La Vie As Giet Jaune Under The Specter of Article 13

In Paris, masked and hooded protesters picked up and hurled crowd barriers and other projectiles in running battles with police-- Les Miserables, redux

The failure of my Toshiba laptop in 17 did not directly affect my relationship with Writer’s Market. I was simply forced to miss my billing renewal date because of my hope for rescue from an over-valued computer technician. The Writer’s Market website never coded particularly well. Their emails reminding me of auto-renewal were sporadic, and the renew never took place, perhaps due to the fact that I purchased 24 month installments with quotidian regularity. I had to manually renew the use of their directory services, sometimes under the advisement of customer service through F+W’s 800 number, only to discover, late fall 17, that the website stopped accepting credit cards. Through necessity, setbacks mandated other options. I have let sleeping dogs lie, moving on, and Duotrope has better mastered the art of automated updates for creative writers--  psychologically I still live in the ecumenical adhesion to the newsprint directories that Writer’s Market and Dustbooks represented, and in fact have long contemplated a revisionist obituary for one time playwright Len Fulton, the demi-god of the independent presses which I have ever so reluctantly started to eschew. I did not mind coming up through them, like a rag time impresario, but I’ve begun to see, again reluctantly, that literary journals, bloviated as they are through their college department budgets, are as extraneous as decentralized independent living centers. My friend Robert Thomas is still committed to them, because like me, this is how he grew up, what he and I both were taught about publishing and generating content, and neither he nor I need directories to canvas and update information as much as we used to, but I spent a significant amount of time this morning galivanting through Newsweek pages looking for updated guidelines for freelancers, and this dinosaur brand is also somewhat diaphanous on the matter. Duotrope doesn’t list the publication due to said inconsistencies. Automation has definitively changed the landscape, but that doesn’t mean code itself isn’t a chimera. Twitter is increasingly embedding with traditional media outlets, but at its core, like Facebook, it is inherently unstable, wreaks havoc on human physiology. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stay adhered to it on a daily basis, and it is absolutely not helping me retain my grip on journalistic pretensions, even as a counterculture figure. Examples of that are Charlie Kirk, whom I culled off of Nick Gillespie. I followed Kirk for a while, and still read his tweets with recurring frequency, but find his ideological stridency tiring, even parroting. Facts are by and large contingent, but the retaliatory way in which Kirk uses those facts to defend the right at all costs is debatable. Candace Owens fares better in my esteem, but I cannot follow her lead. Old sows like myself aren’t telegenic. I cannot do podcasts, and if I even attempted it YouTube would have my head on a platter. If Writer’s Market is foundering, its corporate owners might take a page from Fee, which folded The Freeman, and cede the field to digital innovation.

Once upon a time, I was ready to defend Twitter against Milo. Not anymore. If Minnesota wanted to elect Omar to the House, then Minnesotans can reap what they in turn sow, but the same applies to Laura Loomer. Her fervor makes David Frum look relatively paltry. However, herein truly lie the seeds of our doom. If genocide is a form of political extremism brought about by reactionaries fueled by severe economic stresses, Loomer's post-Twitter insignia is a cosmetic mockery behind which looms Orwellian defeat.

Richard Burton's Alacrity of Overbite When The Sole Keynote is Rage

There is very little unsaid in Look Back in Anger. Jimmy Porter lashes out verbally at a huge variety of topics – the class system, American evangelists, Alison’s family, women in general, flamboyant homosexuals.

Every writer who has any degree of aspiration in the U.S. wants to get into The Atlantic and similar periodicals. The popular highbrows, interchanging bylines with senior fellows even, those minute analysts of detail, like Fallows, who effortlessly seams up space in The New Republic and The Atlantic, as easily as filtering sea water with gills, reserving a land organ lung for gulps of oxygen when hauling that reptilian ancestry on the beach. None of you have any idea how hard it was for me to once come as close as I did to both periodicals, though I wised up in my pre-internet era and ceased submitting my poetry to the magazine that made Henry James into a sub-academic gay decoder for the untutored. Anyone of pretension keeps the Atlantic in orbit, knows that James Bennet went to New York after Hitchens passed away, knows Frum took over, without necessarily caring how far this descendant of the Roman working class has fallen, in mortal combat with her marshmallow nigger aide on a daily basis. Conceivably, I could argue I am being abused by this man, verbally, daily, on the eve of the midterm results, Frum rather inconceivably tweets

A female friend just lost a job for being "difficult." As she narrated what had happened, it struck me: a difficult woman is one who asks for the things I get without having to ask for them.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) November 6, 2018

He was mocked, but my response was not satirical, rather a throbbing pulse of pain, none of you really give a fuck. I took the man off my feed, genuinely indignant, genuinely more than indignant. Given his paranoia over Trump's ostensible Manchurian qualities, I'd be persecuted for cruelty to Canadian expatriates if that poor mother Russian bear shredded his jugular in a particularly creative mortal gerrymander. Do you read this as a victimized outcry?  Maybe it is a sentiment we can expect from a Canadian blunderbuss who was 43's speechwriter. 
I only ever saw the black and white film version of Osborne's explosive movement drama, find it a consolation that Burton is somehow incapable of anything but a commanding grandeur, and in that, he's irreplaceable, even if cutting feminine love for him into the forbidden orifices is a trifle superlative, wishing that you might have a child and that it would die, the agony he created then triumphant over him. This wasn't the post I wanted to write this morning, obviously, but I'll toss out a discordant positron: The delightful optimism of Antonio Paris pleases me. He honors me, even if the alliance isn't everlasting.

Welcome Table Crusts

I just deleted over 80 emails from Yahoo, knowing that if I put Allison's pendulous list on web only I will cut down a great deal of being overwhelmed by deadlines; my disillusionment is so pervasive, however, that literary journals are making me nauseous, regardless of quality, and playing catch up with poetry and at least one non-fiction collection little alleviates my dun colored views. I'm sick of it. Don't even bother to tell editors I am so striated by economics that supporting them is a struggle. I no longer have time to read them all. I still respect The Atlantic, if not David Frum. What he triggers I am not certain of, but was more sympathetic to Bennet's down to earth sensibility. I still respect American Scholar, and just remembered I've conveniently forgotten my assignment, which, if the powers that be leave me in peace, I can refocus this weekend. (And KDP awaits)

About a year ago, I suppose Welcome Table Press was soliciting me. Did they interpret my voice as a variation on EB White? Do I genuinely generate that much content about writing? I forgot about my assignment because I have to psyche myself up to lie my way into getting a lawyer to sue Trudy Richardson's ass back to Raleigh. I know exactly what Sexton's victim was suffering when Sexton denigrated her dignity, killing her for an ATM card. I am never going to be able to re-generate enough income to keep myself safe from a fourth, fifth, minority attack. I know I'm going to get hurt again. They smell it on you.

Maggot Larvae

Where I first heard of David Frum? Perhaps Charlie Rose. Moderate conservatives like him always reign in Libertarian militancy toward the two party system with statements such as these. Once you get past a certain age, Brian's dictum evinces itself through politics. The laws of nature tend to repeat themselves. Frum is Douthat is Johan Norberg, is Niall Ferguson, and I happen to be an enthusiast of Ferguson's ideas.

Frum's chastisement presupposes that NSA and the Defense Department are powerful enough to keep rare specimens like myself in check. For a while, but I have serious doubts about what comes after the post-Obama era. I make the assumption that most of my viewers on the outside don't understand Medicaid Waiver services, what a lifetime of entitlement is like against ecumenical insistence on the inherent value of human life juxtaposed against medical warehouses like Inglis House, which belie such pluralistic niceties. Most of us don't dwell on beneath the surface insecurity all the time, not even I.

But I've lived it most of my life, and at 53, it threatens to suck me down the drain; this is the kind of rage which permeates revolutions, velvet, or otherwise. Remember Philip K. Dick's short story about android political candidates? Remember what it signified? But there was also what Dick didn't say about electing representatives, about the limits of political processes.

I'm living off my father's guilt at the moment, and don't like it, having come full circle, little spastic slum dog, repeating the same thing over again, like one of Patricia Highsmith's lesser known protagonists.

I'm never going to vaunt past the sterility of the welfare state, simply because I could not stay inside it to earn a living, and allowed you to read what a vicious maniac its scar tissue has maimed within me, to the tune of Google's reluctant unease. What do I have left to aspire to? Beneath the surface, the entitlement system is like a lava slide. Slow, molten, deceptively destructive. Heavy enough to make the West Wing's security apparatus as thin as a thimble.