Mnemonic Agrarian

Given my personal history with the last post modern beatnik progeny on earth, his powers waning in my estimation (alas, the undercurrent of antagonism stems from? psychoanalytic drum roll, but this morning it is not a primary concern, father fucking as an act of annihilation which did not happen...) I am unresolved on what attracts me to the work of Allen Tate, whether it is, in fact, Tate's mimetic qualities conjoined to his violent modernism, which Yezzi recognizes in ridiculing fashion in his New Criterion piece, an article I have been attempting to digest off and on since 2007, and will continue to absorb, only to note here that Yezzi's hyperbole, highlighted below, while charming, is the normative hogwash of the literary critic, and his or her concerns toward peer review:

Without a proper appreciation of Tate, the full story of recent American poetry cannot be told.

Really? Jerry recognized early in our journey that I was interested in literary imitation, but I am not sure I recognize my youthful curiosity in my appreciation of the poems themselves. We'll come back to it, as I am contemplating asceticism as a form of reactionary protest, except to add something about Tate's *inherited racism,* as Yezzi calls it.

Slapping labels on people is a way of turning them off. Unlike the event of Gore Vidal's death, my demise will not have much public reverberation, but commentators burned bright to excoriate Vidal as a racist elitist pig. What does that mean exactly? That his intellectual endeavors are worthless? Not every form of reaction is an atavistic backslide.

Kubik's Chameleon

The sheriff's Goddamn was a murmured curse
        Not for the dead but for the blinding dust
                                                           -- Allen Tate, The Swimmers


I sigh in disappointment, but no studied individual in filmography is assisting me, whether or not they care that Schneider and I sparred each other's bones, and I doubt they do, even in the likeness between Mr. ChickenFried and myself as ugly brunettes and the related caste resentment. Shame at the provocative trigger, and the feeling that I have an occlusion the size of a walnut thrombing in my armpit, waiting for the exact implosive stressor. A little worm made my mind flag slippery in my observation of Larry Gates as Sid Kubik. I should have placed him against Poitier as Endicott, or in the classic anti-communist polemic. Long term memory subtly alerting me, but not effectively until I linked him in this mild winter storm that technically prevented me from driving to the DVM. In actuality, a packed defecation made me fear a Presley simulation. Mildly faint, from leg to left temple, I am the daughter of my grandfather's terminal coronary, "Poppa Lilly," I called him, so you know my Roman grandmother ruled us with an iron fist. Her husband was soft as marshmallow, handing the eight year old in the armchair a copper penny, shiny with the magic of his broad smile, "What 'tis?" He bent over me like a jowl wagging hound, but it is Lillian whose absence pulls; she lived very long, but I miss her the most of all my family. She kept me fluent, beautiful woman, every inch the grand belle, silent strength, auburn hair coiffed perfectly, my body tells me I will be back in her warmth and homemade escarole soon. Mi dispiace nonna Lilly, ti prego perdonami.

Bow our heads. Whatever his ethnicity, for the purposes of the studio system, Gates was a blank check, and did not have any point of origin; he wasn't supposed to have those traits, unlike Ernest Borgnine. This does not mean he could not have been a mafia Don. Northern Italy has its Sweden spillover, fair skin, the type who could have kept a Rico like Eddie rolled in pork grease. Karlson condenses this with theatric artifice, as I mention. Real life does not suck you in to a methodical quarry hunt not minutes after you put a punk in the dungeon, warding off the potential fury of your wife  who will probably rip out your eyes if she doesn't get that baby, properly adorable, and a necessary retrograde: Dianne's Alice will not be deprived of the blessings of new life, a happiness given to a man as uncomplicated as a truck driver employed by her husband. Conte flies to New York, in an affluent cosmopolitan mobility, that might have been a stage set for a cabinet meeting with Ike. There is no question, that to all intents and purposes, Sid Kubik is the assimilated appearance of senior management at the country club, and Conte can be many things in the example of Sinatra, the rat pack play boy, the swarthy breeder whose seed is desirable, but make no mistake. Only Gates can aspire to WASP pretensions, whether or not he is merely a brilliant imitation.

They parry, the nervous avoidance of eye contact by Conte effective; he may not know that Gino has been caught, marked for death not ten feet away, but are we supposed to believe that Eddie buys Kubik's fancy footwork. Is pretty boy really that gullible?

Révolte

I lay the mind's contents 
Bare, as upon a table,
And ask, in a time of war,
Whether there is still
To a mind frivolously dull
Anything worth living for
                        --Allen Tate

Stendhal lived during a time of uneasy transition between the Enlightenment, which, in a rare moment of personal exasperation, a fifty year old McGuire exclaimed, "I refuse to teach it!", but in all fairness, Pope has that effect on me as well, with his trilling mock heroic verse, and the burgeoning dawn of global superpower which the Victorian age would bequeath to the 20th century. The world that Stendhal presents to readers is delightfully manicured, much more so than in the Balzac who purportedly supersedes him (and for those of you not familiar with how the dowager handles majority consensus by now, she exclaims "fuck that," and would be stranded on a desert island with Stendhal over  Balzac any day) but it is still a pre-industrial world with a vain and petty aristocracy, wallowing in Napoleon's tragic grandeur, a world where men controlled women, selecting and discarding them like a deck of cards, as long as the female in question was desirable, regretting not studying this nearly unparalleled author with my French professor.

Though I am not sure how France 2 works, in comparison to RAI in Italy, I am now writing in rare protest. to my cultured aesthetes across the pond: Some classical authors cannot be faithfully adapted on screen. Stendhal is one such author, even if curiosity overcame me to see what was done with The Charterhouse of Parma, to realize it is a more superficial variation of Julien's story in Le Rouge et Le Noir. Certainly, Stendhal's world of backstabbing principalities can influence screenplays, but some canonical material should remain just that, canonical, not bootstrapped by the props department to offer sensibilities of the baroque slowly crumbling to egalitarian lies. Not that I do not appreciate the derivative, and in the case of pop culture like Star Trek, even prefer it, but more often than not, adaptations detract from the engagement with literary imagination, with the exception  of Dickens and his Christmas Carol, which is probably known by heart even by Boko Haram. While we may meet our doom enhancing our bodies out of species sustainability,  enhancing our cultural historical memory through the ascendancy of video as the supreme medium can have its drawbacks. As opposed to being enacted, great narratives need to be read. And if some of you are going to object with a question like "What about Victor Hugo?" Hugo's flaws are tightened when they become musicals, movies.

Petraeus Notary

Dana Milbank's back pedaling on the Petraeus affair implies that Director Clapper was too harsh in urging the general's resignation, and while I get the point of his column, and was headed in the same direction, in the vein of a disadvantaged freelancer without the same resources as an old media conglomerate, granted, one that may have saved the country (though I am unclear why Nixon was "this close to being a dictator," to quote a long ago would be paramour of my own), I have to agree with scholars who take the long view, and feel that the Petraeus resignation was necessary. To cue in on what keeps James Fallows awake at night, if the cyber warriors in China had breached the Petraeus-Broadwell electronic trail, then this sexual dalliance would have rapidly spiraled into a potential national security breach; this possibility is what's feeding the hysteria of the Congressional lap dogs. True, it may be a stretch to say that the general's distractions affected Afghanistan, at least in terms of operations theatre, or that it had anything to do with Benghazi, but this is what happens in a society where the narcissism of need, the selfish pursuit of that fulfillment, stains true personal liberty as something soiled, shallow. I may not have elevated Petraeus to heroic status, but viewed from a distance, I thought he was an honorable military leader.

Briefly, as my time is importunate, though open for later expansion, I have been shunned by married women online, particularly aspiring suburban novelists and poets, for my frankness, sometimes graphic honesty about sexual subversion. A little comeuppance seems in order.