Anglo Habitation: Black Judaism

"Who cares what model the weapon is?" -- Leon Wieselter

I did not mind Roth's specificity over Simon Axler's shotgun in The Humbling. This is not to dispute Leon's churning efforts at literary distillation. I am a failed woman with birth brain damage we classify as cerebral palsy, but do the same thing Leon does, think in the hues of comparative terms, and I do not understand the American Jewish Left's argument with itself. Not for lack of trying, or not so much trying as exposure--perhaps too much of it-- inclusive of the particularly Jewish obsession with Henry James-- where the fuck does that come from? I often ask. How did Jewish academic culture appropriate a fairly affluent but rather fucked up and somewhat not well educated Anglo-Irish snobbish old fart who could never make up his mind and had a great deal of enmity toward American Jewry, as he saw it, in the late Victorian era? My belonging or enmity or both belonging and enmity with the academics surrounding those of us obsessed with the Master is trumped up. I know it. I am neither friend nor foe to Greg Zacharias, and my speculation about his use of anti-depressants exposes me for what I am: a silly cripple who isn't trying hard enough. I wrote to a more accommodating member of this sometimes queer community that I was writing an essay on Lampedusa "for myself," implying that if I ripped my fucking soul apart over James that it was out of obligation to the dead who aren't even necessarily my dead.

I liked Roth's faulty little book, more than Wieselter's nearly overweening deconstruction of it. The Humbling is a satirical take on the pernicious influence of Jewish culture in the arts and the American entertainment industry, and reiterates what Roth achieves with The Human Stain. Hopkins was miscast to play a high yellow masquerading as a Jew who is murdered by Richard Harris in Anti-Semitic mode. This whets my curiosity over the genius of Philip Roth. I also did not read hostility to homosexuality in Pegeen's boomerang relationships. I read a send up of Jewish mothers, of infantile narcissism, an encapsulation of the customer review I may write for Amazon in a concomitant act of phlegm melt and decomposition. Green dildo in a harness?

I think not, but if you like Roth, his send up of the psychiatric modality, one I lived with my mother's continuous hospitalizations, points to my lack of belief in counseling therapy. Not that ableism can't kill me at any time.