Sushi's Thumping Heart

As a former penny ante reviewer, Steven Hall evinces my generational divide from Ali Spagnola or Ben Landis. I am not very far along in The Raw Shark Texts, and am more likely to conclude from Wiki's summary that since I now know the end I can slough it off in my archives, which I haven't, but I read it as a generic identity crisis which doesn't interest me, as all literature falls under the cult of allusion, and linear narrative doesn't lend itself in a particularly conducive fashion to easter eggs. A  British woman from the LNF whose user name I cannot remember, an indicator of serious trouble if my life depended on it, posted to me that she liked the book, but that was long long before I started it.

Hall knows how to build up tension which creates life threatening suspense, and yours truly is not necessarily asserting he's bad at what he's doing, but it seems more or less hyped up correspondences, whatever it challenges about individual identity. I'm only as far along as the busted television, and the heavy handed references to drowning, and haven't caught up any overt parallels to Benchley on my own, one successful author freely ventilated by academics, but the occult enthusiasm for this kind of thing just isn't up my alley. Hyperlink exuberance may give Ev Williams and his predecessors a hard on, but computer technology is just that, a technology. It made certain things possible, detracts from contemplation, and search has certainly amplified my inferiority complex.

Now this guy is another matter. Nakamura is a master story teller, and I yanked your chain however many decades of posts back by pretending I was going to offer up a critical analysis. Consider it a soft lede toward  that actuality against the twenty and change in my checking account. I am going to upload to KDP soon, as I have little choice but to utilize Amazon as vending vanity, and if I ask on social media about the timeliness of payments, my empty stomach is the primary impetus.

I was rather dramatically "banned for life" from Beasley's precious tutorial services, and just re-signed myself in, after four years or so. I've no idea why I've done this, as Beasley is from Michigan and posts like Donald Trump's bobble head. I've come to terms with an internalized hatred of public posting software, and suppose this falls under the rubric of because I can. I hate kids, college students fare little better. That's masochism for you.

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. 

Austrian Perocet

An ordinary matter. Law is law.
Noblemen were exempt, the vulgar thought,
From racking, but, since law thinks otherwise,
I have been put to the rack-- Count Guido Franceshini

Sixsmith, for an avatar, had a persuasive critical ability within the forum community. I do not know if he is still a part of Chris Beasley's rigid, insecure, and unjust virtual authoritarian play land, nor do I know his gender for sure, but he is a gifted critic who I believe respected my faculties as long as I kept my cyber sexual fancies to a minimum, and in one thread he asked me what I thought of Musil's posthumous, inconclusive masterpiece.

What I'd be able to convey to Six, in light of what I've written in Spirometry, is that Musil also deliberately engages in evasion within the massive tome that comprises Ulrich'es adventurous sexual escapades. It took an Austrian soldier to flush out Henry James jibe to Howells about publishing a story on incest, and at nearly two thousand pages, Henry James would have delighted in Musil's prolificacy. The Man Without Qualities is also the first modern novel to feature what we now categorize in the terms of psychopathy, the predator Moosbrugger. Beyond this assessment, I cannot offer more, at present, since I will be rereading, slowly, as I am rereading Broch, slowly, except to add that the gaming of Robert Musil is more accomplished than anything James Joyce indulges through linguistic playfulness. The great modernists lived through or anticipated WW1; perhaps WW2 killed them because they could not prevent it, despite realizing the consequences of European implosion, and why these men of genius could not recognize the rise of Fascism on the continent and try to stop it remains a mystery. Scholars laud Joyce for Leopold Bloom's metamorphosis, but the reductionist and incisive cruelty of Joycean humor makes me recoil, in light of the horror that launched itself upon the world past the publication of Ulysses. Unlike my former transvestite ally, (and whatever you read in this picture, s/he is a crook) I assign blame; it may be a heavy onus to put on a failed Jesuit with his own vulnerabilities couched in grandiloquence, but Joyce knew better, yes, even for circa 1922, and this is what sticks in my throat. Walt Whitman believed Leaves of Grass would prevent the Civil War. What Joycean frolic with Antisemitism  achieves is the laying of a red carpet for a bloodbath. 

This is no reflection on Lance Walhert; he is a competent instructor; neither is this a reflection on the Rosenbach. It was good to get out, good to engage, despite that my intellectual restlessness needs to push further than a paid discussion group, and if you were wise, and entered a profession like engineering for financial security, but always wanted to read Moby Dick, outsourced class structures such as this would satisfy you, as they did Cassie in the what's cooking pic. She is the gamy legged woman I rolled with now and again, a gimp Annie Proulx would have enjoyed subverting.

Cheers to Ylan Q. Mui

Thank you for your article Ylan, for it represents the predicament in which Linda C. Dezenski left me twelve years ago, and now my lung issues leave me too much further impaired to undo the damage; more than likely I am now going to decline worse than any animal mortally injured in its habitat, which leaves me empty handed but for this age old question about the human condition.

I cannot apply for a hardship exception anymore, and that is my fault for being honest with the lawyer assigned to me during my bankruptcy hearing. I told the lawyer about my mother's death leaving an uexpected windfall from insurance, and the lawyer was not happy with me, as a practical matter. She and I could have applied for hardship, and I probably would have won, but I told her about my mum. I did not want to be prosecuted by the state for fraud had I not spoken, but you know, I begin to feel as if I might have succeeded in life with a criminal record, and I am starting to giggle on the verge of insanity, to steal a direct phrase from Henry James.

My conditions are bad, but not as dire as when my mother died, and before you ask, I wound up having to use most of those funds for medical bills, and to pay Tim for not having the time to take care of me very well. I'd like to stop using him altogether, but professional cleaning services would cost more, and inflame my bronchial issues just the same. Would you like a dark anecdote? Do you have a choice?

My colon erupted, little more than a half hour behind this paragraph; it felt like a decent half gallon of paste, with all the phlegm I have been producing, and that eruption would have been an accident, but I had a chuck liner stuck to my thigh, and that caught the opening discharge, like a loose diaper, spared the worst. I got lucky, in a sense, but I will never get better, and so Chris Beasley bans my account @ the literature network because I tried to approach him on the fact that I was ill, but could he pay me for the work he accepted, and this discussion constituted an attack.

You know what I think it constitutes? Spastic_dowager absorbs a great deal of punishment, whatever else I am guilty of. Posting frequency does effect concentration, and I tried to limit my usage before I crossed swords with the big kahuna, not become too invested, but did anyway, but how far we go with banning online accounts makes me wonder. I did not threaten to sue Mr. Beasley, though I will soon file a discrimination claim against him, because some of those virtual connections mattered to me. I never harassed or attacked any poster, nor emailed them to talk, though I did make a few research requests from young and healthier instructors, and I never consciously attempted to violate their rules, nor given an *infraction*. I know about this from live meeting three members, and in short I'm tired of being punished like this.