Petite Sentiments

Before I return to my futuristic medical catastrophe of poverty induced stroke, barring poverty induced subcutaneous embolism, a few spare thoughts on the kindle paperwhite, spare, because I wish to cash in with a digital angle, though I never can write as fast as Yoffe, which may be just as well.

I am more comfortable carrying the paperwhite around, as the older kindle keyboard model has taken a beating, though it has stood the test of time, remains functional, and I am not ready to trade it in yet. Still manually easier to subvert the location issue through bookmarks and highlights on the older and technically more spacious device. Touchpad is still frustrating, though divining menu operation did not take me too long. With a little effort, I can read the paperwhite in dim light, and as long as I do not buy a text accidentally, Amazon's special offers, though no friend to the over-educated, do not trouble me, as this giant retail monopoly represents the best and the worst of Friedman's holy grail. Amazon's claims about battery life are so so, but since I am normally near a power outlet, this is not much of an issue. Relaxing into a text itself might be, but this may also be the residual effects of my bloody and asinine bid to becoming a patron of local color, and expending money I shall never recoup, much like the drain from felines dead and alive, and sibling rifts and expenditure, on the conquest, semi-lucid at this point, of Ulysses. (Lance, dear fellow, I take back what I said about "not deciphering," bloody fool spastic is!) Still cannot distinguish the period from the comma, but in terms of modern alienation and agony, figuring out which is which is a minor affair in Sebold's flickering window candle.  Certain classes of least functional cripples may not benefit from all this that is derivative of the cell phone.

One thing I have not done is transfer my periodical content, not yet. Less pressure. I am also entirely ignorant of comparisons to other models, but I am not seduced by the Apple device fetish as the rest of you, so you may deem that mild generational resistance. How much I can still absorb and maintain my dignity? The fact remains, this technology would have made me a better student; for that, a great deal of regret. This may seem like opaque reasoning, but the physical act of researching is a touch harder for wheelchair users, however much larger universities pride themselves on access, library architecture seems welded to the Victorian age, not that this was a conscious issue in youth, but in contemporary terms, it does begin to matter, and academic electronic fair use issues might include disabled access exemptions.

Comparative Predation

I surprised myself by finding something derivative out of Sebold's metaphysical triumph over trauma in The Lovely Bones. If you like dark parlor games, consider Stanley Tucci as George Harvey against Michael Rooker as Henry, against Hopkins as Hannibal. That is your job spastic, might saith twitter, might saith the hapless surfer, or those who chance posted with me prior to community banishment. My rebuttal is distillation takes time, and my facial ligaments are in pain.

For me to watch a film twice in rapid succession means the transcendent caught my interior suction cups, and decided me to track Sebold even though I cannot do it her way, find my way through the thorns to loss of my own ego. My escape as a writer is to burrow into the agony, with or without substance aid, like Thomas More in his hair shirt, willing to accept the assassin. But my challenge to the Sebold victory is this: Would a mouse be owed the same consideration? It is the snicker bar on the evolutionary scale, killed swiftly, killed slowly, high pitched squeal as its spine is snapped on a glue trap, or pummeled and then eaten by Joey, speared by his brother. What does the fabric of space give the insect, krill, or plankton, for that matter? Why did I pay for my pet's ashes if I am a non-believer? There is also Aaron Eckhart's work, scathing and stark, which I thought of during the morning hours before Sandy's landfall, but evaded me in the initial post draft. In the company of men is a different genre, a masterpiece of social manner, critically acclaimed, then buried by the public, but it is a vehicle willing to be honest in its illustration that blind justice, fortune, are projections about how the primate moral code works, possibly no more than a facade; yet Sebold strikes something a mass audience needs, just as I needed Joey's remains, my deceased, now part of all minimalist dead pet theatre.

Even if we keep it on the human scale, is the serial predator simply an evolutionary outcome our self-domestication refuses to accept, or is it disease, as we attribute it in clinical terms? A footnote on which I'll have to catch up. Tucci's performance here nearly matches his more physically magnetic role in Big Night.

Tech V Earth

"I'm talking about a relationship with a device."
--Cynthia Nixon


If the kindle came equipped with a vibrator and gender identification software I'd marry it; charging it in the face of a hybrid storm is no doubt lame, but this amounts to my preparations for Sandy. Hardest thing is that my plastic nicotine vapor has not arrived and I assume if the winds really hit the postal service will go into cardiac arrest, and this will amount to my most discomforting withdrawal, second hardest will be intermittent power outages, but Philadelphia, asinine backwater that it is, seems to collect sordid child abuse cases and leaves the grand theater of disaster to NYC. Give or take, I can eat until Wednesday; currently mining The Lovely Bones, but I am not sure the story is ripe candidate topically. To cope it uses the magical realism route. An engaging first hour, however, and more than that, to add a quick end note, this adaptation is my idea of a perfect modern drama. Sebold reminds me of Alice Hoffman.

The soft fatalism that resolves this tale may be how Sebold resolved her own trauma. I commend the courage of her survival skills. I know who all my attackers were, and for her never to have received justice, never to have known, illustrates why we cling to fate. It must have taken her quite a leap, but I am not positive that quantum mechanics ensures lex talonis, though on the basis of probability it may allow for it. The film runs again in an hour, and moved me powerfully. My physical stress is taking its toll, and for the next 24 hours, perhaps, I will conserve my strength, and try to talk to my own projects as I talk to you.

Comparative Interstice

The performances of The Invisible cast are stronger than the lazy adaptation of the Mark Davis screenplay, and I hope if I do ever chance on the Wahl novel, that the author deploys more credible imagination toward metaphysical need. Limbo may possibly have some foundation within verifiable science, because mind and body do not always die in synchronization, and the modern upgrades on medieval allegories in regard to "the inbetween," interest me, whether it is The Lovely Bones, or Terry Gilliam's use of escapism when those who wish to cease engaging in complicity are tortured to death via the demands of extraction.

This post is being scheduled in the back archive because Wahl drew an introspective mention on my earlier account. The hyperlink interlock ongoing, hopefully to return with more detail later on.