Immaculate Conceptions

"The lady was ugly!"-- Wilkie Collins

Ms. Ellen Muth is not so insulated in the problems of celebrity that she couldn't reach back out, which she did, liking my tweet in my praise of her character. One small pleasure in a crippled writer's twilight. I quite unwittingly sent an anti-lesbian poem-- one which was once much larger and ambitious in scope, to a Peter Pan pixie faggot in a no nothing literary journal I decided to briefly grace with my attention. Old august potentates do that. Allen Ginsberg, a more mercurial fruit in his time, appears with me in Big Scream, which was also nothing, lithographed pages in a binder. [I could have met the celebrated beatnik with Jerry, and very conscientiously passed on the opportunity.] What game am I playing?

In the mechanism of not paying attention, just keeping busy, and if I accidentally blow torch a progressive anus along the way, provocative victory is salivating, as I am starving and desperately in need of an inhale, I am taking a risk, partially charged, running to the bank early, hoping the entitlement is there. Ravenous seems to induce hyper sexual restoration. Don't ask, but in thinking of Nick Denton doing what I didn't, I am fairly confident Michael Washington would have slept with me. I was burning; he knew it, and if I had kept a lid on it and he had fraternized with me over a drink, I would have become a human stain. Padre would have killed me while I was even in the process of drilling the mixed race fetus out of my vaginal cavity. The fuck of the century would have ruined my life.

But while I am here, a 19th century literature reader defended Collins as a sympathetic advocate of the impaired. It was a defense to my liking, made me reconsider Collins stature against Dickens. I hear the censorious roar of protest in my ears, but I simply cannot stomach Dickens, prefer his less illustrious contemporaries, and understand why Henry James made valiant efforts to undermine the prodigious Victorian novelist of Great Expectations, (The only Dickens work I like, though my Signet edition is misplaced).

Squibs

The Dickensian Christmas, with its cozy homes, hearty dinners, and festive pleasures, is the embodiment of the Victorian Christmas.-- Tom Pold

Why the mostly antithetical relationship to the voice of Dickens? It goes back early, to the guilty imposition of presence on my academic adviser. Michael had a soft spot for Dickensian caricature, exaggerations of type. I had not yet read Casamassima, not between 82 to 85, but the Jamesian attack in this flagging middle years novel embodies some of my hostility to Dickens and type. Do you believe the modern world is any less brutal than what Oliver Twist conveys about the welfare state in the Victorian era? 

My appreciation of Polanski's distinctions as an auteur come late. I did not know before 2009 that I would be setting up this topic, failing, remaining stubborn, but his interpretation of the famous tale seems uneasy. Jump cut to pastoral abstraction. By a certain hour, my temperature belies my artistry and legacy and though I hope NBC or another network runs the film again to save me the trouble, I stopped viewing after the caning. Perhaps a reflection of my intolerance for the genius of Dickens himself. I have ground to a halt in the opening chapters of Our Mutual Friend. It is the giant's voice slightly muted. I started it for a reading group thread on TLN, before the owner banned me for life (isn't this shit silly?), and trying to get through it is analogous to slicing lethargy for lard substitution. The decline of Christmas itself may be tied to the waning influence of Dickensian sentimentality. his over the top melodrama for the death of figurines like Dora, his horrific grief for prostitutes. Defenders would argue he did clear the brambles for progressive social justice.

One could also look at the family tree of influences and turn away, dismayed. 

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.