"That was something else. "-- The Rosenbach director correcting my veer off topic.
If I was savvy enough with graphics, I would screen shot the Rosenbach events email and embed it for you, but suffice to say, their open house is September 28, from 12 to 6, and if you have not been yet, and enjoy eccentric historical preserves in cityscapes, then go take a peek. My first time I practically fell over myself to unload my small change in their donation vessels, and we will not dwell on my economic folly of maintaining my contributor membership; it is a folly I wish upon myself. The docents are friendly and know the history of the family. I did not spend a great deal of time in the Jewish history exhibit last evening, primarily out of consideration for Jewish tribalism and the museum's more important moneyed donors, but it is still an accessible and informative exchange, and the Civil War gallery is well designed, interesting to amateur and professional.
I shall not be in attendance, as I am a member now, and will conserve my energies in the direction of events, or future reading groups, so my absence will no doubt be an added inducement. Eh, let me hedge: If I am well enough maybe I will drive over and play mascot, but stay on Delancey. My sore spot over my reading fumble of Ulysses during Bloomsday this summer past is minor in the scale of things, but perhaps nerves led me to broach the issue. I know I am not upscale, and perhaps irrevocably falling out of the meritocracy. I may also secretly desire to try again one day, but that involves politics, like anything, and I am the Italian who hates Joyce!
There are lesser and greater inclusionary practices, however, and what quirky little Rosenbach represents is the greater, though I do not have the knowledge beforehand to know if the bookseller installed an elevator in the home as it was when it served its primary purpose as a bourgeoisie dwelling. Do mark your calendar.
Showing posts with label bloomsday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bloomsday. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
1348 A.D., Fetishize 2
"I am not going to comment on prosecution."-- Barack Obama
I wonder how well Cooksey knew his Fowles when he conceived his canceled series. I have too much else to do even to borrow the novel of the same title at the moment. None of you bothered to inform me about Terence Stamp and the film. Thank you so very much. Why should I worry about my audience when your timidity belies the necessity of having one? Fowles' irony is not totally lost on me, but I can remember only fragments of The French Lieutenant's Woman, nothing of the alternate endings beyond what the film vaguely calls to mind.
I can see now that Stamp was no doubt cast for the lead in The Mind of Mr. Soames because of The Collector, and some of you may remember my earlier preoccupation with Soames, its analog era thematic structure. Fowles worries something else, and exploits the dark side of acquisition more brutally than Henry James, (in physical aspects) though Fowles is probably equal to Balzac for melodramatic effect.
People seem to worship Ulysses as a matter of civic pride? As much as I love literature, to see a mock epic interior prose poem enshrined in a metropolis that became a backwater about five minutes after the Quakers ceded it to the huddled masses is discomfiting, literally. Once an excellent reader, I fucked up on my five minute passage with Gerty's burlesque so badly I fled the scene of Bloomsday virtually in tears. None of this was an intentional humiliation. I am struggling to keep a grasp on matriculation so wanted to stay involved, and the little museum made an effort to accommodate me, but when Lance offered me an out perhaps I should have retired.
It doesn't really matter when we aren't ready to die, does it? O yes, I will get to a lung center and explore my fucking options, but I'd like to see how you'd feel if you had to depend on slovenly insolent lard asses that make up the paraprofessional class. I hate them. I hate this city. I hate my family. I hate my simpleton ex whose advice is to stay engaged with the Jewish bookseller's enshrined space on Delancey Place.
I don't know that I can; it feels like a tumor, like a lung cancer at a certain stage. I pray for vengeance on their souls. Figure whose souls for yourselves. I pray with all the malevolence I can muster that she will pay for her callousness that has left me in these circumstances. The hate will live beyond my demise; I believe that.
I wonder how well Cooksey knew his Fowles when he conceived his canceled series. I have too much else to do even to borrow the novel of the same title at the moment. None of you bothered to inform me about Terence Stamp and the film. Thank you so very much. Why should I worry about my audience when your timidity belies the necessity of having one? Fowles' irony is not totally lost on me, but I can remember only fragments of The French Lieutenant's Woman, nothing of the alternate endings beyond what the film vaguely calls to mind.
I can see now that Stamp was no doubt cast for the lead in The Mind of Mr. Soames because of The Collector, and some of you may remember my earlier preoccupation with Soames, its analog era thematic structure. Fowles worries something else, and exploits the dark side of acquisition more brutally than Henry James, (in physical aspects) though Fowles is probably equal to Balzac for melodramatic effect.
People seem to worship Ulysses as a matter of civic pride? As much as I love literature, to see a mock epic interior prose poem enshrined in a metropolis that became a backwater about five minutes after the Quakers ceded it to the huddled masses is discomfiting, literally. Once an excellent reader, I fucked up on my five minute passage with Gerty's burlesque so badly I fled the scene of Bloomsday virtually in tears. None of this was an intentional humiliation. I am struggling to keep a grasp on matriculation so wanted to stay involved, and the little museum made an effort to accommodate me, but when Lance offered me an out perhaps I should have retired.
It doesn't really matter when we aren't ready to die, does it? O yes, I will get to a lung center and explore my fucking options, but I'd like to see how you'd feel if you had to depend on slovenly insolent lard asses that make up the paraprofessional class. I hate them. I hate this city. I hate my family. I hate my simpleton ex whose advice is to stay engaged with the Jewish bookseller's enshrined space on Delancey Place.
I don't know that I can; it feels like a tumor, like a lung cancer at a certain stage. I pray for vengeance on their souls. Figure whose souls for yourselves. I pray with all the malevolence I can muster that she will pay for her callousness that has left me in these circumstances. The hate will live beyond my demise; I believe that.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Nubile Antecedents
When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books.-- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, p.14
Michael Apted engages cinematic allusions as well as the dramaturgical in his direction of Nell, and perhaps even some narrative traditions. According to the lucky theater critic, Handley was aware of this in the production of his play, but the film superimposes a diachronic continuum with the history of Grizzly Adams, the short lived Lucan, or Truffaut's rigorous battle as an auteur. What about on set romances that seem to be requisite to belong to the screen actors guild, or Foster's characterization of Nell's rape phobia as a mythological echo, even older than the taunts of demonic possession in The Exorcist?
What I am driving at is my willingness to equivocate on Jodie Foster's public projection of her sexual ambiguity, despite my betrayed disdain and contempt for my fuck wit neighbor. It involves more than her life long navigation from child actor celebrity to contemporaneous diva. As an artist, Ms. Foster seems wary of binary definitions of otherness. Certainly not present in all her roles, it is still an important subtext in many of them, a willingness to evade certain aspects of identity that I can respect.
I could push this post a little further, but we shall return to it, my health permitting. Lithium batteries are an untrustworthy crutch, and my frustration with their flimsy durability is of the sort that makes the ambulatory frightened of me. Tomorrow is an event day. Rare thing.
Michael Apted engages cinematic allusions as well as the dramaturgical in his direction of Nell, and perhaps even some narrative traditions. According to the lucky theater critic, Handley was aware of this in the production of his play, but the film superimposes a diachronic continuum with the history of Grizzly Adams, the short lived Lucan, or Truffaut's rigorous battle as an auteur. What about on set romances that seem to be requisite to belong to the screen actors guild, or Foster's characterization of Nell's rape phobia as a mythological echo, even older than the taunts of demonic possession in The Exorcist?
What I am driving at is my willingness to equivocate on Jodie Foster's public projection of her sexual ambiguity, despite my betrayed disdain and contempt for my fuck wit neighbor. It involves more than her life long navigation from child actor celebrity to contemporaneous diva. As an artist, Ms. Foster seems wary of binary definitions of otherness. Certainly not present in all her roles, it is still an important subtext in many of them, a willingness to evade certain aspects of identity that I can respect.
I could push this post a little further, but we shall return to it, my health permitting. Lithium batteries are an untrustworthy crutch, and my frustration with their flimsy durability is of the sort that makes the ambulatory frightened of me. Tomorrow is an event day. Rare thing.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Extraditied Appreciation, Lacunae
The only female foreign minister in the world, Golda Meir was also the only foreign minister who had no use for formalities, who flew tourist class, who shocked hotel staffs by handwashing her own underwear and shining her own shoes, and who entertained foreign dignitaries in her kitchen, in an apron, serving them her homemade pastry along with a stern lecture on Israel’s security.--Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I stabilized my old Quickie on the charger at approximately 4:38 AM Monday morning, flicked through Browning, struggled to drift off. Cats stalked me awake at noon, and the charger was still going. I waited until two and then had to get down to business, washed in desultory fashion, droned to lack of inspiration by my own weakness, why am I doing this if I am already bored?
How can I explain the struggle with palsied muscular contraction to those who are fortunately limber, or under thirty? It takes me 50 to 70 minutes to get stretch slacks on over flaccid toneless shins and flaccid toneless buttocks, heft and pull, heft and pulling, biting my lip in pain, essentially taking me all day to appear at a scheduled and a somewhat laconical event where I was already a known and disruptive element in horridly old sneakers, because I told a staffer of whom I had no clear memory that I would make an effort.
Make an effort indeed. So this is what I hoped would give me connections, a late bid to stay matriculated and advocate for a revival of patronage. Throwing my money around to appease my interior pretensions which do not translate among ambulatory eclectic whites was a failure. I do not belong to this clique, not that anyone would tell me so. I smiled at old women and brayed "I am a failed writer and failed scholar hoping to connect...." Yet dimly, I could see what it must have been like when the upper crust in the city of Philadelphia was less egalitarian.
Egalitarianism is actually somewhat disgusting. "There he is laughing," I observed to the director when young Lance appeared as one might have envisioned Nicholas Nickleby in evening dress. The young and charming Lance kindly got me cheese cubes. I talked about my imbalance couched in a vivacious scatter; he talked about the exhibit, his fellowship. Why am I here? A reverberating outcry not just about the fascinating and oddly a little off world at Delancey Plaza, but how the fuck my life ended up in a very small circumference of a center city grid, my alienation being relieved by compassionate blondes whose grooming makes me feel like vermin, but I could not tell Dana she did not have to obviate my discomfort. I am not so much pointing to lack of inclusion in the activist sense, but about belonging, knowing where you belong, and I guess Aunt Evelyn and cousins Frankie and Robin surfaced to my vocal cords because Evelyn, who is Jewish, would have fit right in with her coif, waddles, her progeny.
And yet, and yet-- something in me finds this little microcosmic preserve of old world caste fascinating and satisfying to the pretensions I harbor. Brilliant and insane?
"Maybe it's both," young Lance suggested in accommodating fashion.
I stabilized my old Quickie on the charger at approximately 4:38 AM Monday morning, flicked through Browning, struggled to drift off. Cats stalked me awake at noon, and the charger was still going. I waited until two and then had to get down to business, washed in desultory fashion, droned to lack of inspiration by my own weakness, why am I doing this if I am already bored?
How can I explain the struggle with palsied muscular contraction to those who are fortunately limber, or under thirty? It takes me 50 to 70 minutes to get stretch slacks on over flaccid toneless shins and flaccid toneless buttocks, heft and pull, heft and pulling, biting my lip in pain, essentially taking me all day to appear at a scheduled and a somewhat laconical event where I was already a known and disruptive element in horridly old sneakers, because I told a staffer of whom I had no clear memory that I would make an effort.
Make an effort indeed. So this is what I hoped would give me connections, a late bid to stay matriculated and advocate for a revival of patronage. Throwing my money around to appease my interior pretensions which do not translate among ambulatory eclectic whites was a failure. I do not belong to this clique, not that anyone would tell me so. I smiled at old women and brayed "I am a failed writer and failed scholar hoping to connect...." Yet dimly, I could see what it must have been like when the upper crust in the city of Philadelphia was less egalitarian.
Egalitarianism is actually somewhat disgusting. "There he is laughing," I observed to the director when young Lance appeared as one might have envisioned Nicholas Nickleby in evening dress. The young and charming Lance kindly got me cheese cubes. I talked about my imbalance couched in a vivacious scatter; he talked about the exhibit, his fellowship. Why am I here? A reverberating outcry not just about the fascinating and oddly a little off world at Delancey Plaza, but how the fuck my life ended up in a very small circumference of a center city grid, my alienation being relieved by compassionate blondes whose grooming makes me feel like vermin, but I could not tell Dana she did not have to obviate my discomfort. I am not so much pointing to lack of inclusion in the activist sense, but about belonging, knowing where you belong, and I guess Aunt Evelyn and cousins Frankie and Robin surfaced to my vocal cords because Evelyn, who is Jewish, would have fit right in with her coif, waddles, her progeny.
And yet, and yet-- something in me finds this little microcosmic preserve of old world caste fascinating and satisfying to the pretensions I harbor. Brilliant and insane?
"Maybe it's both," young Lance suggested in accommodating fashion.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Wandering Rock
...the individual brain, even if outstanding, was lagging farther and farther below the dizzy peak which science and technology in their totality had reached.-- Alexander Blade
Part of the reason I chaff over Ulysses is that I plod, not making the time for an autopsy of due diligence, and should not have then spent the money, though it went to a good cause, as I am the child of the aesthetic underdog, but something about the Joycean idiolect gives me epileptic seizures, and this goes back to my reading of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when money wasn't my primary concern. Perhaps it is not important that I grasp it for you right now, why Marcel Proust is soul food and Joyce is an orbital emergency to battle. I should be able to appreciate the subversive characteristics of the leprechaun, and do, but there is an undercurrent of antagonism when I enter Joyce, as if I am being conned. With Sterne this is central. Frustrated expectations essentially serve as the reader's antagonist in this early post modern exploit, which I read, reread, never seem to finish, poor Shandy, still waiting for me to allow his mum to enter into labor, but it takes me more and more of an effort to accomplish my goals, brushing my now dry and brittle hair, hour and a half to dress, and that on a good day. I am wasting too much time, but if you go, and my physiology allows, I will see you here:
Part of the reason I chaff over Ulysses is that I plod, not making the time for an autopsy of due diligence, and should not have then spent the money, though it went to a good cause, as I am the child of the aesthetic underdog, but something about the Joycean idiolect gives me epileptic seizures, and this goes back to my reading of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when money wasn't my primary concern. Perhaps it is not important that I grasp it for you right now, why Marcel Proust is soul food and Joyce is an orbital emergency to battle. I should be able to appreciate the subversive characteristics of the leprechaun, and do, but there is an undercurrent of antagonism when I enter Joyce, as if I am being conned. With Sterne this is central. Frustrated expectations essentially serve as the reader's antagonist in this early post modern exploit, which I read, reread, never seem to finish, poor Shandy, still waiting for me to allow his mum to enter into labor, but it takes me more and more of an effort to accomplish my goals, brushing my now dry and brittle hair, hour and a half to dress, and that on a good day. I am wasting too much time, but if you go, and my physiology allows, I will see you here:
A dinner to benefit Bloomsday | ||||||
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