Segnatto Esatto

Who are you and what makes you so important?-- Twitter user frog contessa, whom I answered tersely

I have to confess, despite the fact that social media is increasingly passe, even for me, the nativity of plebeians like the above contessa still has the capacity to throw one's ego off the mount. I am important simply because I tweet back to Speaker Ryan?
 

Three years ago, we began a great journey to set our nation on a better path. Now, my season of service is coming to a close. Tune in live soon for my Farewell Address as Speaker of the House: https://t.co/RrNzrxPmYU

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) December 19, 2018

As a disabled, disenfranchised American, I am entitled to my ambivalent sympathies for the 54th Speaker of the House. He wasn't always mercilessly excoriated in the press by those of Canadian Jewish ancestry, like David Frum, but when the deputy prime minister of Italy ferrets out and follows your account, it is best to run your research fast and furiously and pay appropriate homage to the man in his native tongue. I knew Matteo was right wing, like Beppe, who isn't as right wing as English media would have the five star movement in the homeland appear, but when it comes to the political power Salvini holds, the spastic dowager dropped the ball, and aspirates:

 

"Se uccide i cristiani è nostro fratello". Queste le parole di odio del 20enne somalo arrestato per terrorismo internazionale. E voleva mettere "bombe in tutte le Chiese d'Italia". GALERA ed ESPULSIONE, via dal nostro Paese questa gente. VIA! https://t.co/8hCp35z8WV

— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) December 18, 2018

Augh!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A stiletto through the heart! 

Matteo, questa donna rotta vuole morire e baciare i ciottoli a Roma per favore! I cannot very well excoriate the man for follow and drop behavior which I'd otherwise normally deplore. When I calm down and renew my grammar studies with vigor I will *speak* to him, but yes, the Deputy Prime Minister of my homeland, the blood of Roma in my veins, followed me, for three days! Who isn't the Empress of Italy under these transcendent hues of a cathedral's stained glass?

The Strange Psychology of Admiration

I just did Ms. Phillips a favor in microcosm and purchased her debut collection, which I read, in Wolfgram Memorial Library, some odd thirty three years ago, in 1982. Read yes, but cannot remember the slightest thing about it, because of my young vibrating brain fumes. Of all Phillips work, I believe I responded to Black Tickets best, but if I can be unkind about my brain damage and overzealous emotional longing, I can stick a few pins in feminine literary endeavor which has its moment in the sun and then becomes more of a routine expectation. Much like Lorrie Moore, with whom I only have passing familiarity as a reader, Jayne Anne never quite sealed the deal with her modern overlay on the South's agrarian argument with the cosmopolitan North, and I harbor the vague idea that I was referred to her work because of the effective shock value of her plot points about body betrayal-- one of her stories where this is accessible and easy to grasp is "Home", an anthologized piece about a dying grandmother and the battle with "smell". The bonny instructor is less confrontational about fecal matter than I am in my posts, but "Home" is brave, honest, nicely balanced between burgeoning youth and the struggle with age over death.

Why the bottom fell out for Phillips after that is anyone's guess. Writing is a lousy way to make a living. Machine Dreams, her novel, has some interesting tropes, but those figures of speech weren't enough to sustain the book, and like many short story authors, she falters in long form, and Fast Lanes, which I now read at Paley, alone and unhappy, did not seem to sharpen the perspectives of her voice. Why then I cut her portrait photo out of P&W, taping it on my door in Diamond Park, and wrote her publisher a frothy enthusiastic letter, and then my more dangerous poem, "fortissimo" published in Metis, a tribute, yes, but it was also something else, a form of sexual imitation so that I could get laid the way I imagined Jayne Anne herself presenting her body to men as something to be feasted. Heady stuff, eh?

Yes, but both Jayne Anne and I will soon be passing the torch, and to those who will listen, although you'll have to learn this for yourselves: it is okay to get "blown away," by a writer who touches on your affinity, but this doesn't mean they aren't ambivalent about hero worship, that they aren't flawed people too who have to have practiced shields with students, and they will not necessarily offer you the friendship you think you don't have.

I don't think I asked her if she ever got the letter. It was foolish in any case; the poem, however, will be in my book, with her work more evenly adjudicated.

Weaves

The Slap is an interesting illustration of what creative writers have been doing for years; a closure on a nearly thirty year gap. I only caught last evening's episode by remote flicking accident, a rarity, but I'll have to catch up, with bodies not so perfect, children not so cardboard. We've come a long way, but of course, what makes it intelligent, like the Germanic Crime Scene Cleaner, is we're beginning to learn veracity is complex, not so one dimensional, and that there is virtually no difference between Grecian and Roman methodology, except in stratification by social status, and well, Italians have the charmed corruption of the worst inferiority complex 1000 years of history can bench press on an ethnicity.

I have to rouse myself now, reluctantly, eat, wash, spend my entire damn day hauling my pet supplies; it is the price of stiff necked obstinancy which will eventually crash on my warped skull. Sulk. 

Thick Around The Middle

Nothing is ever so simple, at least until it has to be, in terms of survival outcomes, domestication may mitigate impairment and crippled limbs, but only to a degree, as maintenance drives everyone insane or to the subversion of parody, look at Hawking, for instance, the egg shell celebrity who grinds up managed care for breakfast, whose allegations of abuse surface in the ruthless Fleet Street maw and then burrow beneath the surface, I had forgotten that Claiborne, in its contextual unraveling, opens with an assisted suicide plea, and is the best adaptation of any work by Stephen King, because its heightened dramatic impact pulls few party tricks-- yet, I'm not partial to reliving the movement of the film, at least, not in any present tense, but Vera's death points to the ripple effect of suffering and ethics, which, in the universal scheme, is irrelevant. Perhaps bipedal species have come and gone before numerous times within space, and hard choices remain what they are. One can resign oneself to ejection from senior living facility into an institutional paradigm, like Inglis House, which I should be able to describe, but find it difficult to do so, like any nursing home, it is all linoleum, overwhelmed by tubes, urine caches, invalids in various stages of deterioration, or, like me, vulnerable to crisis but too stable and strong to die. It is worse than the home my father placed in, Inglis. Dead mother thought I'd be happy there, in this facility overrun by power chairs with worn tires, the odor of piss and bed pans overwhelming. I'd rather be dead, but in indigence, have little choice. As I decline, I can be maintained, bedridden, by welfare labor, go to Inglis to go raving mad, or be proactive like terminal citizens in Oregon, stop drinking coffee, stop worrying about my battle of wills with the officious black women who at present have so much control over my destiny, and make an effort to go food shopping. I have lived on the point of this sword since I was 34 years old, pissing myself with stress for a lower middle class income of roughly 25k a year until the pressure of my brother's death unraveled my ability to handle the fieldwork by bus, and then I made 3000 USD freelancing basically shit, and now I am a recalcitrant penny aggregater.

Your choices may be more optimal, or unexpected, as in I could die of hypertension in a matter of weeks due to my raving mania to flee my current environment, with absolutely no place to go. In a party trick of my own, I could visit the Italian consulate move a mountain, go across the the Atlantic, and die with Roman rats and sewage, mumbling a few native phrases, maybe running into some of our peasant family with our mariner surname. Would I be really any happier, naive in Old World dust, at the mercy of modern bravoes?

Indemnity Double Down

"She's made her face chalk white, with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks."-- James M. Cain, Double Indemnity, page 114

Vivien Leigh was dying while engaged in her ensemble performance on Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. It is an excruciating scene to view, her climatic moment with Lee Marvin, a real life alcoholic, standing in for Olivier, in a prospective rape that reverses expectations. A woman has to be insane to survive the force of male need, in other words. The people who control Porter's copyright ought to make Ship of Fools available to digital technology. I want to read it, but I am not keen on buying it it as a heavy handed siren against the Fascism Europe would not see in front of its face. Katherine was ponderous as a writer, and while this is not a fatal detraction to her other strengths, I hesitate to rank her long complex allegory as a classic. The film is so thick with portents you need a butcher's saw to cut through it, and my time is squeezed between knowing free legal access is going to dance jack shit on my burial plot and buying an hour of Philadelphia Bar association time is going to get me the reprimand that I've seen too many legal students overzealous in battle in a Grisham movie script-- but legal students are overzealous-- one asked me if I wanted to sue my sister and I had to refrain from snorting.

I know I've delayed the game considerably. I am not that dense, but somehow I cannot die without striking back, and there has to be some exemption in PA state law-- something a well versed advocate can do. I may just give in to the possession is nine tenths catch phrase and buy a damn used copy. Or does it matter to me enough to take a drive to Vine Street?

@PhillyChitChat did a nice feature about billy penn. I could just tweet this to him, but Philadelphia's hard muscled depreciation of inadequacy because NYC is the top east coast target has never sat easily on my native digestion. I wake up knowing I'm probably going to die right here, and worse yet, if I cannot move hell, I'll die with molasses matron Debra Horne making her crabbed Mississippi sanction over my blood red contorted grimace. I do plan to pay a visit to Philadelphia Magazine. Can't wait. If anyone on their staff has viewed this account, I am toast, but I do intend to do it. Whatever my nightmares, I do not usually dream of earthquakes that aren't actually happening.

I did last week. Maybe it was just the memory of the plate aftershock a few years ago; maybe that and the damn train, but it is not a good sign.

Double Indemnity is a perfect example of where movies and texts fail each other, if I want to add an afterthought. Cain's ending in his novel is preposterous, yet significantly different in tenor from how MacMurray and Stanwyck doom each other.via the studio system.

Pinata Reel Change

I am really not much better for my herring and succotash, hands shaking, hypertension swirling in circulation, feeling it behind my eyes. First she is in physical agony from her hip, father's sister, and when I ask what I can do, not meaning a damn word, she wants to hire Tim. Marie seems far more sold on Tim's insolence than I, and his rebuff, when I telephone him to query, "You know I'm here eleven to seven," indignant that I pitch extracurricular activity between the two of them, Italian crone and African road runner, and then "Call me back, it is urgent." She wants to be my long long long long sick uncle's attendant now, and there is one for independent living, Uncle Joseph, the Marinelli spit ball from my days as a child, my father's favorite pinata joke that my Roman Grandmother kept Quiet. I and my fourth cousin were the family spaz'es, and my youngest uncle was the off turd. Sometimes I wonder what Lillian the belle brought over from the old country. The fault more accurately resides with the patriarchal sperm of brow beaten grandfathers who died young. At least I tried to live a life, struggled to have victories and pride, vanquished now. Joe never did. Sat in his chair, sullen, anti-social. This distant fourth cousin, Richard, is a faithful ADAPT activist, marching to the orders of Cassie James Holdsworth and I, well, you hear the scathing acid of my disillusion, the hard erosion into the pathology of a broken imagination, hollowed demonic interior seething poison, or maybe you don't. I would like to email my first cousin, also Richard, a contractual release on his mother, then fly to Roma so riot policia can pock mark my ass with bird pellets, but of course I will instruct the old woman on what she needs to do, involuntary tremors jerking my shoulder blades. Call it a night.