Viatica Franchise

"It won't be Amazon." -- Leon Wieseltier

No, it won't be Amazon, nor will it be Google Books, but like Leon in his past, I am always broke and skirting the edge of destitution, and gave my ambulatory younger sister and brother four thousand dollars while Trudy Richardson was threatening me on the telephone in an imitation Oprah Winfrey voice that "I would not be living at Riverside." Four years later I wrote her a letter and said back "as an African American woman who can live where you choose, either evict me or leave me alone," and like magic the black police state flips a pancake: "oh of course you're normal, you're not doing anything wrong..." Landlords really hate litigation, don't they, in the munificence of forced egalitarianism of the pluralistic American landscape? Is digital monopolization of publishing good for the dialogic of ideas, the very cause of authorship? Sure, I can teach myself how to take my work straight from hard drive to a kindle file, and turn (a) blog account into a spam market for my own vanity, but would it pay? I am not part of the establishment in which Leon and Marty Peretz wag their inner Jewish mother at the Beltway because we have 2000 years of Hebraic law on which to draw, nor could I maintain the visibility pressure through which David Brooks secures his affluence by being the voice of Everyman. I hate David Brooks, because I have intellectual parity with him and live on rats corn seed and he gets money for saying on air what McCain believes: That American prestige necessitates involvement in a sectarian schism American citizens know we need no part of. McCain may deserve his own affluence, but Brooks? Brooks is where he is because Buckley chanced to offer him a job. Marianna Torgovnick examines the merger of Italiano Americana with the conceit of Jewish men making good husbands. Had I walked I might have been a variation of her, the feminine Italian intellect lost in the humanities shuffleboard with that *good husband* who, even with that veneer of feminine taming, betrays me in some manner that is displeasing. Ed Berkowitz did not mean to set me up with fringe nut cases; it happened because he could not think to tell me that Zach Tollen was a mental health consumer. If Ed had been able to offer this sacrosanct assessment I would have avoided interacting with a nut case with a not unusual Jungian fixation that more or less is an indication of limitation. I will get past all this, but it tells me I was wrong to single out Mr. Berkowitz, to attempt to bridge a gap, or even to worry about my loyalties to whom, since Ed's partner has epilepsy. If you see me as just another fringe player out of the world of James Leo Herlihy, then that defeats the purpose.