Cooksey Conveyance, Secondary Submissions

How frozen and how faint I then became,
Ask me not, reader! for I write it not;
Since words would fail to tell thee of my state.
I was not dead nor living.--La Divina Commedia, Canto 34.22-26

Since I do not have the wherewithal to play detective and find the contact information for Jon Cooksey's production company that he runs with his spouse, Ali Marie Matheson, which is less awkward than my full name written long, this is an open post to the couple, for the time being, to advocate for The Collector's return, perhaps as a digital exclusive for Amazon Prime members, even if Chris Kramer isn't available, we could reinvent the wheel. I am not sure if my viewers on Blogger know that I was approached by the casting directors of the Exorcist franchise to play the institutionalized cripple in distress against Linda Blair, but I was, when I lived at Rusk. Decent place, but those same domicile old maidens who field American case management systems like the plague, then as now, prevented me from earning some decent money for college tuition. The evil cripple syndrome is what led Presby, and its hypocritical motherfuckers, to attack me ceaselessly in the 28 years they have been my landlord, so why not take a shot at being Satan? A cold and chilling inanimate Satan, the way Dante Alighieri properly conceived its menace. We could use exacerbations for high brow special effects. What is hell, after all, but a chronic obstruction?

Your original series wasn't perfect. Something about that pinched Canadian mien, care worn, genteel, submissive, leaves your actors at a loss, like the monastery abbot in 1348 A.D. While it may be true you have roughly fifty minutes of air time, you seemingly overlooked the power of the cardinals who burned the damned during the Inquisition. Morgan Pym's keepers did not provide much of a contest against evil. Yet it is equally true your vision was more realistic, bleaker than your American counterparts who also dabble in the genre. Maya was a brave child of incest. This would probably place you in agreement with Jessica Valenti.

Some may not be comfortable viewing women as an oppressed class across the spectrum, and certain issues surrounding domestication, and the stodgy matron upholding propriety, this may undercut how Ms Valenti frames sexism in sociological terms. Then again, I haven't been shy about the price of my survival, which has included homosexual vicissitudes, as well as female on female and minority victimization. And then there's this charming buzz bit. WTF indeed, or is aborting for sex selection more sinister still?

My caustic tongue seems quaint in comparison. This is why we need a revival of your series, and its struggle for a moral center; if I can generate enough interest to bring it out of mothballs give me a buzz. I'd like to recoup on my quashed foray into the industry.

Convex, Concave

"Our friendship is an ethical responsibility."-- Robert Sean Leonard


The confluence of spiritual beliefs is handled with the appropriate level of reverence in the Dreamer episode of The Collector, and the high camp gives way to a more authentic sincerity, at least momentarily. For all the differences between American and Canadian mien, however, Cooksey is at once more honest and more subversive than his muscled friend to the south. The indigenous natives were notoriously screwed by European conquest in the northern hemisphere, which recalls to me the interesting demands by the British Empire for the creation of an Indian Free State during treaty negotiations as the war of 1812 came to a close, the victor inconclusive. Clever ploy by the mother country to slow the expansion of American land consolidation, that was pissed away in a murky conflict that seemingly had no raison d'etre. Not that my favorite Scott would give me a hand here, but I'll take a clever grad student, as I am interested in expanding my history studies. Not an encyclopedia like David Foster Wallace, I'm afraid.

Cooksey's subversion is the twist that makes the Chief a near megalomaniac who needs to retain his power at any cost, to the point of killing unborn fetuses, and this is so close to the real nature of the modern banality of human evil that the satiric goading of the Satan is left out in the denouement, although this is the standard the directors employ when Pym is victorious. Cooksey is much better at troping the classical God versus Lucifer struggle to contemporary significance than these guys.

I may expand on this later, but my lung is struggling this morning; I'm weak.

Molten Eggs

"You cannot enforce this deal with him;  he's deranged!"-- Chris Kramer, UFOlogy


The one last observation I have to offer about my curious conflation, for the time being, is that I am more forgiving of Marty's acquired prejudices against Muslims than the scofflaw that surrounded him at Harvard and his resignation from The New Republic over them. I was still very active on the TNR site at the time, and remember much of the salient details of the uproar, but Marty has been formed by his experiences much as I have been formed by mine, and he is as entitled as he is cultured, despite the fact that old age has turned him into a Mario Puzo character (and Michael, you successfully bored me to tears only two paragraphs in, despairing for my non-existent byline, alas!). Bigotry is never the sum total of anyone, even those less erudite and flaming in reaction. My experience with the disabled/LBGT activists has taught me this: betrayal is more important than the principles these activists purportedly stand for, that they have no honor, and that they will subvert anything to their own ends, including the Christian faith, or any doctrine, biological science, for that matter, and their minds are not so stable as the psychiatric shift warrants, and though I can be duped, I shall not reconcile with libertines simply because they wear dress clothes and imitate pedestrian modality. I have been too close, seen too many head games, whether or not they involved me, and hurt too often. Human homosexuality is not moral, nor blessed, nor spiritually sanctioned, virtuous.

It is subversive, psychologically twisted, indulgent, and gratuitous, even if its practitioners are happy, or have an untouchable A list status, or falls into queer genius, but I will deal with cultural and literary contributions at a later date.

Lament as I may that I have no fresh series to attach to, I have found rewards in the dead zone of cancellation, and I am finding The Collector of use, as I have mentioned in previous posts, and I hope someone in the industry one day attempts to reinvigorate it. The UFO episode was a decent bit of gamesmanship, and funny, to boot. I am not quite sure where Cooksey was taking all the threads, all the motifs within the mainframe, but suffice to say, I am mining the episodes that exist, and need to review the pilot once more. Remind me that I cannot wilt with surrender back into the literary journal entirely, but a great deal of that is sheer fatigue. 28 submissions a month on average down to two. Do you see what you are sapping out of me? Stingy lurkers, the lot of you.