I am resistant to the little girl, who might outlive me if she is as young as she seems. If in so many weeks, it  appears I will be hurling toward hell, I will be relieving myself from the burdens of ownership. I understand Debra Horne's concern, the social worker for my landlord whom I denigrate with my interior voice in sentiments that would appall Amy Gutmann, whose circumference is close to the range of my disparity, but whose status is in league with the Davos list; if la Presidente Amy sat in my wheelchair and heard and saw Debra screaming at me, maybe she would take a more nuanced view of what keeps racial tensions alive and inflamed. I have at least three times the education level of Ms. Horne, and yet I never broke into getting an interview past my very high scoring civil service examinations. Ms. Horne did get in, and yet mysteriously floats out of vocational rehabilitation to work for Presby like an obedient Doberman, tagging problem tenants.

A List Pose

The thought occurs to me that maybe I could one day approach Nicole Kidman's publicist about getting an interview in my own right, even if I cannot make the Henry James Review deadline, and it is quite possible that I will not make it, at the rate I am going. I care nothing about her personal life, and do not necessarily have to meet her in person; it is her art that interests me for a feature, along the lines of The Others (2001) and Birth (2004), if I could develop my own track, not that such a feature article has not been done. Of course it has, I believe in WaPo, and make a note to make a concerted effort to dig it out of archive, but not this morning. Her ex husband is insane, but too high in social status for anyone to admit that as obvious. Cruise and I are exactly the same generation, tail wind to the boomers of whom the gen X are so weary, one of us a self-hating sow always on the verge, the other a sometimes great actor always on, and a cultist, dodging trick wires. I wonder if Tom really has a central core, and knows himself for himself, but I doubt it. I have read some, here and there, about his religion, do not understand it, and a good federal conspiracy would set the Mormons and Scientologists up to kill each other. That's a fun idea.

I might be able to derive secondary material from such an attempted effort toward credibility, while groping toward a thesis in the fog, much as it was created by Amenabar on location.

How The Cymbals Reverberate

When I reviewed, or interpreted The Others earlier this year, I was unaware that Nicole Kidman had followed through on her psychological thriller arc with the equally creepy but possibly more uneven Birth (2004). Though I missed few, the minutes that escaped me were still crucial, and I'd like to screen it once more, but Cameron Bright was used to much better effect here than he was in the stupendous and confusing Ultraviolet, another film that has drawn my mention during my unfortunate LiveJournal stint. Endless revision, tying in the old posts and the new, for what exactly when I cannot solve my application problems, but this will wait until after the holiday, as the dynamic between the new little lady and my poor Vincent has exhausted me, and I am close to giving up the love of feline parenting, though it will break my heart, already rife with fragments. I will not be celebrating tomorrow; indefinite at this point, but I may try a weekend holiday ride to Penn's Landing. In all my years at this location I have never taken the 21 bus to the pier. For me, during the active years of my field work, it was always in the opposite direction, to Darby, smaller maybe, but to my memory the Darby borough is just as bad as the city. Drugs more concentrated, and I have more graphic memories of my mother's drug use, the purple bruises in the fleshy crook of her elbow, the rubber tubing I wasn't supposed to see. What was it that I said about reticence? But the irony of Doty's continued lunging over my review is that particular review was of no consequence as compared to what I write here for the sake of testament, alienating my family, and those who knew me. I think Doty has a lot to learn about what can be controlled in public domains, and what cannot; in contrast to his desire to be loved by his readers, I do not care about my audience in that way, so much as the integrity of my work itself, and if people are dismayed by what I produce, I do not go on a boner about it. I have been praised for the power of my poetry, for how hard hitting I am, or impressed poor Louise, who I abandoned through no fault of her own. She is a perfectly nice young woman who found my work *very raw,* and we should have left it as that. I have been criticized as pretentious, but unlike Doty, I did not harangue the now inactive Usenet poster who threw out that red meat. I like the complexity of my imagery, though it leads to the flaw of a certain top heaviness that can topple my poetic construct. I have been rejected as many thousands of times as the paltry dollars I have drawn in on my work. I have been accepted for publication in sometimes unexpected ways, and I have not been as successful with marketing paradigms as some, including those whom I actually respect, like Cheryl, (not liking the Oprah juggernaut and my expressed frustration at comparative trajectory is not the same thing as disdain; Cheryl is authentic--Doty is a crock, a load on) but there are reasons for this beyond talent, very much related to my vulnerability, strained resources.

Lee Doty Lives

And still it does not die!

Doty is back, claiming he made a bunch of money, that he is not a professional, and he is obviously trying to be humorous, and I sit here gritting my teeth, in a bad mood, in trouble because of a cat barely into adulthood. I have standards for my published work, and do not make money on entertaining my audience with lowest common denominator character sketches senselessly slaughtered by drug addicts sans demons under the mind control of magical spiders. Sometimes I fail my standards; sometimes I do a fairly good job and stir controversy. See my New Mobility article in the 2004 archives even if they request that you buy it. I have read at least five fantasy horror texts on kindle that made me puke. They sit in archive, discarded. If you wish, by all means, keep this thread going, suggest that Doty read some of my other reviews, and perhaps he can distill what earns my respect, and what doesn't. or maybe he does not care. It should sadden me, that authors, as a class, fall in such a range that so many should be beneath contempt. I am moving on, staying with talents like Ferguson, who make me think, but this is not to say I don't feel a little pissed off at the man for trying to put me in the wrong for not liking how I wrote what I wrote. His lack of maturity on this matter sickens me, regardless of my disadvantages as a disabled woman. Amazon tolerates much less polished opinions than what I wrote, and since my mettle is up, I am thinking of turning this issue into a column or article. It seems we could all use a lesson about the virtues of reticence. I emailed Mr. Chicago Punk last night, and so far, he seems to lack the balls to tell me exactly what he wants to stop deploying his Plumber Joe victimization.