More British Sexual Diversions

Chronic conditions occasionally wrought havoc on succession orders. In the age of Roman emperors there was the reputed madness of Caligula. In the line of American presidents, there was Grover Cleveland's oral cancer, a successfully held state secret and surgery that could have gone the other way, and there was Woodrow Wilson's stroke, and in the ever entertaining line of English Tudors, there was the sickly Edward6, a Catholic Mary, and the great virgin Liz1, of whom Renaissance students can never get enough. Lady Jane, in and of itself, is a curious film, with Patrick Stewart giving a kind of innocuous Merchant Ivory flavor in a supporting role as the duke whose loyalty is doomed. The violence in the film is ornamental, as in fact most period videos about the Tudors are, almost like a postcard. I have the film on my watchlist for additional review, but I am not sure when I'll get to it, having had a difficult weekend, from which I am trying to spare you.

I thought my little adventure into what remains of Philadelphia's historic leisured class would... how can I put it? Open a last venue, of sorts, but when I got back in, I had a furious battle; there is something about putting up one's nose against old money, and I feel, quite simply, defeated, a broken swizzle stick with a jagged fracture.

I'll never have what I want, and it is killing me, partly why I have avoided the merits, the detractions, of JK Rowling and her legacy. There are not many authors, world over, whose franchise simply steamrolled its way into that kind of wealth. She broke the chains of her state socialism. I have failed, and it will not only be a conceptually difficult issue for me; it may become one of stark choices.

Burn Out

Bleyer's article has depressed me. I am fully cognizant of the fact that she and Slate see this as a necessary advocacy, and it is not their intention to trigger a sense of hopelessness, but this is what years of regulated housing methodologies does to a soul; here is my dream that I'll probably never reach. Eight weeks is not enough, though I am debating an application, since Kimmel's anti-discrimination claim must mean their studios have wheelchair access.

Here We Go

Dick Wolf's Law & Order series was ahead of Slate contributor Jennifer Bleyer by 15, 20 years, at least, that the dark side of identity politics was going to lead us down this inextricable, and really ugly path. I am not like Jennifer's inter-source critic, Reisman, and will not say that executing pedophiles is the answer, though I have stated that Sandusky should receive the death penalty, but again, I am asking progressives, at what point are any of you going to say enough is enough? I can never go back to monotheism, but I have no problem tying my atheism to my own moral values, and we have to stop using biology as an excuse for relativism. I did push too hard yesterday, I had little choice, and so I am expanding and revising this after a lengthy rest, but at the rate we are going, we're losing any pragmatic sense of our own humanity. Violence, and aggression do actually have a function within evolutionary theory. Dominant males in many mammalian species kill to eliminate the faulty wiring that Jennifer suggests should be met with empathy, gunning very hard to put us in the pedophile's place-- not here.

Compassion is not going to keep our species in the best shape. Survival is brutal but that is how things work, and I know this will shock some of you, but when my dad got drunk in 05 and said he did not force my mother to abort me, well, maybe he should have. Not that systemic culling should result in mayhem like this, or even like this. Erin Moran clearly has not adapted to the fact that her fifteen minutes has expired, but what about those of us who haven't spiraled out of control? I suffered until my late twenties, and my life came to a halt pretty much by the age of 42. It is eight years of punishment later, and my body is breaking down. How can I move on if I cannot change my circumstances, no longer capable of sustaining the commute and punishment field work inflicted?

The disability movement shuts this down, saying take pride, be empowered, yep, they empowered me to nearly the edge of suicide, and will never take responsibility for it. I will not be around long enough to see the nightmare that is coming your way, and it is a consolation.

Cosmopolitan Shag

I wrote a number of posts back that Patrick Stewart melts me, and although I have to take Yahoo's carnivalesque banners in limited doses, this because I lived on the site portal at one time, losing not a few dissertations I'll never publish, screaming to Jerry in an unpleasant inner falsetto, "I'm sorry, I cannot complete the terminal arc, the human animal has wasted me, I am sorry." What powers of absolution do I believe this teacher deity holds? I punish myself for the invisible incompletions; he is only a representation of my failure in those early years of cyber and telephone sexual fantasies. I was very popular, due to my imagination, and with much effort, I did hook up, and now the article has led me to the classical heart throb, but those days are finished. I know cougar is the descriptive term du jour for women my age, but I just do not have the will to keep getting stomped on by the men of intelligence I want who don't feel anything for me, and my ex, Frank, he was obedient as long as I was willing to engage on the fictions of his virility, but I did not see the love he said he felt, and had I married him, he'd be in his hospital bed, probably complaining that I make love to the laptop and the cats, but to him, never. It would have been the truth, and we never engaged in intercourse because it would have been physically impossible, and he was impotent due to three, five, underlying conditions that came with his stroke. Stewart is 72, a classical actor who seems to stay smartly in the confines of his range, an ex-wife, children. I am not sure if his Claudius  was subversive or too molded by conceptualizations of the television set. 72, but that projection he was as Jean Luc contained things I had always wanted in a partner: confidence, wry depreciation, a mature masculinity that held bravado within reason, a magnetic rather than pretty attraction. Jeremy Irons shares similar attributes. Could they possibly be cloned, raffled off in a lotto? Do they cope with erectile dysfunction? I am still not ready for prime time, but I have to get out tomorrow, maybe Thursday and Friday, so I have to take care not to push myself too hard.

Half Century Skin

It must be nice for a playwright to spawn something like Heaven Can Wait.
Segall may be a footnote, but his conceit bridges two centuries, and I can think of four, five other films besides the 41 original, only the David Niven version of mild weight, having the right touchstone for its English fable qualities. What underlies the fantasy mechanism between that sacred and profane in temporal transit, is the resolution of interrupted fulfillment. I am sore, perhaps a symptom of diabetes, even though I do not abuse my diet as badly as my mother, on my elbows, and where I bend, under my belly, and I am not ready for prime time. It has turned rather chilly very quickly, and, if I can haul myself out later today, I may need more than my shawl, trying to make breakfast, fighting languor.

We all have to die, at least, thus far; we are not anemones. Some biologists think they are immortal under environmental constants. I would not want immortality, but dying unresolved and unhappy will only increase my anger, sharpen my bitterness. All I want to do is move, and I might as well be igniting the start of the Afghanistan action, rather than watching its withered climax. I am unreasonable and must have a hole in the head if I believe I can leave public housing in this climate, but my weariness is in my marrow, and I am not allowed even this level of selfishness, a change of environment. I opted in for hash browns patties, just two, because I am going back to bed. It may be the fall air. My rage builds, then crashes, builds again, feeling like I have been duped my entire damn life, a naive dunce. Many of my early posts on this study looked at Jodie Foster's film career, as I grew up with the actor that she is, and the thought occurred to me that if I contact her agent for an interview, if I can come up with an idea, I will censor Hinckley on my own, even if the media has their names inextricably linked. I have the publicist. Foster's oeuvre belongs here, and a film like Nell only confirms this, as painfully bittersweet as it was to see Natasha and Liam in a youthful mode.

Natasha Richardson's acting has always felt fake to me, and I think in the context of the girl's story, she almost makes it work, as a flaw, in her conservative supporting role, but the qualifying flag has to remain, almost. I was able to see Neeson's hunger for his wife, but not vice versa, perhaps only a flattered coquetry. If they married in 94, mmm, I have to give it up, whether this was the laudable, drooling set romance that fans, in shallow fashion, ga ga over. kimmy bit me awake at 8 last night for her supper, but next I looked, when I attempted to settle down it was 10:30. Then I managed the film. We'll have more when I can think.

Il disprezzo de Blond Bombshells

I gave up viewing Blindness at all, and took a shower, which is the only bit of drama remaining in relation to my own control of my life, my ability to set my own parameters. I have some things to do this week, not many, but some, and need to do my best with this unfortunate body, the battle with hygiene over its age and contortion, but I do not look like a woman worth fucking, except to black hustlers, and when they take aim at me, I grin behind glass, drive on. I would never sleep with one of them. With white trash, you can picture the hand wobble gesture that goes with "mmm, iffy." My mother picked up such men like hopping lice, one louse after the other. I have a hard time forgiving my mother for her licentiousness; it led to so much danger and violence for her children. I have lost count of how many times I was threatened with, or subjected to sexual assault, terrified that Stuart, my pathological stepfather, would kill my real dad, which is why I think the three of us, me, my estranged sister, deceased brother, never went to our father. It was not simply his pain and the emotional void of his ruined marriage. I believe we the children were trying to shield him, and it is why I have such a difficult time mourning for my mother, forbidding myself. I do not mean coping with the shock of the initial grief. Most would be hit hard, writers, failed writers, even my father. I mean mourning after that torrent is cooled. I do not allow myself certain things, like loving her memory, hating it. I know she was sick, and of course, I see some of her symptoms in myself. Her younger sister, me, Stephanie, we are a milder continuum. The added burden of my brain damage (sigh). I suppose we have been through my self-righteousness and justifications in two years of posts, but my mother's illness involves a great deal of repression; when she was alive, it erupted. My sister would say my face went purple and I should have my heart checked. Death has not staunched the wounds. Nor therapy. Nor drugs, nor the longing for jubilant abandon in the arms of a good man, to paraphrase the Brigitte Bardot of Contempt.

New Wave fascinates me, I fear, and some of you say to yourselves that I cheat my topic; this is both true and false. False in the sense that when I look at A list material it is with the view toward deeper deconstruction. It slipped my mind that Bardot is still alive, and turned into a reactionary crackpot, but in researching and finding myself back at Alberto Moravia's doorstep, I recalled Bardot's anti-Muslim stirrings in the news. What does this aging diva live on? I almost find myself pitying her. I am falling apart after 27 years of horrible struggle, and I feel sorry for Brigitte Bardot, her loss of relevance.

Contempt fails in its conscious structuralism, unlike the 61 Goodbye Again, for which I have a passionate abandon, and Bardot is indolent more than anything else, but it is, none the less, sending what cognition I have left on a hopeful romp.

The Value of Retaining Habits

Undaunted, Richard Lynn has with The Chosen People accomplished a yeoman's task in summing up work done thus far on Jewish intelligence.-- John Glad, undaunted in his own eugenics sphere.

The television network system, in its former monopoly on what viewers were fed, has a somewhat lengthy populism of its own in soft pedaling the Catholic tread on monotheism. The dowager wouldn't be able to remember the content of Sally Field's Flying Nun adventures even with a hypothetical inducement from Peter Thiel being willing to overlook my grimace, offering me a charitable donation to debate him like a fool on why my diffidence against homosexuality matters, but I do remember her self-effacing smile at the conclusion of her playful gymnastics had it about right, in the wholesome humility the public was willing to buy, the abuses pounding the doors of our district attorneys today then still an indulgence of Bad Catholics, according to latter day Commonweal contributors. There may be some hardy souls who point out that my willingness to destroy Presbyterian Homes as a fraternal brickbat stands in direct contradiction against my preference to preserve Roman Catholicism as an institution, but that is a huge thesis I inadvertently rolled into. It is easier this evening to disparage Michael Landon, rumble slightly about Della Reese and angel touches, and point out that Early Edition is beyond superficial, although, in its essential elements, it operates under the same premise as Joan of Arcadia, which respects itself.

However, Shanesia Davis has better facial expressions to pretend blindness than Audrey Hepburn does in Wait Until Dark. The dowager, in her most cursed moment of carelessness thus far, caught only the last 20 minutes of the thriller. Arkin almost looks like another actor. I am not attempting to be hard on the iconic princess. One wouldn't want to be shocked if she had really dug in, but blind people do have facial dysphoria. Here is the evidence of it in the unpleasant leftist Shaf Patel. (I knew it wouldn't work, but swallowed my loathing, followed him back, briefly, still suffering from brotherhood syndrome.) Saramago does imbue a grisly realism to his inexplicable parable of white death, but network never quite knows how to carry disability, pretend or otherwise, for itself. The able majority prefer not to notice, and the deprived, adapt and stiffen. Other than Chandler's sidekick, I am not sure what her role is in the series, other than to cross her fingers that she gets friended a cameo in the ever recurring confirmation bias.

Anarchist José Saramago

Also, of course, you inevitably pick up some friends you could manage without: to wit, queers, neurotic ladies, Jewish psychiatrists, Muslim boys, and young Presbyterian assistant ministers. Those who hold this position (which I do not hold) would argue that the responsible citizen necessarily gives up. The situation is hopeless, and as a reasonable man the responsible citizen becomes indifferent. All the available options disgust him, from Ayn Rand to CORE to the Birch Society.
--The Sunlight Dialogues, location 1128-29

Peripatetic Rollers

I cannot recall any familiarity with the voice of Charles Krauthammer during my adolescent loyalty to the authority of Time Magazine, but his was an active media platform back in the day when reasonably intelligent readers consumed the periodical like a rich dessert with a sophistication of texture. I miss what the publication meant to me as a student, one of my Constitutional instructors snapping at the lectern, "Put that away!" when I wanted to continue with my foreign policy article, and I obediently swiped the glossy off my desk. When I first started reading Krauthammer on WaPo, it was in a state of amnesia, confronted by a hostile alien, but I reflected today, after I battled the neocon psychiatrist in the comments section, where I am becoming an inadvertent regular, studying the paper the way gnostic mystics lose themselves in the kabbalah, that Charles and John Hockenberry are the only two prominent paraplegics in national news media who have a broad based recognition. Charles actually thinks the way a disabled mind would, which is why he incites his readers (sometimes viewers) to such passions, for or against. Of course he is better educated, no argument there. I whine the night away about my colon; doubt he would be caught dead discussing ostomy tubes and any potential pressure sores, but he still thinks like I do, cutting it down to size: Obama is a wet dish rag, and Bush was tougher and had the right idea. You take the Middle East, country by country, kill the designated strongmen and fanatics, with the exception of oil wealthy magnates, and welcome to hell. I did not think Obama actually articulated anything akin to a doctrine in his Cairo address, but this is why Charles has notoriety and I have never derived any financial benefit out of being a wonk, except for the mention of John Bolton in an editorial where I was paid a pittance.

To say I am in closer alignment with Charles is inaccurate, but I have increasingly paid more attention to him, and his refusal to allow paralysis to define him is something I have realized a little late in life as a disabled writer with cerebral palsy. If I was a wonk, though, and had the influence to be taken seriously, this is what I would do, short of murdering our way out of the problem, which Bush and Obama have done, continue to do with drones. I would simply end Afghanistan and Pakistan as sovereign nations. Do a damn deal with whomever, China, Turkey, India, Iran. Turn the two countries into a protectorate by force, take away Pakistan's nuclear toys, and rule the region as empires once did. Use Turkish troops, give Iran a bit of hubris and give the Revolutionary Guard an entirely new population to terrorize.

Will it happen? No, but it is better than allowing near failed nation states to start a third global war, with more dire consequences than the second, where the bad guys were more clearly defined.

I am better, dried out my lungs in forty eight hours, but severity will only continue to be an issue.

Invidious Distinctions

When I write in Quarantine that Russell Crowe is too generic, another way to frame my contention is to bracket it in terms of over-exposure. He gets the organic nature of paranoid schizophrenia right in A Beautiful Mind, in terms of John Nash's transition from promising scholar to a man beset with illness, and it also felt like an Ike and Churchill rendition era film for modern consumption. Beyond this the star underwhelms, and does nothing to reconcile me to Australia. One of Tatyana's characters felt the same way in her early collection of stories, yanking the land mass out of the ocean like a diseased molar. A film like On The Beach exempts itself, simply by virtue of being early nuclear porn, as we call it today. It is not a fair comparison, but we do see a certain difference in handling impairments, however: the Rhonda of Muriel's Wedding adapts to her cursory paralysis, whereas here in the States, Swank's Maggie and her choice causes reactionary protests.

I happen to be on the character's side. Being a writer is an insulating process, by the nature of the beast, but when it has been your life for half a century, and essentially failed you, even if you always know you can never do anything else, sick now, broken, as well as crippled, making a choice to let go does not seem so threatening. The activists I knew, at least those who aren't dead, have nothing to say to me, and won't, obviously, since I haven't been nice, and on angry days, ah, well, some of you have seen the same diabolical villain films as I have, and can use your own imagination about what I do with a slowly dying vengeance, biodegrading; the very awareness of the fact that I am fragile fuels my urgency to get away, the ever omnipresent American impetus. Migrate. East to west, west to east, or be Hemingway in Paris.

I am running out of time. I am probably not going to make it, and neither stoicism nor protest is entirely satisfactory.

Quarantine

Our food will be poison.
                                        the ophthalmologist in Blindness


如果我的偏执狂放大的优良中华人民共和国公民滚动通过我的帖子？

How accurate the calligraphy I have no idea. Simply an attempt to be accommodating, but allow me to be honest with the most powerful hunk of Asia: I fear not you the people, but your mighty nine member Politburo? Yes, most of us lowly, if educated, Americans, fear your Communist Party, its corruption, thuggery, and the beating of heroic self-educated blind lawyers who can still score a victory for small cogs. The people of the United States are not free, but we do a better job of respecting personal dignity than your officials, and you, dear citizens of China, have a terrible petty provincialism. Grow up some day soon. Spastic waves.

When I watch Australian films, I tend to get a bad taste in my mouth, as if degeneration on the basis of criminal caste had some truth, and wonder in the back of my bigoted mind if America got the better part of British blood in the colonial era, or if it's just that Australian dysfunction is an uneasy mirror reflecting back on all of the white working class, the status of a Blanchett or a Russell Crowe aside, and Crowe does not really count; he is too generic and Hollywood plasters his face in every white might blockbuster of which humanity can conceive; given this, I had a difficult time controlling my self pity renewing my acquaintance, after midnight, with Muriel's Wedding. I wept, and the mismatched love making towards the conclusion, after the mother's suicide, was convincing. Most homily women have the untapped depth of Toni Colette's character. From a 2012 perspective, some of the digs in Hogan's script were cheap, and Rhonda is little more than a bitch in stencil, but this film was made for women like me who never wanted to go lesbian, but need the emotional intimacy of a best friend, and can make love to a great looker with the best of them.

Let us drop the facade for a moment. The real Joanne Marinelli never went to her senior prom. Can you even enter into what that must have been like for me as a teen? There was no American Civil Liberties Union, not in 81, blaring trumpets for me because a high school student with cerebral palsy could not so much as get a trophy beau with a corsage to experience such an important rite of passage.

The Sunlight Aria

I am on a semi-lucid search for yet another well thumbed natty paperback from my tribal imagery days (huh? I see you, puzzled, asking what I am alluding to), John Gardner's Grendel, and I am not succeeding. I could, probably should, given the age of the paper, my marks on the typeface, just buy the much more expensive etext, but my used paperbacks are important, they provide clues, and Grendel survived the building renovations, unlike my health; where it was last escapes me. Gardner himself died quickly, violently, days into my swelling freshman breast, and I've clung to his memory ever since, my most beloved post-modernist, even if not the most profound. I have talked myself into an etext edition while my hunt pauses in digging through my musty bins, the paper trail of drafts, the certainty of checking account statements. Gardner, much like Lessing, is interested in the obscurity of origin, but where Lessing sees violence as an innate repression in the evolution of homo sapiens, Gardner has a more problematic view, as does the original epic from which his derivative masterpiece stems. Grendel and his *dam*, if I remember correctly the curious and hard word for the Teutonic view of the feminine, are monsters, perhaps obscure survivors who formed our myths, created our heroes, formed the basis of our territorial empires, the muscle of our modern powers, which, in Gardner's view, is a geocidal insanity (Beowulf as the rationale for the systemic extermination of the Vietnamese), one that makes Grendel a curiously sympathetic, disruptive figure.

Within this paradigm, Grendel's violence is the catharsis necessary for survival, whereas the personality cult evolved around the hero is a horrific, deadly excess. Where applicable, violence is unavoidable, targeted as a means to an end, but when it is senseless, it then becomes tragic. Ajami, versed in feeding our penchant to look for reasons, soothes the Western mind with timelines that provide insight, but I'd ask the Muslim world how it is that you forget the fabulism within your own traditions? Everyone knows the enchantment of Shahrazad's narrative loom, and its cures for palliative erosion that festers due to disillusion, and how European literary traditions copied from it, evolved.

I pity Nakoula, without endorsing his need for a polemic; he was used as a covet instrument, a cover as another means to an end. Vomiting Islamic traditions against liberalism, even into it, for the purposes of identity, is only a devaluation of virtue.

Fever Transit

Disease does have its own auto-erotic components, particularly related to the release of inhibitions. The most noted of these, in literary terms, is Mildred in Of Human Bondage. The charms of syphilis and British whoring, however, is nothing compared to a full frontal view of mentally ill queers with bloody cuticles who have full blown AIDS stricken partners with deadly froths of spittle on their mouths. This was one of my Christmas parties with the secular Jewish bosses I worked for with their progressive holy grails, if you want to know why my rage, with the lid off, unchecked by nicotine, would be so frightening if I utilized it in the now quaint and dated slang of going postal, but then again, could I be bipedal, most likely I would have been a battered woman, like mother. Mon frere morte passed his AIDS on to his girl, and this is why I believe that culling modalities will one day be dystopian realities for our species, though it is a matter of degree, and I have work that centers around jacking off cancer cunts during a course of treatment. The Castle of Otranto, with which I am racing along when I am tired, dances around this more obliquely. Despite Walpole's playfulness, there is something unseemly about Manfred bursting at the seams with his seed, as there is in the generational passage in a film like Darkness, which I need to view again. I lost the narrative thread in the last third of the film. As pro forma as it was, the script utilizes Huntington's as a conduit for horrific possibility. I had a waking nightmare recently, my power chairs being dismantled by Presby security, deliberately, cruelly, while I laid on my mattress, naked, crying on the phone for my father, who appeared like an imbecile, strolling along while I was taken away on a stretcher. If you think these motherfuckers will lift a finger to protect me against this actuality, the joke is on us, as we already live in the world of Soylent Green. We've been there for a very long time.

Yes, I know, my terror is overblown, woven in with the magnification of Wagner's darkness, and the rebuttal of the able world is the conspiracy of the system against me is my own adorable symptom, held up by my baby brother, by the Jamesian list moderator (in a different context), but no, if I do not get out of this building, and find a patron, this will be my fate, whatever cognition I will or will not have left to recognize it. I am in the process of being discarded, like so many of my former clients I carry on my back, with there own abandon, their own outcry. If I could just land a punch, find some form of liberation in the deployment of aggression, conceptually, it is a liberating notion. And all I wanted was a quiet day with my texts, notes on modernism; it never works out that way, and I am too tired now, past a painful lung flare.

Double Entendre

Not that it matters, but things went rather smoothly today, my old self, with my old strength, for a few hours, though gall still worms its way through me when I exit through the vestibule, and my sorry past sits there before me, as if looking at it through plexiglass. Any normal woman would have left this environment after breaking a wedding engagement, burning so many bridges; my only consolation is apparently exhausting myself on Wagner, and this is just television. How does a live audience manage it, let alone the poor fellow doing Wotan? Wagner, like most everyone else who ascribes anything about it, Shakespeare, for instance, is seemingly a pessimist about power. The SWGs who script Criminal Minds were not up to it during Ms. Brewster's protracted departure in a series which is so schematic and out in left field that it more aptly fails as a black comedy rather than succeeds as a procedural drama. Yes, the team always cautions that *profiling* is a tool, but this is one crime drama that does its viewers a disservice. When this preposterous ring cycle reaches its scheduled conclusion tomorrow, perhaps I will undergo fresh brain growth. My equilibrium has recovered, but I shall have to be more cautious on my downturns. I have had attacks (menopause, stress driven, stages of emphysema) for years, but what hit me over the weekend struck for three days, and I thought a catastrophic medical incident was imminent.

Valhalla?

I sat obediently through the first fourth of Der Ring Des Nibelungen last evening, and less obediently listening to Die Walkure now. My thirst for cultural refinement does not extend to all forms, and the Metropolitan need for sustenance is one of those. Maestro Levine would scoff, point to my lack of education in the synthesis of the trained baritone and the orchestra's ability to magnify melodrama, and far be it for me to argue with such gods who walk the earth, but whatever function opera served in Wagner's day, and in the Victorian era as a whole, where dying aristocrats and the rising bourgeois went to gossip, end and start new sex lives, in the modern era, the spectacle simply doesn't work for me, and I can understand why poor Nietzsche, in the eclipse of his sanity, thought Wagner's scores were dangerous. Why not just break all this up into managable segments more tolerable to the modern ear?

What interests me more is the complicity sometimes laid at Wagner's doorstep, Nietzsche's too, for the rise of National Socialism, as David Bamber cryptically murmurs, made up as Adolf, "One cannot understand National Socialism without understanding Wagner."

Are leitmotifs really as powerful as all that? We still suffer today from such cheap reactions, but to me it is only evidence that the human animal is stalled, losing its evolutionary advantage. As my mortality circles itself, my embrace of darker hedonist sentiments includes the elimination of the powerful who do harm (my nemesis is the one on the titanium sticks with cuffs), but not at the expense of willful destruction of civic struggle.

A Glimpse Through the Window

"You are not evil!"
--Erik von Schmetterling, six weeks ago when I told him I'd purchase his cigarette brand for the sake of old times...

I should be in bed, as my symptoms possibly invoke wariness, suppositions about typhoid fever; instead, I swallowed a small bowl of paneer, hoping to keep it in, and sent my latest sallow memoir of dead fat bipolar mother out dancing on the ether, a twirling plate on a stick, whoosh, off to a contest of a publication which never impressed me. When I reflect on Marcel, and assert that I am darker than you know, I am not merely hinting at my mafia in Hollywood bloodlust toward the Philadelphia activists of whom you are weary of reading any more about, I mean as well that I have secrets of the type that cost Henry Miller some blood and guts. I am not quite quite willing to be so embarrassed in a blogger account as Miller is in his writing, but as I physically weaken I risk greater severity of my triggers, and must head toward my mattress, nodding off, drinking Pepto; whether with this post lengthened later, or a new one to leap the frog, we will trot on hopefully not in so many hours between then and now. My hungriest wish, if not my greatest, is to get laid by a man like Jeremy Irons, just once, dosing myself with necessary pain killers. Why couldn't I have been more attractive, less plagued by mammary cysts?

It is Jeremy's appearance on Tavis Smiley that I want to enter into, but damn illness snuffed out the appreciation. One is drawn to the man's intelligence, not just the physique. At the moment I need to discover whether or not I can absorb nutrition.

I have bran in there, rumbling as I revise, so hoorah; lets elision back. To listen to Jeremy speak is to learn anew how status can command silence, but I heard a subtext within the promotional chatter for his latest appearance on screen, this review of which does not deter curiosity. I heard, juxtaposed against the grounding that Tavis seems to fluster in, a certain lack of sincerity. Not that Irons was lying. Perhaps at this stage of his life, maybe plagued by ennui, wondering if he should have done something else, been an entrepreneur; there was also the usual plaint of the famous about fame itself, though I think the disadvantaged would trade on this curse in an instant, and not simply on the merits of affluence. Status confers privilege, and an indirect if not actual power. All those with name recognition should be more mindful of this, even if they would like us to understand the flip side of the coin. I may never fully cement my reputation, for instance, but if I surprise myself and wind up in a dilemma similar to Rowling, notoriety would be the least of my worries, regardless of my audience.

Dead Ringers bowed me over with indelible impressions as a Reagan era hit, part of the reason I have remained fixated on Irons in his season, but only part. Now back to the conclusion of The Ring Cycle, after which, I shall swear off opera viewing on a flat screen for the rest of my life. The sensationalism on which the Met banks smells like twilight to me.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Charm is something definitively absent, which also seems to be the case for Henry Miller. Looking at this glum old fellow in the Wiki photo makes The Tropic of Cancer a bit difficult to square. The closest I can enter into the charm of Proust's voice that so soothes me, is the small ceramic Madonna grandmother Pauline gave me when my pelvic ligaments were being butchered in my first year as an adolescent, and a nervous British nurse broke the statuette. I never forgave her for that, ever. It is a cue I can recall as clear as day. I am busy writing a letter to a paying editor on my 1987 Smith Corona PWP6. Much like Sean Connery doing Salinger, I like returning to electric word processors now and again, but charm, joy, love? These feelings were never mine to truly experience. I wrote earlier in the year that perhaps I was in love with Jerry's memory, and suggested, then, that this was a pathway to defeat. I quarrel even with my own outreach for sentiment, however, because I do not know what this means.

I do know that nakedness strips off veneer, that sexual contact is a vulnerable exchange, even in the most romantic circumstances, and that was never mine either, not even the so so exposures to married male impotence. Swann's Way is my only hard copy edition of Proust in translation, and it is Marcel's segue way into the girl with her masochistic tendencies for the reward of a kiss that I am thinking of, whether it is in the Sodom & Gomorrah section, or before. I pulled the text out of my shelf, always fond of the vinyl feel. It would not be remiss to review and refresh as I journey slowly through Budding Grove, for I do understand abasement, unfortunately, as a tool to gain a sought reward. Not to be another woman's lover, however, so much as to feel necessary. Is it even conceivable that I can still meet a good man without a lesbian like Josie Byzek to do her unfathomable damage to my anticipation of desire? Do I still have the ability to derive pleasure from desire? Shakespeare had his own somewhat subversive take about passion, and we do not need scholars to remind us about Othello, or that Romeo and Juliet were victims of "a smoke raised with the fume of sighs". I go to lie down awhile, fearing my stability is loosening, my lone submission finished, of which there used to be so many more.

Soirées à Marcel

"There are people who should die." Rose might be discussing the price of milk. "Americans have a hard time with that, because they think everyone who is bad got broken somehow and someone else is at fault."
                   --Timothy Hailinan, A Nail Through the Heart, kindle edition, location 672

Michelle Obama, Contravened?

According to EJ Dionne and Joe Biden, Michelle Obama scored with her personal narrative, and indeed, if you pay any attention to the upscale pundits, the First Ladies should run the damn presidency, and sometimes have. My problem with the Obamas is not their potential, nor the hope they generated in 2008 as a political couple. The issue that sticks in my throat is nothing happened. Where did the change we can believe in go? It vanished into TARP, into Timothy Geithner's stress tests, or into derivatives and credit default swaps, mysterious financial tricks that make me feel my IQ is near parity to the imbeciles among whom I live, and no, I am not being kind, to the same degree that Philadelphia has more than once nearly taken my life, I am entitled to causticity. Today I thought I'd give you another reason for that.

When I first returned to a full urban life, now defeated I suppose, I had a neighbor, Levora, who lived to my right, and the good Sisters, recognizing my intellect, wanted me to mentor the girl, motivate her to finish study for her GED. Problem was, Levora had Huntington's complicated by the fact that Levora was not Olivia Wilde playing a bisexual doctor who did not yet have full blown symptoms. Levora was the real thing. Levora had it early, a gangly athletic girl with google eyes and a large smile who broke down and cried to me, "It's too hard!" Levora and her brother fucked like bunnies, passing on this condition to their children, and I have to live with the memories of the disgusting physical dissipation of this family in the inner city, live with the memory of her dying seven years later at Inglis House, another black woman in scrubs rubbing Levora's reptilian neck with ice chips. Linda, who was then not what she would become, the Linda who isn't so much stronger than I am, only and simply more capable of destruction, said, "Don't feel guilty."

Someone should. Levora is forgotten by all but any survivors, a living shame, a scandal under any model we'd like to use. The ideological left is back to whining about the fact that the disabled want to work. and the ideological left is tone deaf. Abilities need to be recognized as well as limitations, but again, this is another case of liberalism run amok. I think it is a horrible thing to give birth knowing you've passed on a death sentence in so many years; it is also a horrible thing that in trying to imitate those who told me I was normal, that I have been punished repeatedly for aspiring to live a rich aesthetic existence.

The Nature of Malice

My neighbor, of whom I shall after this mention nevermore, and perhaps unwisely educated on how to find my posts, expressed the same concerns a virtual plethora of others have in relation to my lack of reticence online, and today I am going to address this directly. Confessional writing, as a utility, can signify weakness and strength, simultaneously, and to the extent I have deployed it I have done so for the following reasons:

1. As it relates to the independent living and community integration model, I was betrayed in a legally actionable fashion on more than one occasion, and at the time wherein I had a window to litigate, I was not strong enough to act, partly out of my own guilt, however applicable it was in the commission of the harm, and though I am taking action in contemporary terms, I shall never see the resolution I deserved. I may be weak and in pain and fully conscious of failed potential, but realist enough to know that justice does not change the world one case at a time. Testament might, even if I do not live to see it, and I will state emphatically that Linda C Dezenski deserves to be punished. The only legal avenue I have to see that through is to force her resignation. I have revealed a great deal about Liberty and public housing, but I have not revealed everything, and for the disabled community that does not like it, that is fine. Blogger can close my account if enough of you complain, so feel free, but I refuse to stay silenced.

2. As to the absence or the intention of malice, well, determinations such as that are trickier, but as to my actual sentiments, yes, I feel malice toward those who have victimized me, and named those individuals, but my attention to detail, to personal recollection, is mainly to make a point, or to have an outlet. I have written very simply that *I hate* Cassie and Jimmi, but in translation, that means I find their methods deplorable, and feel frustrated that I cannot get away from Mr. Shrode and his partner; nothing would make me happier than making a healthier change in location.

Ed countered my poisonous cynicism by evoking the corporate ruling that residents can no longer congregate in the lobby, to feed the malicious gossip that is an everyday preoccupation of the ignorant. Regardless of what this does to the constitutional right of assembly, this is hardly the triumph of Enlightenment era evolutions about liberty, is it?

If you feel that I cannot be trusted, that is your perogative; none of you need to pay me the slightest attention.

A Note on Duncan's Myocardial Infarction

Serves him right for perpetuating infantile stereotypes, as his life was apparently darker than the signature role that cemented his celebrity. I hate The Green Mile and will always hate it. Just because Stephen King taps into white paternalism to make blacks seem like overgrown children and it becomes a popular guilt trip, doesn't mean it should be a daily staple of the American diet. I am not a huge fan of Grisham's legal pot boilers either, but A Time to Kill gets significantly closer to the truth. I touched on these issues lightly in 2011, and I am still tapping egg shells here, but when I am able to take the time I intend to do more than pelt car windows with yolk.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should mention the one episode of Finder I viewed, and though recognized as a send up on procedurals, found intolerable; it is interesting to note, however, the tokenism transposition, with the white actors operating within black strata. This is nothing new in television after the apex of the civil rights movement. From the little I saw, Duncan brought nothing to the table. I will concede that King's allegorical pastel, in the film, was heightened, larger than life.

In "The Finder," apparently no one was home.

Offline

I believe foster kitty disconnected my telephone Friday evening, gnawing the wire. This has created a host of difficulties for me over the holiday weekend, created an atmosphere of jeopardy, while yet another eccentric Catholic schoolboy film airs, Bruno. Seen one and the plot creates twenty derivatives; morbid obesity a possible exception.

Clint in Ellison's Invisible Ink

Philip K. Dick long ago predicted the cosmetic nature of democratic choice in a story about robots created to simulate human politicians, where an older prototype is operated by a short black man who pauses out of exhaustion and asks for a beer, and in many senses, Obama is still this figure, uneasy in his own identity, neither black enough in the civil rights sense, and not quite accepted by white America on its own cultural terms. What Romney shares with Barack is that same invisibility, and though Gwen Ifill was not entirely off when she remarked that Eastwood's speech evokes Ellison's famous opening, she gives the country too much credit for being able to pick up the allusion, and I am doing my best to tune out national politics on either end. My sentiments about actors and the two party system seem only to be confirmed. The best the Democrats can do is offer me compliance with a regulatory system that is brutal in its own right, and the Republicans have nothing to say to me as a disabled woman who believes in success through hard work, and wants her own autonomy, inclusive of more fluid mobility options.

The disabled community views Eastwood as an enemy, and indeed, John Hockenberry shredded the former mayor for his objections to the ADA with a better effectiveness than anything I have at my disposal, but my view is more nuanced. Million Dollar Baby was about escaping bleak entrapments, not killing the crippled. Neither the right, nor the left, seem to realize that the American conception of individual liberty is virtually paralyzed.

Fabulous Terrors

It is curious that I am an acolyte of Doris Lessing on the basis of such slight familiarity as I have with her work. My first exposure, initiated by Jerry, motivated for me by sex as much as intellectual inquiry, was The Memoirs of a Survivor, and I suspect this title will remain a favorite, despite my intense desire to consume her speculative material, which one assumes is more comfortably categorized as science fiction. I will reread Memoirs as long as I live, but had a quite serious battle with an anxiety attack when I attempted this in the weeks following September 11th, and tossed the poor abused and yellowed and aged paperback against the back wall, which forms a slight alcove. This is the area in which I fell and nearly died after returning to this unit after the renovations, because it was a freak accident that wedged me, left me unable to free myself. The aging text survived the toss, has survived Jerry's class, as Jerry and I and indeed Ms. Lessing still survive, and in the study of this work I learned about Ms. Lessing's life and its possible savagery that imprinted on her so that she became the woman who blithely scares the living shit out of the rest of us.

I have been diffident about reading *everything,* as I am not sure it is necessary, nor do I want to quarrel with her legacy, as I can envision an argument with her middle brow and middle aged women, and their grounded, pragmatic objections, but I will hopefully read more, unless I wind up shivved in a homeless shelter due to my conflicts with public housing, an appropriate caution under which to mention that next came The Good Terrorist, then The Cleft. And then The Fifth Child came online and I chortled in glee, as I proudly assert that I want to read this "before." Before what? Before I became too influenced by "the best Shakespearean on the east coast." Which is now the Gulf coast I suppose (and maybe no longer the best?), but who am I to judge that, and I am sure less than one percent of you are following my obscure train of thought. Spell it out spastic? I am not in the mood today, as I am angry to that which my ambition finds itself sacrificed because I invest too much emotionally.

I read The Fifth Child in little more than two sittings, and felt that terror gnaw at me in my stomach, like Linda Blair's fuck buddy. I did mention to you in the past that I was courted as an extra for this franchise, did I not? But Lessing at her best is more terrifying than The Exorcist, and that is because of how she sees what she sees, and the sensibility, in the smartly educated, that she is right, and those of us that know it cannot warn the rest of you urgently enough to wake up, be more on your guard, and less self interested in the bloody conquest of your kitchen appliances over foodstuffs, your domesticated insistence on status culture; we're all going to hell one way or another, but we could slow that down, all of us, if we pay attention, if we listen, if we learn that the right choices are never easy. The Fifth Child enthralls, but for a student of Jerry's, disappoints. Reviewers who were baffled by the novel did not dwell on its family resemblance to Memoirs, with which it shares a great deal, though it is more localized to the dynamic and the schisms within the Lovatt family.

I do not know how Lessing mastered what her ambiguity portends. I can achieve the comparable in my poetry, and have, in my best work, but I could never do the same in prose, not with her force, a real mistress of horror, and I bestow that phrase as a crowning achievement, excelled by no other.