Folic Acid

Already [t]he film, and not just Louisa’s husband, seems to feel that childbearing is a woman’s paradigmatic work, wheres a man's is to create great art--Nick Davis

I have to go downtown this morning, and thus I am trying to take it easy with sinuses that have been on the flare for three weeks, angry at myself for putting myself back into an informal course curriculum, anger stemming from the fact that I am going to be dead soon and Ulysses is not the detective game I wanted to play; astonished to discover this degree of antipathy in myself toward the text, this is more than the folly of my immersion with Jerry. I really don't like Joyce, and although I am a failure and now too weakened to do much about that, it makes little sense that a great author such as this pisses me off, another detective game in itself.

I do not know if Sheldon Novick is upset with me. I don't know if Jerry is upset with me either, but Jerry is memory, and Sheldon is an accomplished Jamesian who told me I could accept a gift, and wrote, many years ago, "to my friend," and now maybe he regrets the appellation, maybe not. The alliance mattered, perhaps out of a mutually shared sentiment, his being better disciplined, of course, and mine more disruptive, angst ridden, that James was a romantic optimist, of a sort.

If I have lost the association with Sheldon, this is part of the price of intellectual ferocity whose only achievement has been to get my minority landlord wardens to back off, which isn't much (and yes, I slur them, going off like gun powder, but have to remember who outnumbers whom in this city), but I am sorry to lose it just the same. He is a good man whose nature is not one to see psychic hell on earth as a place of fortitude from which to argue.

I used to feel guilty using slurs of a certain kind. Not anymore. Why do I tell you that? Is this symptomatic of mental erosion? Or in part the honesty of my resentment of having to cope with a plethora of black anti-social behaviors, and, unlike some of you, I am trapped, and have not the slightest way out, of not dealing with them again in the future. My brother would not want any of my minority attendants in his home, but day in and day out I have to cope with it, their insolence, unwillingness to keep to an agreed upon schedule, and those are the small annoyances that do not threaten my personal safety. I do not want to die at the hands of black negligence or black violence, but the odds are about as good as Oxbow's that I will fall before one or the other.

I paid attention to the Preakness on NBC sports because it is a world I do not know, with a pageantry beholden to a fictionalized notion of American aristocracy, one that would have eroded even if Lincoln had managed to avert the civil war. I laughed at it, old men with old money running herd animals on race tracks. Will computer simulations one day become horses?