Insidious Possession

Satan's three faces are a grotesque counterversion of the three Persons of the Trinity.
--Allen Mandelbaum, note to Canto 34, Inferno


All western countries make bad television series better than the America that gave the world the technology for television, gave the world the technology that makes some of us diffident about the digital age, in fact, not that this is not good. I labored and starved and threw my impassioned energies into the small presses for years, which, just outside of the relative security of small presses in academia, was a small club of loons, alcoholics, mental cases, and hippies reading out of notebooks. By the eighties, nearto the death of Bukowski, a man with whom I have published, and disdain, beatniks were already an anachronism, much like my mentor's late life poetry readings. Listening to his aging YouTube voice, I allowed Jerry too huge an imprint on my life, but am yet able to step out of the narrative, and observe that his pathway ossified, even as mine has stalled, and dwindling into sterility. Where his ambition has settled disappoints me, and my own, we have been over that, my weakened frame hanging in the balance. How we allegorize evil in contemporary tropes has been much more dynamic. My accidental viewing of the Roboticist episode of The Collector reinforces this sensibility. Here Lucifer seems to be an ironic moral arbiter. In a show like Supernatural, he is an angry existentialist. What did he represent to Polanski in Rosemary's Baby? Polanski's genius takes us closer to the truth about the banality of moral corrosion, and most other commercial films do a terribly bad job of actualizing horror to make us take a step back and take measure of the autonomic amoralism we're hurling ourselves through. If I am an atheist, I am one who carries a huge Roman, Catholic chip, at least when I am not looking at the murdered mice of my pets.

I was going to deconstruct the episode in this post, before I spent three hours uploading this blog for Amazon kindle, but let me also step back, since this insipid Canadian production triggered the links between evil and acquisition, a steady diet in which Henry James luxuriated and Fowles updated. The Fowles novel is on my wish list, but I am cool to it at present, over taxed, to the point that I foreshadow what we know now about Obama's mandate. He did not need me. I was busy leaking urine on my poor ancient history hard copy reference guide, stressed, apoplectic that I still do not know how to find the print screen key to take screen shots when I need them. How long have I been online now? Would you like to guess?