"I think my face is funny," Audrey Hepburn, blue blood trinket
My living scar tissue over little brother ghosts is not all that complicated. Nicholas junior and I enmeshed with each other in an interlocking vehemence borne out of contempt, the shared experience of pain, which, as with most things human, realizes too late the blood bond binding one to the other. When he was dying, baby brother appealed to eldest sister to come to him, and I had no way to drop my caseload to get to him, hence the abandonment I carry, not beyond the realm of some of your experiences. Rick, as the once-and-never future executive father figure, attempted to release me from my albatross with his own mortality tale of a relative left hanging. Didn't work.
With Alexandra, though, my interaction with her was a series of smokescreens worthy of Jamesian contortion, and no, it was not about repressed homo-eroticism, so much as, once again, my need for confidential intimacy, such as that from a child to camp counselor. Our first telephone exchange made me hope for a literary friend. Not that she knew it. Our first meeting sent off strobe emergency lights in my head. I knew she was butch, spinster butch, but would not allow my mind to form the fact that here was an authority from which I shrank due to lesbian overtones. Did I walk away? No. Did I try to get under her skin? Not the way I did with my other larger than life personages, but once a cripple made is an invalid baked in a kiln, and I was disruptive to her reticence, a reticence she insisted upon. She was as closed as I am open, with invidious penetration. She was not Erik, the fucked up shit on a stick. She wasn't Josie Byzek. Alexandra had no apologies to make, yet I wasn't woman enough to close off my sycophant psychology, looking for Dante's Virgil, moral perversion as it might have been. What we saw and appreciated in each other was the weight and scourge of the sin we carried. It gave her a pursed and drawn demeanor, and it has wrought in me, over the years, a terse unpleasantness. If I had been more assured in myself, I would have cut her out of me, like gangrene, and this was the best literary editor I ever had, knotted by deep aesthetic affinity that penetrated the lack of personal closeness. And yes, I hear you. "Fuck this," you mutter, fleeing for the hills, with so much import I place on the thinnest filaments. "Tough shit." That's my response, at least for this morning.
"This is how the legal system works, so you work within it."-- Marlo Thomas
"We have a few steps."-- Good Karma Cafe
Now that I can join Nick Denton in the legal threats department for the deliberate use of an appalling analogy, and possibly join a Temple University professor with whom I studied Faulkner in earning an FBI file, but what can they threaten me with when my landlord utilized the Department of Health and Human services to suggest Inglis House? Regardless of how pretty the Inglis site looks to the eye, it is comparable to a minimum security prison: I may not have been a troubleshooter there for the better part of two decades, but the facility is the equivalent of an equally minimum security insane asylum, and whatever the sin of spiraling hell, I'm not going, and thus have a constant fingertip on my pulse, but even in small things, my engagement with the literary community has been a whirlwind of bravado as heady as crash landing in Tibet: hauling two flights of stairs in Robin's Book Store to read for the enigmatic Grecian lesbian who was Alexandra Grilikhes. Our association, never fully contextualized, was predicated on a degree of willful blindness. I pretended not to heed the homosexual sirens flashing in my Freudian id, and she pretended I wasn't a disruptive jackass who fit right in with University of Pennsylvania's ratified Ivy League sentiments. There was also my brazen five hour train ride to Pittsburgh, in my wee little manual chair. Immortal words to Harry Calhoun when the car opened at the station, "I have to pee!" He has a small penis, such kind observations after a 72 hour holiday of insanity, inclusive of the lovable loathsome Louis McKee. We talked all the time, Lou and I, me turning green after he won a grant.
Now I have to make do with the minute slights of parking my chafed tail bone outside of ad hoc neo-beatnik locales. What I am trying to say is I'm totally with the psychology of moving on; I'm doing my damnest, but the cyanide capsule of the ADAPT pathology which is Riverside Presbyterian's unique variation of human trafficking is the Battle of Somme on my soul. Erik von Schmetterling's day attendant did not engage in toxic behavior toward me once, or twice, it was persistent, continual, for nearly 8 months; then I challenged him and he threatened, denigrated me, and yes, after everything I've written here about victimization clinging to my flesh like a Zika infection, I am throwing down the gauntlet, unable, like you, to casually barhop in the best areas. If I could stick a pin in a map, if I could get there, I'd be gone by the end of next week, hitching my battery charger to Nebraska if I thought I had the wherewithal.
"I'm uncomfortable being on a soapbox," Gwen Ifill, after publishing her book about President Obama.
You look fairly personable and presentable to me Josh Barro, and I for one, do not have time to send hate mail, as a disabled woman who cannot eschew the obvious nature of her spastic-star-spangled banner flexed ligaments, which twist and contort in such interesting ways. Flambeaux I may be, but my social fears aren't so ingrained that I join in on mob assaults. I do not hate you, but a number of lesbians have earned my ire, and I'm weary of butch hits, and I have to stand against LBGT subversion of accepted methods of pair bonding, despite my education and significant voyeurism into indulgent sexual pleasures, relative to where those activities fit on affirmative and/or masochistic scales.
My parents allowed surgeons to butcher me at a young age, abandoned me, divorced, my mother moving in with her duplicitous lesbian neighbor who hit on her, my suffering mother. Whether this was before or after my womb carrier's third suicide attempt, can't say. All that would not have been so bad, but you see, for a cripple, it never stops. You think your orientation provides an impetus for terror, do you?
Guess again.
I do not feel like recounting the strenuous psychological wounds of my past in full. A little worn out hustling for my charming penny ante aggregate, having to work three times as hard as you for pot luck, since that is the draw, brother, between ambulatory function which you have, and quadriplegia predation and rejection, which I have to live.
I have known many homosexuals. Let me give you my list, aggregate it all here:
1. Kathy-- my bipolar mother's would be lover, who used to touch my crotch with an appetite in her ruddy face, before she decided to come out, in her merry widow weeds, co-opting a relative of her husband's; her daughter died of cancer, but they became estranged. I hate her for corrupting the sanctity of my already difficult childhood.
2. Alan from college-- he sought me out. I pulled on him, cried often in his company and he took it. I can't hate him quite, since I leaned on him out of cowardice, but homily people on both sides of the isle should know when to quit. Seeing each other naked and stoned was a sexual deterrent. My undying gratitude to drug induced lethargy.
3. My editor Alexandra, whose reticence was shield and sword. Let's categorize this peevish puritanical association an interesting exchange of mutual blindsiding that still managed to score me while she was dying of breast cancer.
4. Fern Markowitz, the Jewish lesbian boss of my Jewish supervisor. What they did to me consumes about 40 posts of partial detail. Ditto Erik von Schmettering, a crippled transvestite who is also a challenge to your groomed portrait. Ditto Jimmi Shrode, his fat partner. Ditto my former co-worker Jim, whose mild senility made him incompetent. His lover had full blown AIDS, and I hope someone had the sense to use the crematorium if they deceased.
This takes us to Josie Byzek, former editor who lashed out at my last male cyber interest.
What you do not discuss in your column about Robertson's supposedly vile intolerance, is the difference between Semitic moralism and modern Gnosticism-- where god as love is essentially meaningless.
And no one discusses the sneak attack of homosexual passes. Something I have had to tolerate repeatedly from disabled lesbians, mixed race nursing aides in the closet. Never mind repeated sexual and criminal assaults I've sustained. My tolerance meter, Josh, my struggle to survive, is well into negative numbers. You would not dare respond to me, but if you did, "I'm sorry for your situation," really wouldn't cut it. I was always part and parcel of corporate patronizing; tokenism, in fact.
Insidership? That's a treat tossed at me through the bars of my cage.
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, kindle location 9-17
Lena Canada's triumphant tale is dated, but nothing has changed in the United States since its conversion. I lasted five minutes with the film, and the once magnetic John Amos filling the time honored role as the minority domestic touched by God to tend the angelic birds with broken wings. Absolutely nothing has changed, but this was my life, and I was that girl and my idol was not Elvis Presley, but my plot points were exactly the same, just as they are for the disabled victims of rape whom are goaded into fighting back by Mariska Hargitay. Abuse victims crawl out of the woodwork to connect with this actress; never mind case management, cannibalizing celebrity empathy is more rewarding, orgasmic and aspirational for both sexes, but Hargitay has made the most of a casting limitation, and she projects living within Olivia Benson, making her fictional part more interesting than she is herself.
If you want a taste of my authentic self (and what is that?), I think both theism and atheism is a waste of time, but consider Kuhn a fortunate metaphysician, since he is in a select and dwindling minority of thinkers who worry about veracity and evidently makes a living doing it. I agree with him on one of his main contentions, which I will frame thus: If religious doctrine makes no sense, neither does the narrative language of theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics may have valid proofs, as does the big bang, and impaction which leads to the birth of new voids, but these are mathematical equations that have no end, and just move on to the next mechanism. Human mind is not capable of processing it.
If I can inhabit the space of logic, what is it then that makes me retract from radical progressive equality? The censorship of experience, primarily. Friendships with homosexuals, the kind of gay people who are only filmed for POV, has not been good for me, filled with dark back stabbings, equal to the macabre histrionics of John Webster. Even when it comes to my late editor Alexandra Grilikhes, and her etiology, the silence of willful blindness was a gulf upon which I could not presume a platonic attachment. The further the tent expands, the more bewildering it shall become. We are the only species with an argument, but a species nevertheless, one that should acknowledge its primate evolutionary triggers more often, even while acknowledging that the revolutionary act in Genesis, that of naming, is essentially what created humanity.
"Look at him. He's just pissing himself to tell us about the fake Aryan Cosmetics conspiracy!" --Vincent D'onofrio
The narrative behind the rise of Catherine the Great is fascinating in its imposition. A fairly low key Prussian enlightenment era aristocrat marries well, excels in the game of court intrigues, has her husband murdered, or the truth around his death successfully repressed, and Voila, long live Czarina, the great Russian ruler who isn't Russian. I wrote a poem about her after extensive research. It is a poem in need of a tuning, but one of the last I showed to Robert before Trudy Richardson's hire at Riverside nearly annihilated my existence. If you think I am being unfair to the evasive minority who will tap dance any way but loose in order to avoid a civil rights lawsuit against her parent company, look at what we do to the damned; it is in this sense that I pity young Tsarnaev, regardless of his motives. David Brooks gives me cover here for incredulity at the sheer magnitude of the manhunt that took place in Boston. A kid is a kid, despite the marathon deaths, the loss of the campus security guard. Slavic conventions baffle me, but Alexandra published my poems that used those conceits to signify desolation, my Grecian editor who had to fucking die of breast cancer despite the fact that prim and proper lesbian was the best promoter I had. Here too, back in the day, initially, when I heard Alexandra's voice for the first time, I grew excited. "New literary friend!" This assertion ran in my mind until I met her in person. Flag went up and chilled any sentiment I had about confidential intimacy when she presented herself. The able bodied world can't even allow me confidantes in my own fucking field, and more still, she did not functionally edit me. This is what I asked of her when she was dying, and I could not get the manuscript out to her in time, and so she died on me also, a pissant of a hanging chad.
Doubtlessly, I stay with WaPo as a reader because of its national gridiron mentality, but let me respond to Joel Achenbach's points by objecting to his use of grid iron simplicity. I am as perplexed as any of you about the motives of the brothers, but the tactics of the terrorist is not about winning, it is about resort.
I am hesitant to press on with this in any thorough fashion in the moment given the national tempo and corporate suppression, which I find absolutely ludicrous, but I am always mindful that I am letting my id, scars, analytics, dangle under the largesse of a powerful corporate tolerance.
I can envision taking Lauren Weisberger's novel out of the library on a slow day, one that might involve the leisure of trivial pursuit, but whatever the film adaptation leaves out, what it augments it augments so that getting beneath the surface of high couture isn't an issue for me. We do not need to see beneath the surface of Miranda Priestly, because Streep's minimalism says enough about the cost in and of itself that further exploration isn't necessary. Like Alexandre Dumas' dazzling marionettes, The Devil Wears Prada offers a material surface that becomes its own argument, and the pushback from Andrea's friends and family is obligatory, because the story has to acknowledge that the rarified atmosphere of high fashion is one that most mortals could not flourish in, not just those made obese and diabetic by high fructose corn syrup.Yet we're all fascinated by pagentry and style, and why we are is interesting, even if it might have convoluted evolutionary triggers, our ability to distinguish color and pattern, to desire the perfect human figure even as we exploit and react to its varied entropic deformities. Meryl Streep does something virtually impossible in this film, or in real life, in that she embodies a perfect figure, that on a small scale is the epic equivalent of Grecian mythology-- not that Prada is a great film, or can stand with the classics, but it is great within the urban world it inhabits, one that makes Islamic fanaticism look like a biological nightmare by way of comparison, as if our species were losing its remarkable ability to conquer environments rather than evolving, as science fiction either suggests we shall or will fail, which sums up this vast genre in a nut shell, but is the basic truth behind it.Is style an evolutionary adaptation? Andrea seems to reject it, on the surface, when it is time, she does not want to pay Miranda's price for ruthless perfection, but is that really what is going on with this movie, and why it was such a hit, strikes so many chords?The fact that I don't need to read Weisberger's book isn't a reflection on her work; all serious writers have some version of it, like mine with selecting Alexandra Grilikhes over Bob Small, for instance, with her aesthetic vision more in tune with mine over Bob's working class post-beatnik brass knuckles, the two of them represent the basic division within the American literary presses. My thoughts here are only scratching the surface, goaded on by what Harvard modernist critics have written too, in their critical shorthand that my range does not quite match, though I can see where writing about Prada might assist me in making that leap. I did not expect that Weisberger's self-discovery, however Hollywood translated, would imprint on me in my environment to such a degree, the brutalism of a life style barren of any glamor whatsoever.
