Fish, Chips, Tuberculous Hip

"Al Pacino was successful playing Richard the Third because he understood the nature of power." --Jerry McGuire, approximately

In the annals of local color, politics can still provide fonts of amusement, the representatives and constituents colliding like asteroids in the void. I am watching the auteur of the effeminate reconstructions implode Truman Capote, so I am typing slowly, still a student when I viewed his last television appearance--the actual person-- in 1984, obviously in the grip of alcoholic dementia, as is not quite the case with  Dick Cavett. We applaud Hoffman for his talent, and that seared underbelly he captures in relation to the wicked under bite of the homosexual male, one which provides theorists with their relentless apologias, yet if I assert how punishing LGBT interactions have been for me as a disabled woman trying to do the right thing on progressive rails, getting damaged, that is all of freak flag reactionism. In the end, it's all about the scaffold, how we build our towers. Weeping old woman, political aides. If I really do launch myself as a crusader in this twilight of my life, what will it amount to? Cripples will still sit discarded in lobbies, victims created on finer and finer threads of discrimination. Monogamy will still find its way into curiosity shops

Comfort food. Herring, hash browns, diced onion, oysters, olive oil. It took me two days to convince myself to prepare my favorite entree, to swallow my 1200 milligrams of salmon over it, and now I need my shower, to go buy tins of ground offal for my substitute feline children. The condition of my edition of To The Lighthouse is worse than the sweat of indifferent hygiene, however, a problem which seems to plague Jon Avnet's direction of 88 Minutes. The narrative is a world weary affect of an old man who pissed off his brand due to economic necessity. My heart still throbs when I look at Al Pacino on camera, but if you'd like me to strum it simply, I could kick him for being a mule. The opening rape scene is an exercise in graphic lack of tact, Pacino seems to wander around on location waiting for Hades to make up his mind about where the famous Italiano will spend eternity, and yet there is a sleazy subtext that someone like me recognizes, all the triggers that go off in superlative fucking of the mentor, or maintaining chastity in the sexual tension. I grew up with Mario Puzo. But his dramatic conceits which ossified the Sicilian stereotype was a love letter. Al seems determined to make us regret those dried petals in the scrap book, with that ridiculous bouffant. McDonough's first instincts to give up on acting were the correct ones.

I am beginning to learn that no one really knows what they're doing, and thus the exposure of the reporter will always be valid. I intend to keep going; if Google wants to shut me down when I hit hard, that is up to them. It is their service. I may obfuscate my agenda from time to time, but I do believe in my conviction that if I fight back, the next spastic may be spared the wicked corruption and trauma to which I have been subjected. Raising my voice has risks.

I am taking them.

On Notice

Even Google is confused about their account services. They sent what I presume was a mass mail saying adult content monetization is prohibited. I am always screwed, one way or another. I signed onto  LiveJournal because I was late to trying my hand at web logs, and I found LJ to be a poor resource site; again, and I suppose, with misguided enthusiasm, I paid into the Adsense application anyway, believing in my own skill. I paid in 38 dollars. Then LJ's Slavic contingent balked; the community stopped supporting the app. I came here, still with no idea how to link Adsense to my particular Blogger code, and now I am being hounded about porn, which in my first post, I conveyed I don't utilize.

I have no ads. I have no support, no adviser on creating a website for promotion. All I managed to do was link Blogger to kindle on Amazon, and that without a header. I concede this is not a deliberate conspiracy. The search engine giant doesn't care about spastic's war wounds, but I have not successfully navigated Google's services, should have never gone near LiveJournal, and with all this content I have written, now what?

I have three dollars and change I cannot collect in an AdSense account, three years of posts. Maybe we should all follow Snowden's itinerary. If Google removes my account on Sunday, I don't know where I go from there.

I'm tired of always butting my head, coming back with contusions.

Woolf Harts, Disambiguation

Internalization is a bitch.

Virginia Woolf never really came alive for me in my student days. Beneath a certain level of insularity, I disparaged tragic literary figures like her, or the equally notorious Sylvia Plath. 

Plath, as a dead poet, I refuse to deal with, but Woolf is now a vibrant living voice, beating inside of my own shriveled half century, and I am not sure if I should be alarmed, or if it is merely the power of Michael Cunningham through the translation of the film. If the voice of James Joyce rouses rebellion against what that voice represents, Woolf is a consolation of minute interior motion and impression, despite the fact that I am not partial to Orlando (and yes, I still feel calling this satire a transgendered or bisexual experiment literalizes the text too easily, and no, I am not secretly tormented about the masochistic thrill of sucking my former supervisor's cherry, if that is blunt enough for you; when I turned to her and pulled on her to return to the center I was facing imminent disaster, and instead of attuning herself to this she treated me like a personal cyber toy), and I find solace in Woolf's social milieu, an ephemeral comfort perhaps, as I certainly would not relish the sensation of feeling my capillaries burst through water pressure after weighing down an overcoat.

We are losing that sense of social intelligence Woolf invariably emanates, still vestigially Victorian in many respects, vestigially Jamesian.

I stopped off in twitter last evening and noticed Ann Tran posted a link about judging people. It made me smile, though I did not follow the link, sitting here ripping my guts out, as I so often do, though I know such diets are in decline. Look, I want you to understand something: I understand the benefit of letting go, but I am surrounded by the casualties of my matriculated career ambitions on a daily basis here at Riverside Presbyterian. Former clients, aging and dying activists who I hate because if they can't work then they also don't seem to know what they want except to march in a kind of simulated protest of disobedience, while my ex-fiance lies in his bed below me and watches television, making an event out of it when he is lifted into his chair to go pay his bills once a month.

What kind of existence is this? If I make a serious attempt to return to full time employment again, and fail, again, it will kill me, but trying to be positive because I live in section 202 senior public housing that is a grade above an institutional environment, one that irrevocably scarred me as a young girl, as an adolescent, this is very difficult. Give me compassionate capitalism, an empathetic roommate or two, a more humane interior like the home with my family I used to have while I still have a mind to appreciate it. We need less adherence to regulated process, and more sense of interpersonal community conscience. I need a new milieu, less cruelty hiding behind the guise of case management methodology.  

Alpha Female

let not
us that are squires of the night's body be called
thieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's
foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the
moon; and let men say we be men of good government,
being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and
chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal. Falstaff, H4P1

I just sent a query to an editor who doesn't like them, to be positively droll after my wee morning sausage toast. I know better, of course, than to violate guidelines, but assumed the standard query with clips applied without scrolling down all the way, which is why I'll never be Ruth Gordon, can't be Gwen Ifill, and don't want to be either of them, but this idea is not a piece I am willing to commit to without approval. You can laugh, at and with me.

I have failed more than succeeded in the news business, but it is not that. My hatred of Liberty and its sister 50 state wide models gives these centers more primacy than deserved, analogous to Dacy's Graham seeing the light due to Hannibal's excessive scheming. I am ashamed of the fact that I allowed Linda to push me over the edge, that I facilitated her ability to abuse my trust 50 ways through a dead end maze. I want to see her suffer, to hear her bones snap, not because she terminates the employment of vulnerable subordinates, but because she deliberately humiliates and openly condones criminal conduct, and has gotten away with doing it since she became Vice President. She has a Masters degree in Social Policy and Law, was touted as the center's mouthpiece, but god forbid that Liberty holds her accountable for nearly driving me to commit suicide. I am never going to get past this. They hire the diseased and impaired, and even the pre-die off from dialysis, then dump them like a milling herd of lambs doomed to slaughter, but Linda Dezenski will no doubt  expire as chief operating officer, and Liberty will embalm her, a waxed Lenin in the lobby, after she accused me of wanting to sleep with her, as if I was the one who brought up her orgasm quotient. She forgot that my hamstrings were cut, forgot all about her "recognition of the personal bond between us," forgot she wished she had been kinder.

People have been fired, even hurt, for less than what she did to me, and I have already written about what my life has been like in the last fourteen years, in comparison to her ruthlessly maintained security and appearances, the empowered ice princess. It simply isn't fair, what I have had to suffer in this city's environs, in a pattern of sustained cruelty, ineptitude, and she gets off every day, fifteen minutes away from me, with her pension secure, decent health benefits. Aaron Eckhart certainly offered his fans a lesson in the truth about these prevaricating figurines, but that was a film. There the victim of a ruthless manipulation rearranged the entrapments that held her in place without any visible consequences to her character.

Where I am at, in this point and time, I probably can't survive leaving the influence of the center's circumference without further duress which might prove to be otherwise irreparable. How high is the price for the murderer in you?

Wolf bane Intrigue

Al Qaeda planned attacks years in advance, inserted sleeper cells, did reconnaissance. They took the long view, believing that their struggle would take decades, perhaps generations. -- Richard A Clarke, page 227

I cannot recall all of Clarke's testimony before Congress after 9/11, but I remember his demeanor, how it had a manichean aspect. He was very briefly a real American policy maverick, and his policy wonkish book was the first of its kind for me. I purchased the hardback seeking reassurance after the terrorist attack, and finished Against All Enemies in the hospital before my graft surgery, a period during which I often wept conspicuously, and the ward nurse guilt tripped mio padre and immediate family members into paying me a visit. I wanted to go home, then, as now, I want to go home. Mother's side of the familial would tell you that my longing to restore my sense of place and identity is my fault, and it is; they wanted me to move back in with mother before she dropped dead, so that I could relive all my sexual assaults, and I broke off my wedding engagement just weeks before the non-event, and apparently all I live for now is the fucking blog post, alternately violating my own internal decency and then reigning myself in.

Clarke is a competent assessor, but he wrote nothing I did not already know through my assiduous reading of  the papers, or viewing PBS, reading The Boston Review. Last week I wondered where the title had gotten to, but did not panic over its absence. I may have given it away years ago, perhaps to the little whodonnit bookstore on my Chestnut Street corner. Though faded into the pundit netherworld, Richard Clarke did not have to violate national security to bite back the Bush Administration where it counted and get his point across. Looking at Edward Snowden's actions in this light lends itself to being fearful of young white men's paranoia, despite my own bigoted sizzling, displacement, rage at defeat.

Yet the maw this strange young man opened, if not racist, then at least a wound with a stink about the fact that we have a choc-mix centrist left administration in place, is a complex issue, as well as a perplexing event. Americans have to be be able to trust themselves in order to remain a superpower, and the government has to be hard on such people if it is to be able to function, and yet it bewilders sense, what young men like Bradley Manning (though a rage riddled homosexual) and Snowden have thrown away and forsaken, breaching patriotism in real world terms. Does Edward truly believe he will be able to thrive in Ecuador? 

My alienation from the disability *conspirators* I was once in league with is not so draconian, not quite. I was always a writer first, but the game of spy-craft and the nature of intelligence and national interest is a labyrinth that mirrors psychopathy, the zeal of ideology driven a league too far. Literature and Hollywood have thrived on it since both have been in existence.

In the burrowing for my epigram, however, Clarke's evaluation recalls that I have to be true to my own sense of justice, however beaten I may be, whatever length of time it takes. If I cannot finish my protest missive today, I have to remember that I did get a draft off last year, without realizing that Babette Josephs political career had nearly concluded. Staying abreast of office holders is useful.

Torpor's Aspic, Freelance

"I'm sorry I was such a child about it."-- Mia Farrow

Hannibal is primarily about spectrum disorders, which, to reiterate, is in a subset by itself. Psychopathy, sociopathy, as classifications, have very little to do with disease and chronic conditions that impair mobility, yet both can be disabling, merging into each other. Quadriplegia of any sort can drive people into serious emotional disorders; mental illness can be crippling physically as well as psychologically, and Hugh Dacy gets the Spastic Oscar for portraying Will Graham with such subtly, and the toll these cases take on the sexually attractive child man, another way of voicing my regret that David Slade with his directorial talent was not in my orbit as a high school sweetheart. Not to excoriate the hapless television critic, who has the pressures of space limitation and plebeian diction, but Geoff Berkshire is lazy with his descriptive terms. Will Graham is not crazy. In Bryan Fuller's lexicon, however derivative from Harris, Graham is the true moral center of the series, lacking willful blindness, something that Jack Crawford shares with Hannibal and the other villains in his dragnet.

Fuller and Slade are also gaming the audience with a rather sophisticated casting irony and the allusion to cult classics. A gaming theory that has a language of its own, building on Harris' original creation, moving beyond it, no accident that we are meant to recall the X Files when we see Gillian Anderson's complicity in the allure Mads is able to project as the attenuated cannibal. Like The Following, Hannibal, as a series, is playing a game, at least with those old enough to appreciate Hitchcock's legacy. But what does this gaming signify, with its rich video evolutionary relation? In the regret of lifelong sensual frustration, I should have married a film director. A good one would have looked at my kinked ligaments and hip dislocation as a suspenseful build to climax.

I have been stymied in recent days with my decades old war against case management and its complicity with the zealots from ADAPT. Of course I am a fool, overwhelmed and powerless. I cannot change the system because people like Sherry or the Gladhandler or Joe cannot change themselves, other than to go to DC and roll around in demonstrations for the sake of empowerment, simplistic, retarded, broken bodies, roaring like wounded animals. It is going to take a great deal out of me to force people to respect my narrative, what happened to me.

Cooksey Conveyance, Secondary Submissions

How frozen and how faint I then became,
Ask me not, reader! for I write it not;
Since words would fail to tell thee of my state.
I was not dead nor living.--La Divina Commedia, Canto 34.22-26

Since I do not have the wherewithal to play detective and find the contact information for Jon Cooksey's production company that he runs with his spouse, Ali Marie Matheson, which is less awkward than my full name written long, this is an open post to the couple, for the time being, to advocate for The Collector's return, perhaps as a digital exclusive for Amazon Prime members, even if Chris Kramer isn't available, we could reinvent the wheel. I am not sure if my viewers on Blogger know that I was approached by the casting directors of the Exorcist franchise to play the institutionalized cripple in distress against Linda Blair, but I was, when I lived at Rusk. Decent place, but those same domicile old maidens who field American case management systems like the plague, then as now, prevented me from earning some decent money for college tuition. The evil cripple syndrome is what led Presby, and its hypocritical motherfuckers, to attack me ceaselessly in the 28 years they have been my landlord, so why not take a shot at being Satan? A cold and chilling inanimate Satan, the way Dante Alighieri properly conceived its menace. We could use exacerbations for high brow special effects. What is hell, after all, but a chronic obstruction?

Your original series wasn't perfect. Something about that pinched Canadian mien, care worn, genteel, submissive, leaves your actors at a loss, like the monastery abbot in 1348 A.D. While it may be true you have roughly fifty minutes of air time, you seemingly overlooked the power of the cardinals who burned the damned during the Inquisition. Morgan Pym's keepers did not provide much of a contest against evil. Yet it is equally true your vision was more realistic, bleaker than your American counterparts who also dabble in the genre. Maya was a brave child of incest. This would probably place you in agreement with Jessica Valenti.

Some may not be comfortable viewing women as an oppressed class across the spectrum, and certain issues surrounding domestication, and the stodgy matron upholding propriety, this may undercut how Ms Valenti frames sexism in sociological terms. Then again, I haven't been shy about the price of my survival, which has included homosexual vicissitudes, as well as female on female and minority victimization. And then there's this charming buzz bit. WTF indeed, or is aborting for sex selection more sinister still?

My caustic tongue seems quaint in comparison. This is why we need a revival of your series, and its struggle for a moral center; if I can generate enough interest to bring it out of mothballs give me a buzz. I'd like to recoup on my quashed foray into the industry.

Mewing CBS

"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country." --Senator John McCain, frustrated shepherd

Yes, as I once mocked my grandmother for watching Lawrence Welk, though mocked is too strong a word for a stern and bemused affection for a demented woman trotting with Alzheimer's pony, I too more easily pause as an occasional lackadaisical tourist for reruns in traditional formats. Lest you belittle the unfortunate ungulate, she is a piteous invalid. You, CBS are to blame for airing The Collector  during Superstorm Sandy, thus piquing my interest. I want the series back on Cozi's programming schedule so I can avoid eating my usage; I never saw the last episode and I adamantly insist on my rights as an indigent American to watch the CBC dapple in the supernatural with that deliciously dissuasive Canadian mien, whose actors cannot stage an episode about father daughter incest without the utmost cordiality!

Talk to Cooksey. Make a cripple happy and get the licensing rights back. After all, mine is a conservative intelligence which doesn't dismiss  a few thousand years of Slavic culture owing to oligarch fossil fuel enrichment. 

1348 A.D., Fetishize 2

"I am not going to comment on prosecution."-- Barack Obama

I wonder how well Cooksey knew his Fowles when he conceived his canceled series. I have too much else to do even to borrow the novel of the same title at the moment. None of you bothered to inform me about Terence Stamp and the film. Thank you so very much. Why should I worry about my audience when your timidity belies the necessity of having one? Fowles' irony is not totally lost on me, but I can remember only fragments of The French Lieutenant's Woman, nothing of the alternate endings beyond what the film vaguely calls to mind.

I can see now that Stamp was no doubt cast for the lead in The Mind of Mr. Soames because of The Collector, and some of you may remember my earlier preoccupation with Soames, its analog era thematic structure. Fowles worries something else, and exploits the dark side of acquisition more brutally than Henry James, (in physical aspects) though Fowles is probably equal to Balzac for melodramatic effect.

People seem to worship Ulysses as a matter of civic pride? As much as I love literature, to see a mock epic interior prose poem enshrined in a metropolis that became a backwater about five minutes after the Quakers ceded it to the huddled masses is discomfiting, literally. Once an excellent reader, I fucked up on my five minute passage with Gerty's burlesque so badly I fled the scene of Bloomsday virtually in tears. None of this was an intentional humiliation. I am struggling to keep a grasp on matriculation so wanted to stay involved, and the little museum made an effort to accommodate me, but when Lance offered me an out perhaps I should have retired.

It doesn't really matter when we aren't ready to die, does it? O yes, I will get to a lung center and explore my fucking options, but I'd like to see how you'd feel if you had to depend on slovenly insolent lard asses that make up the paraprofessional class. I hate them. I hate this city. I hate my family. I hate my simpleton ex whose advice is to stay engaged with the Jewish bookseller's enshrined space on Delancey Place.

I don't know that I can; it feels like a tumor, like a lung cancer at a certain stage. I pray for vengeance on their souls. Figure whose souls for yourselves. I pray with all the malevolence I can muster that she will pay for her callousness that has left me in these circumstances. The hate will live beyond my demise; I believe that.

Nubile Antecedents

When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books.-- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, p.14

Michael Apted engages cinematic allusions as well as the dramaturgical in his direction of Nell, and perhaps even some narrative traditions. According to the lucky theater critic, Handley was aware of this in the production of his play, but the film superimposes a diachronic continuum with the history of Grizzly Adams, the short lived Lucan, or Truffaut's rigorous battle as an auteur. What about on set romances that seem to be requisite to belong to the screen actors guild, or Foster's characterization of Nell's rape phobia as a mythological echo, even older than the taunts of demonic possession in The Exorcist?

What I am driving at is my willingness to equivocate on Jodie Foster's public projection of her sexual ambiguity, despite my betrayed disdain and contempt for my fuck wit neighbor. It involves more than her life long navigation from child actor celebrity to contemporaneous diva. As an artist, Ms. Foster seems wary of binary definitions of otherness. Certainly not present in all her roles, it is still an important subtext in many of them, a willingness to evade certain aspects of identity that I can respect.

I could push this post a little further, but we shall return to it, my health permitting. Lithium batteries are an untrustworthy crutch, and my frustration with their flimsy durability is of the sort that makes the ambulatory frightened of me. Tomorrow is an event day. Rare thing.

Snowman Boyce to Snowden

Tense, intriguing, and darkly compelling, The Falcon and the Snowman is a uniquely American story of betrayal. On the face of it, there was nothing to indicate that Andrew Dalton Lee and Christopher James Boyce were anything but two devout Catholic boys growing up in happy, warm families in one of the most affluent suburbs in America, living one version of the American Dream and facing nothing but the best of futures--Lyons Press

Robert Lindsey could assure you with the certitude of his specialization that we have been here before, as it pertains to Edward Snowden. Edward, Bradley Manning, Boyce, they form part of a larger pattern that is a distinct subset in the world of espionage, related, but discernible in motive from the gaming of Ana Montes and Robert Hanssen.

The actions of Snowden, to my nose, are slowly taking on the odor of sour milk; he seems to be a character inside of his own Timothy Hutton morality play, although the NSA's technical capacity and ability is something that I am sure keeps James Fallows awake on his pillow, in addition to this well bred correspondent's other worries.

Some films are distinctions of their auteurs; some films have an educational agenda. The Falcon and the Snowman, in addition to what I have written on it in other posts, is representative, at least through Hutton, of the corrosive effects of delayed ejaculations and rapist rage that ventilates itself in treasonous activities. 

Extraditied Appreciation, Lacunae

The only female foreign minister in the world, Golda Meir was also the only foreign minister who had no use for formalities, who flew tourist class, who shocked hotel staffs by handwashing her own underwear and shining her own shoes, and who entertained foreign dignitaries in her kitchen, in an apron, serving them her homemade pastry along with a stern lecture on Israel’s security.--Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I stabilized my old Quickie on the charger at approximately 4:38 AM Monday morning, flicked through Browning, struggled to drift off. Cats stalked me awake at noon, and the charger was still going. I waited until two and then had to get down to business, washed in desultory fashion, droned to lack of inspiration by my own weakness, why am I doing this if I am already bored?

How can I explain the struggle with palsied muscular contraction to those who are fortunately limber, or under thirty? It takes me 50 to 70 minutes to get stretch slacks on over flaccid toneless shins and flaccid toneless buttocks, heft and pull, heft and pulling, biting my lip in pain, essentially taking me all day to appear at a scheduled and a somewhat laconical event where I was already a known and disruptive element in horridly old sneakers, because I told a staffer of whom I had no clear memory that I would make an effort.

Make an effort indeed. So this is what I hoped would give me connections, a late bid to stay matriculated and advocate for a revival of patronage. Throwing my money around to appease my interior pretensions which do not translate among ambulatory eclectic whites was a failure. I do not belong to this clique, not that anyone would tell me so. I smiled at old women and brayed "I am a failed writer and failed scholar hoping to connect...." Yet dimly, I could see what it must have been like when the upper crust in the city of Philadelphia was less egalitarian.

Egalitarianism is actually somewhat disgusting. "There he is laughing," I observed to the director when young Lance appeared as one might have envisioned Nicholas Nickleby in evening dress. The young and charming Lance kindly got me cheese cubes. I talked about my imbalance couched in a vivacious scatter; he talked about the exhibit, his fellowship. Why am I here? A reverberating outcry not just about the fascinating and oddly a little off world at Delancey Plaza, but how the fuck my life ended up in a very small circumference of a center city grid, my alienation being relieved by compassionate blondes whose grooming makes me feel like vermin, but I could not tell Dana she did not have to obviate my discomfort. I am not so much pointing to lack of inclusion in the activist sense, but about belonging, knowing where you belong, and I guess Aunt Evelyn and cousins Frankie and Robin surfaced to my vocal cords because Evelyn, who is Jewish, would have fit right in with her coif, waddles, her progeny.

And yet, and yet-- something in me finds this little microcosmic preserve of old world caste fascinating and satisfying to the pretensions I harbor. Brilliant and insane?

"Maybe it's both," young Lance suggested in accommodating fashion.

Austrian Perocet

An ordinary matter. Law is law.
Noblemen were exempt, the vulgar thought,
From racking, but, since law thinks otherwise,
I have been put to the rack-- Count Guido Franceshini

Sixsmith, for an avatar, had a persuasive critical ability within the forum community. I do not know if he is still a part of Chris Beasley's rigid, insecure, and unjust virtual authoritarian play land, nor do I know his gender for sure, but he is a gifted critic who I believe respected my faculties as long as I kept my cyber sexual fancies to a minimum, and in one thread he asked me what I thought of Musil's posthumous, inconclusive masterpiece.

What I'd be able to convey to Six, in light of what I've written in Spirometry, is that Musil also deliberately engages in evasion within the massive tome that comprises Ulrich'es adventurous sexual escapades. It took an Austrian soldier to flush out Henry James jibe to Howells about publishing a story on incest, and at nearly two thousand pages, Henry James would have delighted in Musil's prolificacy. The Man Without Qualities is also the first modern novel to feature what we now categorize in the terms of psychopathy, the predator Moosbrugger. Beyond this assessment, I cannot offer more, at present, since I will be rereading, slowly, as I am rereading Broch, slowly, except to add that the gaming of Robert Musil is more accomplished than anything James Joyce indulges through linguistic playfulness. The great modernists lived through or anticipated WW1; perhaps WW2 killed them because they could not prevent it, despite realizing the consequences of European implosion, and why these men of genius could not recognize the rise of Fascism on the continent and try to stop it remains a mystery. Scholars laud Joyce for Leopold Bloom's metamorphosis, but the reductionist and incisive cruelty of Joycean humor makes me recoil, in light of the horror that launched itself upon the world past the publication of Ulysses. Unlike my former transvestite ally, (and whatever you read in this picture, s/he is a crook) I assign blame; it may be a heavy onus to put on a failed Jesuit with his own vulnerabilities couched in grandiloquence, but Joyce knew better, yes, even for circa 1922, and this is what sticks in my throat. Walt Whitman believed Leaves of Grass would prevent the Civil War. What Joycean frolic with Antisemitism  achieves is the laying of a red carpet for a bloodbath. 

This is no reflection on Lance Walhert; he is a competent instructor; neither is this a reflection on the Rosenbach. It was good to get out, good to engage, despite that my intellectual restlessness needs to push further than a paid discussion group, and if you were wise, and entered a profession like engineering for financial security, but always wanted to read Moby Dick, outsourced class structures such as this would satisfy you, as they did Cassie in the what's cooking pic. She is the gamy legged woman I rolled with now and again, a gimp Annie Proulx would have enjoyed subverting.

Marcella Midget Queen Data Mime

I have indicated certain dark sympathies for people like Dorner, and many presume this to be a false alarm amid contradictory bias, but idiots, regardless of their superficial ethic differences, provide undue founts of justified pleasure for my cynicism. The reemergence of NSA data mining confuses me because it was already revealed at the close of the Bush Administration. It is not as if we did not know, regardless of the legal sword hanging over Snowden's head (and he confuses me more).

1. I do not have any faith in this kind of electronic surveillance;
2. It did not stop the Tsarnaev brothers;
3. It will be abused;
4. We need to start thinking about what kind of personal autonomy will remain at the end of this century.

If a minority excavator can kill six people because he was an oppressed drug addict deemed untouchable due to his civil rights (and lax oversight by city regulators) and a two bit industry actress can turn herself into a national security threat out of spite, then I guess we're finished. This center engages in illegal acts against a substantial minority of its staff, its clientele base, and my pain over what it and the activists around it did to me supposedly puts me outside the normal realm because I was not emotionally fit in the time frame the events occurred to go through the rigor of litigation, and the regulators with the power to reign in a bad system with a bad mandate will sit on their asses until the culture vomits out a Benschop or Richardson of its own.

Self interest and its blinding impact, incompetence, and the metrical creation of homogeneous compliance. Rulers of the universe.

Richard Basciano

"A smile opens up the whole body!" Danny Aiello

Local newscasts serve up unethical contractors with the same relish that we dig into a pot roast dinner, and undoubtedly, local journalists will investigate construction bosses with renewed vigilance in light of Basciano's malfeasance. The reasons for the consistent malpractice are probably as long  and drawn out as the history of architecture, the ways in which edifice, monuments, churches and palaces are used, instilling grandeur, making statements about imperial might, material efficiency. Boots on the ground may get reconstructed in historical documentaries, but only the designers are treated with iconic status, whether this is through Charlie Rose, and his desire to educate his audience on design as art, or Peter Greenaway engaged in his curious examinations via cinematography. In the art of negativity, however, it also serves up the disintegration of Italian culture that can never be put back together again, even if there was a good deal of luck involved in the rise, the glory, of the Roman city state.

In one of my unfortunate events when I still utilized Paratransit services regularly, my sexual excitement over a male candy sent my driver into Basciano's local smut forum, closed now, some months prior to the Market Street collapse. I gave a fat no nothing black guy with gristled facial hair a hard on, and to this day, carry that episodic guilt, tuning myself to Kafka's abstract disparities. I might have been raped, or led him to get heavy on another client. Greaseball to jig indictment, hand in hand with long standing Mediterranean ambivalence toward North Africa. In these micro narrative terms, Basciano may be a facsimile, an anti-matter image layered on an already corrosive and provincial retraction (the mafia) of what it is to be a member of the meritocracy, the established figurehead in charge, running things, for appearances sake, while skating the lowest common denominator, because serfs are still expendable. Peasants no longer exist in the modern world. Of course not.

I am still in an exasperated stasis over what I did wrong saving my revisions which apparently vanished on my external drive, retyping because I still lack the steady nerve to open my HP and try to rescue my content. In my new found freedom of repose, sinkhole mattress challenging posture and sleep, dismay over my most influential professor's collection leads me to re-examine why I punished myself so badly over my lack of striving to eclipse him.

I never had certain things that make the arc of life worth living, like the joy of falling into a lover. Franz had many of the same problems as his health would gradually necessitate a disability stipend. I was never partial to his genius, of course, though in moments my prism aligns. 

Spirometry or Cornmeal

"Why we are mired in this virtually unsolvable problem is the reason I wrote this book."-- David Stockman

Paul Krugman's oblique critique of conservative alarm is patently ridiculous. Economics, sciences, humanities, health, physics, literary endeavor, agriculture, demographics, third rate quality controls which have decreased population pressures a billionth of a percent, none of these are divorced from each other. This relates to Ulysses hostilities. As superlative and versatile as Joyce proves to be, and as indebted post modernists of the future are to the man of schizoaffective verisimilitude, James Joyce evades a great deal of responsibility with his "damned masterpiece," to corrupt one of his complaints about his novel, and channel Mads Mikkelsen as a derivative virtuoso. Other authors beholden to the modernist tradition do not evade their responsibility. Hermann Broch. Marcel Proust. John Gardner. Even Laurence Sterne, who is a Joycean pater familias, does not evade responsibility.

I am still in Ithaca, after having made such expenditure as I have, although my aging family made up the difference of my support for the tiny and ensconced Jewish bookseller museum of nomenclature in this provincial urban backwater that fomented the birth of the United States, but now that I am past the guidance of Lance Walhert, who has two names because he was warned to be wary of furious spastic mettle, not that my family consciously decided to underwrite my contribution to the Rosenbach-- I had a birthday, veterinary bills, and mother's side and mio padre write off their guilt. Perhaps I will finish Molly's chapter by Bloomsday, perhaps not, and if you would be happier if I focus on small positives, I like young Althena, who looks like cousin Dana, and the guy with the glasses who listened for five minutes to now significantly ill and angry invalid's tale of misery-- I need to get back to my own concerns, however, before I acquire the scars of lung reduction surgery. The Mayo Clinic chastises that COPD is not the end of the world.

Of course it is for those with ambition and aesthetic desire and livid hatred of brain damage and a body broken with never a chance for its own beauty over indolence. I have had a craving for cheese puffs and in indulging it, breathed better. Breathing now. So why do I not behave and be compliant and script myself on the appropriate steroid combination before a machine takes over for me? I did observe that Amy seemed delightful, didn't I?

The Joyce Glove

It's over, and not to engage in hyperbole out of bounds, but I'd dance in the Salvation Army rumble if I could in sheer relief. I like the Rosenbach, I think, but a live reading group with a curriculum structure was a mistake for me, given my pulmonary distress. The cheerful blonde from the Wednesday group said, strangely, that I was *brilliant* when I complained I could barely remember how to construct a thesis statement. Her name is Amy. Nice woman.

I am ill, dying from my own past tobacco usage, and now the glycerin vapor, perhaps. Chronic bronchitis is not an unbearable metaphysical condition so much as minute suffocation. I cannot hug Jerry goodbye; this saddens me. 

I have traversed that Market Street corner so often, it feels like an augur's ill tempered omen, an encroachment of third world malaise, the sleaze of urban corruption. I do not wish to wind up semi conscious on a respirator. 

After rest we shall return.

Two Corners, Many Shades

I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes:
Through it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and Aves vehement;
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it. --Measure for Measure (1.1.67-72)

Foster's forgettable reticence is interesting. Fathomable? This is something that has preoccupied me for the two and half thankless years I have had a blogging account. She is not merely my contemporary, of course, and would not be the actor she is if her talent did not in some sense speak to the American soul. The pretty tomboy, the man girl who dares to transmute a vibrant sexuality, a fast-paced self-reliance that flows with her wit. I tend to think the media backlash she received over Hinckley was a form of moral castigation otherwise unfair to the woman. Taxi Driver was a Scorsese vehicle thick as thieves with Actors Studio methodology and experimentation that doesn't quite pan. Let me put it this way: I have been socially inappropriate with men in order to get laid, and the end result is I am alone with weak legs and a colon which has a mind of its own. Bickle's disturbed mind just doesn't seem consistent with his action of taking a golden girl to a sex education movie. It is akin to me rolling down to the lobby naked after I had enticed the husband, and that isn't an end game, even for a war veteran who is a wounded lone wolf. I have not approached Foster's publicist yet, and perhaps there is no way I could get around the formulaic industry promotional interview to do something different, and this includes the fact that I do not give a flying fuck what she thinks about Hinckley, an assassin of pretend who is notorious for attempting to murder a B-grade actor who had a chimpanzee side kick, an actor who believed in the blacklist during the tenure of his presidency of the screen actors guild before he was senile in the office currently held by a law student who needs to dismiss our highest federal law enforcement official.

I do not agree with McCain about much, but he is an astute politician enough to know when Principals mortally wound themselves. Did you notice Holder's hand shaking in his recent congressional testimony? I did, but in fairness to the Clintonian, I cannot remember any attorney general who was capable of running the DOJ. Holder's competence has been a steady spear in Barack's side since those giddy post-election days in 09 when he opened his mouth about race relations. He just doesn't embody the command and the ability to administer, to adjudicate terrorism, to hold his officers accountable for mismanaged operations.

Near midnight defecation disaster fortunately avoided, I did consider killing myself during the turn of the century. I am not quite sure what force of will stops me, what belief. Defiance has a great deal to do with it. My mind is focused on my leg strength. The level of pretense surrounding Hinckley's nearly successful attempt almost places us in Chesterton's landscape, now that I focus on it. Young Foster was pretending to be Martin's Lolita; Hinckley was pretending anarchy for the pretend kiddie hooker, and Reagan pretended his mettle had solid foundation. I wrote an essay supporting Reagan over Carter and bumped my GPA up significantly. 

Aeneas in New York

Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms? -- Allen Tate, in response to Archibald MacLeish

Maudlin sentimentality sometimes made me sullen with Manny, from the forum, my Italian bug-a-bear and perhaps last Internet meet and greet contact; he has got one on me: the man was born in Italy, bonhomme! He and I are so much akin in temperament it chafes, and yet we are far removed in circumstance. In the vacant affluent way of Americans, he keeps an optimist tab on me now and again, giving my lonely evening a bit of a bubble, much like Lori chasing my peu Vincento into the kitchen injected some much needed vitality into my afternoon. It reminded me of the false security of my suburban years.

Sometimes I have to give ambulatory whites a free pass, but in the right moment they make me happy, alas.

Decadent Valet

That Wells Fargo has fraudulently processed mortgage documents using a process called robo-signing has been evident for nearly two years, since scandal enveloped the mortgage industry in 2010. That it kept doing it even after the scandal broke has been known for months. --Travis Waldron