Ablating Matt Dillion

The book ends with an epilogue consisting of a series of warnings and exhortations and forming an inclusion with the prologue by resuming its themes and expressions--note of the US council of bishops steering the flock.

Most Roman Catholics are atheists at heart. Ratzinger is. Shocking, presumptuous of me to make such a claim of the Pope Emeritus, a man who was conveniently deconstructed as unaware of his homosexuality by Andrew Sullivan, a transplanted Briton not conservative enough, as he was careless, inflecting himself with HIV, just like my brother, who is dead from meningitis received from AIDS. My brother was merely a middle brow sociopath. Andrew is a homosexual policy analyst, and therefore infinitely more valuable. To whom, exactly? But this is why I write this blog as I do, hating all pretension but my own. My remaining and very ailing grandmother is not an atheist. She is a simple Austrian peasant, unaware of her own anger, and a true believer. She terrifies me, raised me through a good portion of her daughter's journey through lithium to ultimate psychotropic death, and I miss her memory. More than likely I'll never see her again. I am not sure about Mary, my Catholic principal aunt. Better educated. Faithful, yes, but mainly lip service. I left the Church because I could see a pathway toward zealotry without belief, battling myself about returning to parish, raising troops in the service of a medieval doctrine which nominally commands 750 million, despite my recent inquisition by Sister Veronica. The nun may be right, and I should stop resisting, and comply.

Fuck you.

It is difficult to explain why Catholics are what they are. Dawkins accuses Roman Catholicism of polytheism. Not really. Roman Catholicism is hierarchical, ordered in accordance with the chain of being, the road to heaven a stricture dictated by ecclesiastical authority, and it is as much a chimera as a ranking of Hindu deities, but it is also Roman, despite modern diffusion and sexual molestation by homosexuals and pedophiles once burned at the stake; perhaps I have the biological memory of grand inquisitors, with this streak of Austrian retention in my barren uterus. AO Scott complained Crash (2004) is too schematic, and he is right. Haggis has a burr stuck in a rectal crevice. Ironies are conveniently placed to ensure what I've long contended. We all reduce each other by denomination, and we all have redeeming salient points.

I had not forgotten about my group DIA so much as left it alone after my former lesbian editor did her damage, and did not realize my Australian page views were coming from Rayna, who has cerebral palsy. Rather than disagreeing with my anger, or contending with my hatred of IL centers, she unsubscribed from the group, from where she was accessing my blogger url, at least presumably. I know little of the woman; we've had some discourse, but I'll say this. Passivity doesn't solve anything. I can understand ambulatory individuals not taking me on. Maybe you presume I am in denial on any number of fronts and don't need a dose of my medicine, and as so many writers have written me, "you don't know what to say," but the disabled community does, and our intake centers need to stop causing so many of us so much harm. I am in part culpable for allowing Liberty Resources to railroad me, but by 2007 that railroading took a serious and negligent turn. It happens far too often and it has to be dismantled and corrected. It also has nothing to do with how Australia handles its model. Philadelphia's center is now playing musical chairs with itself, and this too is so much guano to be washed out of your scalp; they do it all the time. The real reform is with Medicaid's fun and games, and I am not ending my crusade. I have been punished enough, and intend to ensure my former supervisor gets a taste of her own medicine.

Dangerous Idylls

It symbolizes a crucial lesson about craft: utility is not contingent on perfection of form.--David Sherwin

Anton Corbijn offers an inspired interpretation of landscape and enclosure, from the opening shot of rushes and thicket in a Swedish winter, to his claustrophobic overlay of Italian villages and underground freeway tunnels. AO Scott is right about Corbijn's practiced composition. AO Scott is absolutely correct that it is not enough and there are things not to like about The American, a film I wanted to view again before my rental time clocked out and did not, but the preeminent critic under the employ of the Sulzbergers is also wrong, because there are pleasures, insights gained over time, under the breezes of transfixing arcs. I was never big on George Clooney. Liked him well enough; he and the original ER cast made those early seasons, and there too, he portrayed sexual indolence with a shiek and brassy extra, asking her why they did not marry? It is there in Solaris as well, a fatal envelopment, a man done in by his own pampered intimacy, which points to why he cannot quite be the equal of Cary Grant. 

Grant was an onscreen dandy and womanizer who had the ability to contain himself. Clooney cannot; he dies for the nurturing maternal climax that smothers him. Occasionally he plays off its negation, as in Michael Clayton. I think this is why his sociopath Jack/Edward is nervous, unpleasantly taunt in certain key shots; he is attempting to demythologize the autonomic predator. With a better story line it might have worked.

It took me nearly three hours to make my coffee and omelet Saturday evening, in between copper urinal shots. We die young for fried eggs. One pitch, two submissions, in addition to all this time spent on Blogger where I earn not a fucking cent! Dedication, but I can do no more, and missed the spout because her royal highness now runs the studio. 

We shall save all felines! Had to get the incitement in-- and yes, I know your interest would peek markedly if I got past Clooney's publicist, but pricking the guilt of his privilege over his arrest record for the sake of Sudanese advocacy is a high bar.

Epistolary Art

"Actually, McCain wasn't that much of a maverick." -- Kathleen Parker

AO Scott represents the worst aspects of east coast liberalism; had he been presented to me as an ambulatory husband I would have been allowed to choose, I might have taken a second look at the pair bonding dynamic between Josie Byzek and her partner Virginia (not really, but in terms of trigger happy hyperbole what is a broken down and angry writer to utilize?) Assuredly, he is an excellent critic, but the difference between the shield of his snobbery and the pretensions of my failed intellectual ambitions are leagues deep and miles wide. I would have been perfectly happy being Patrick Stewart's fuck bunny on an Enterprise mock up instead, and this has much to do with why I breached the paywall of The Washington Post, only to discover I now belong to the harem of Jeff Bezos.

What is an old woman to do?

My letter to my former state representative Babette Josephs is important and I am struggling to get it *right,* in template form because it will probably serve for the most part as my first chapter for a non-fiction book proposal on why independent living centers do not work. I fully understand that I am not the only American traumatized by bad executive acts and you are sick of me mentioning Linda's name and hey spastic, look what it is doing to you?

But what the paradigm did to me reflects the hell, literally, it inflicts on others who cannot in fact raise their voices. Can I actually get Linda fired? I really don't know, but in real world terms, if I had taken action then instead of fearing that the EEOC would have turned its wrath on me, she would not have remained as second in command. What the center's community services staff did later in terms of their lack of competency are additional jewels in the crown, and what triggers these oppressive engagements is what Foucault examined with the design, conception of the panopticon. I have to walk this line, move, rescue my literary legacy all at the same time. If all else fails, I could mew to the Sicilians.

And Nothingness

He plies his trade with meticulous care, weighing, measuring, disassembling and tweaking his special gun with artisanal devotion. And the virtues of the film itself are those of craft rather than art. 
-- AO Scott, ever meticulous.

To give you a sense of the span of time, in 1998 I logged onto the Poets & Writers website with the stunned intimidation of an acolyte joining the priesthood. I told myself not to open my mouth, which in more literal terms means lurk, not post. I imagine some of the women of Speakeasy would have appreciated the counter factual of never knowing I existed. Admittedly, I hurt some of these women unfairly, sitting here at Tom Reid's hand painted desk, the eastward wall of my studio bordering the janitor's supply closet. 19 years here at Riverside, relocated assault victim, screaming to leave to anyone who would listen. "It is nice here," people say. 

In terms of the entitlement nation that alarms George Will, this particular public housing building may be nice. Beneath the surface it bears all the hallmarks of a re-education camp.

Poets & Writers kicked me off their site due to my mental anguish in coping with this landlord, constant housekeeping issues. It is mid 2013 now, and I was wrong to believe that submitting my notice to Trudy or her future replacement was the one choice I could still make. Not really, as I cannot pack my belongings and cannot drive voluntarily on battery power much past seventh street. From the first day my father left me here overnight in a heap of furnishings in 1994 (my mother had to rescue me), I hated living here. I have to leave, and that is tantamount to a death sentence, one that Anton Corbijn stalks through tunnels and terraced pathways I necessarily could not navigate. Despair is literally making me ill, as much as George Clooney is a rack of doomed nerves in beautiful Roma, bella Roma.

I'd sell my soul to get off this dead end corner of Race Street, to get away from the autonomic remains of ancient Africans who think in monosyllables, to get away from the skeletal remains of Erik von Schmetterling, and the Gladhandler, equally cadaverous.