Camilleri Flats

The British government had become the prime European support of the khedive of Egypt, but sought to remain aloof from the affairs of the Egyptian-ruled Sudan. -- Britannica's encapsulation of slaughter

I took the risk and drove this aged, dimpled, battered and shorting Quantum under the showerhead to hose down, for no more than a few minutes, wrapped in baggies. The bath chair is still functional despite my slide down in 2015, if it occurred in the spring of 2015. Even on sturdier days, the shower stall is a risk transfer, always was, and the Quantum's design ups the notch, as opposed to the easier sling of the P-200, and even with pain killers, and remembering to ease my shimmy off the porcelain throne, I am not ready to play the piper leaving the chair's motors parked close to a good dose of steam, so it is a micro cheat in a necessary living extension of my body. Andrea Camilleri uses power chairs as accouterments in his annoying Sicilian detective series. On my last count, one power chair was the shroud for a clever suicide electrocution, and one was used as a lesson about corruption. If Andrea doesn't like Sicilians, the dowager despises the shame Sicily brought down on Roman glory, even if their old world provincialism seeps into our circulation system like venom. Camilleri is Don in his own right, but he is also a bullshit artist for pathos.

I'm working on my article, very slowly. It is not about rejection, nor commission. As a policy piece, I want it to pass ableism standards. This matters to me, and if it is declined I'll live but you better bet your sweet ass if Editor A doesn't accept it I'll burn through 25,000 journalists if I have to to get it branded. Hence my inactivity of late.

Today, this evening, maybe things aren't so bad. I need to be slightly less pecuniary with pain medication despite daily doses of fish oil, and become more clever with bathing techniques if the pivot cannot be reverted to immediately with confidence, but if you had to choose between end of live indigence in a state bastion like Inglis House, or going out relatively intact, with your dignity behind you, which do you think you'd pick? Camilleri can afford the luxury of a godfather's flesh, etched and contained in codes of honor. Some things never change, and the Sudan is still the Sudan, despite the contest between the superstars, Heston and Laurence Olivier, in a deplorable pantomime of a Muslim nationalist. 

Unleashed (If you give me money I'll buy a Vuse)

"She is an active and friendly girl to whom destiny has not been bright."--Timo, whose commiseration is adept

We have discussed in some detail the angel and demon dichotomy of the invalid's general nature, and we have discussed, in less detail, the nature of shields. If my readers are mildly perplexed as to why I would utilize Andrea Camilleri's fictionalized Sicilian fringe types to preoccupy myself with Falk, with Nimoy, and their archetypes, those who care may thread the needle as we go along, trying in my own way, akin to Wittgenstein, to resist grand unified theories, and yet drawn to the need for something dazzling, at the same time.

The idea of shields is not germane to my own line of thinking. It comes from the superior Jewish intellect which predominates in queer theory, and since queer theory and disability very nearly coalesce, we can examine shields, across literature and teleplays, as we find them. Despite my red flags and red herrings over Psycho, my flags and herring is more about the deployment of aesthetics toward corrupting ends. Do I believe that Psycho represents Hitchcock at his best? No, but as I wrote in my earlier post, relying too, on my memory of Polman's piece in Obituary, the film represented a paradigm shift, one for which the price of civilization has no answer, and, although I envision the problems my old mentor raised when discussing ethics in fiction, as raised by John Gardner, for those asking "How did we get here?"  The answer is in the pathways of moral relativism; I can see them even if I am not yet publishing a traditional dissertation on the issue, and I can see them in the simple stock formula twist of Blood Bargin-- never denying Hitchcock's brand of genius, tracing it through Gena Rowland's virtually vibrant naivety  in "Playback," up through something as complex as Camilleri's "Equal Time". Do we know if the actor playing Biagio is a real spastic gimp? Perhaps not, but his evil lies in his helplessness and inability to change the course of events without a determined truth hunter like Salvo being blessed with the gift of fools.

And now, to sound like everyone else (ad nauseam) on social media, I am taking some time off from this account. I did not break any bones or tear a ligament, but I am having transfer trouble, and it is a bad time to be a poor wasted piece of shit in pain with no nicotine, whether or not this is partly psychosomatic. I am too young not to be able to dump a stool when I need to, and this is going to be a major headache-- yes, I know what ADAPT members would say, I know.

Deficit Apotheosis

"What do you think this place is?"-- Noah Emmerich as Dr. Jenner of the CDC

Since fear of Alzheimer's is basically wasted energy, and Camillieri was spared the worst of slowing brain processes as he hit his eighties, I know there isn't much I can do about it, given my own family history, my bellicose maternal grandfather breaking down from the ravages of senility, my late mother's lapses prior to her sudden collapse, but the close of fifty four years of unhappy regimentation sends me a warning flag about coping with anxiety: Rule number one: If I need to sit on a draft without a mandatory deadline, then sit on it. Remind me of this now and again, in your silence. I cannot discuss the specifics of what I was working on at the end of July through August of 2016, and like any freelancer, after a brief pucker over a bruise, jumping back in, repeating all is not lost, I have a source and did a ton of research. 

I have a draft, in the cloud, transitioned my Word 7 clumsiness to Google's effortless Chrome, but I drew a blank Friday morning om my concluding paragraph; I forced the issue due to severe extremes to which most women with cerebral palsy wouldn't push themselves, and I knew it. The publisher wouldn't have cared if I waited, stalled, procrastinated another 72 hours, even another week. All I would have gotten was a policy byline in a publication I curiously enjoy, and that is all I've lost, knowing better than to query Marie Varenas about whether or not she thought I was demented. Asking a terminally ill woman on Prozac, riding a snicker of exasperation. I linked back to Yabberz Friday afternoon by accident, intending to go to my Yahoo account, and a quick glance assured me I wasn't missing anything. Part of the problem with the Yabberz model is structural: 40 followers often share the same links, and for me it triggered  an adverse onslaught, one from which I am glad to be gone. Twitter is what it is, all of us vying and promoting and being pithy in 160 characters, but we can ignore it when we wish to, turn off notifications. The Hortons adapted their software to this approach, but for me, it did not work, led to unpleasant agitation, much like the Grimes family at their wits end to escape annihilation in episode six.

The destruction of the CDC in "The Walking Dead" was a spectacle condensed, in the ever wobbly line between big screen and flat screen, but it was also a 21st century reminder that technical optimism is also a faith misplaced in the face of catastrophe. If I have now become sympathetic to the ideas the Confederacy thought it had to defend, well, even I'm astonished-- but it was a message. Faith in government is a complacency that can prove to be quite costly.  

La Cattiva Strada

Somebody moved behind the brown door: first on the left, then on the right; first footsteps, then a muted rumpling of fabric and the clanking of pots; the concierge's grey eyes seemed to penetrate the wood in pursuit of the invisible noise.-- Georges Simenon, The Engagement

It isn't that one doesn't perceive the strategism within the provincial puzzles of Andrea Camilleri; Simenon was one of his influences, and it shows in the flowering absurdity and pathos of his local color. His narratives are as much about the terrible transmutation of the Old World into contemporary materialism, the one vomiting into the other with the repugnance of centuries old collapse, as they are about the fraud and corruption which truly besiege the carabinieri and all of Europe. Less murder, more graft. In the States, regardless of ethnicity, to an extent, most murders are an emotional argument: kill the wife and stage a suicide, get rid of the bitch on my ass, or go serial predator to assuage the corrosion of pathological pain. Americans go postal, enjoy blockbuster slaughter. Europe, excepting the transplantation of the mafisio, whose golden age was killed off by the ruthlessness of the FBI, is a bit different. The players are dirty, do business off the books, and authors obfuscate their real critique by leaving a dead body around; that real critique takes aim at provincialism, dirty money, and the plight of migrants, like Pakistanis who leave the volatility of the Iron Triangle, only to be victimized beneath placid milk white  surfaces. For the more swarthy Sicilians, who aren't as European as the Germans, the stigma may envelop Tunisians, but for Camilleri, it is the same formula as other mystery writers from the Continent, his progressive cues play out a bit differently than they do in American class conflicts. Spastic cripples like Bejou are simply what they are, dirty, unwashed, going off under stress, part of the comic poke of Italian effacement after centuries of diminishing hegemony.

The problem: Luca Zingaretti's screwball antics, especially when played off Peppino Mazzotta, feel forced by Rai television, and the mesh of the horrific lengths to which the criminal will go against the scatological gossip filling in the blanks doesn't quite work, not that Rai does err on the side of grandiosity, but Zingaretti is an insult to true Roman heritage, may he dormire con i pesci, grinding my teeth. You cannot win them all.