In the facade of diligence, I long ago took notes on Of Human Bondage in my wheelchair friendlier inner city apartment, always meshing disability studies, and what better way than through the harpsichord of W. Somerset Maugham's sexual indifference to women unless they were dying of syphilis. Faggot doctors, with Hollywood's ingenious tapering of Tyrone Power to serve as the face of the lost generation. In fairness, I have no idea what the struggling matinee pony boy knew of Fitzgerald's jazz age, but he was a young child of America's derelict energies between the great wars. Such a damn stupid film. Fake acting, paint by numbers schematic. Despite myself, I also watched Gillian Anderson inhabit Edith Wharton's Lilly Barth. Been some time since I took my LOA of Wharton out of the bookcase my father gave me, and I do not remember Stolz having such a prominent place in the novel. The television adaption shriveled the antisemitism of Wharton's milieu. No surprise. I can't say if it is better to go quickly and thus be enshrined like Power, victim of daddy genetics, or wilt like a run of the mill has been horse's ass, sans David Brenner.
Obviously, if I am unhappy slaving away for Examiner.com then I should ease up and revest my energy into the hope of better pay for other markets. It annoys me. That I remember Brenner at all and felt caught with my pants down, that his obituary was notable enough for no real reason other then the fact that I watched him and can't place any value on his jokes except for the fact that he was a lanky horse who came out of the same urban environment in which my energies are ebbing with every damn bowel transit.
Not fame I ever wanted. Success. The right man. The right version of esteem and self-sufficiency, all down the drain of fear, my own version of Gillian's cry of uselessness in a character where she exudes pretense and middling craft, and yet her Barth, who doesn't want to pay the price of her vanity in relation to her own self worth as a feminine figure worth having, manages to break through in a facsimile of every woman's insecurity. Had I married Frank, it would have amounted to an unspeakable horror. My job as a writer is to convey it, the obscene pot-marked Hispanic skin, his ocher obesity and gout. The big google diabetic eyes, the constant maintenance of his living carcass, just like my last living uncle with his frigging MRSA and Marie's terror of it. Fucking western physicians, and here I am, still striving. Ah. My poor aunt tells me she is a latent carrier. Our wondrous support systems.
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