The woman weighs no more than a child. She has a smell. My mother fights it continually; bathing her, changing her sheets, carrying her to the bathroom so the smell can be contained and flushed away. --Jayne Anne Phillips, "Home"
I am not sure why Jerry recommended that I read Phillips. I remember nearly next to nothing about her collection "Black Tickets," but I consumed it as if attempting copulation with the recommendation as a sort of compensation, not being able to abase myself over the penis of the master. I wrote Phillips a poorly expressed letter from the inner city. Why? I wanted to feed off her confidence, imitate her vigorous sexual skills, if possible. I cut her picture out of a Poets & Writers article and published a poem about the fantasy of her competitive literary companionship in Metis, a local Jersey Xerox and staple effort. Admiration, as I have written, can be a dangerous attribute to those with low self-esteem.
Never heard from her, and she doesn't have the sustaining power needed for her novels. Her arc has passed its zenith, but she is at Rutgers, her look suggestive, even conspiratorial, exciting only insofar as if I could reach out and penetrate her shield, then I get to hold onto how Jerry at least enabled me to stay alive. I have weighed it once again, contacting her, in the time it has taken me to write this post, but I haven't read her work in years, and her voice, somewhat ponderous, bowed perhaps by an agrarian weight, has been surpassed; she does represent a sexual charge, not for herself necessarily, but the eroticism is inescapable: "I should have been Jayne Anne Phillips and I am not. I am a broken and pathetic--" a whine a whine. Moth to the flame, but moths are silent, not particularly aggressive and I did not enjoy her later novel Machine Dreams. Again, what is it I would want from her? What could her faded reputation offer me, scarred on so many levels as I am? What could Dr. Phillips heal that Bowie's predation in The Hunger offers in the recognition of insatiable appetite?
When I first saw this film the pace of Bowie's spectacular disintegration made an indelible impact, and offered exactly the kind of dangerous sexual foreplay I have always wanted with a man, one that impinges on the trauma of violation, with the elegance of cool. A local literary instructor, whose name escapes me for the moment, said on Fresh Air that vampirism is the most overused literary conceit. I agree with her, except for where it turns in interesting ways. The Hunger is a precursor to the terror we feel about being consumed, wasted from the inside out by viral flavors of the season: avian influenza, AIDS, ebola, and that wasting, in turn, make us focus on that one sole desire, which is the very damnation of its heat. It still contains something of the romantic in Gothic horror, and the danger of seduction that goes too far, lesbian or otherwise, but it is also a precursor film to the rise of retro-fitted zombie genres, like 28 Days Later, 30 Days of Night.
As a selfish outreach, I regret trying to make a connection with Phillips, but perhaps not the poem which is a preserved scrapbook tribute of a sort, saying, in effect, I wanted to be pretty like you, to have accomplished like you, to share gratifications which you seem to convey are in the realm of your experience. I toyed with viewing the film again on Saturday evening, but senile aunts, spoiled felines mewing, the usual things of poverty in tandem with broken bodies making nothing ever go right.
Bad day, but found an unexpected network opportunity, if a summary skim of my post intensity doesn't kill it.
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