Braque Boxes

James once suggested to William Dean Howells that he should consider publishing a story on incest.  --Michael C Clark, shoulder ghost

I may not have had the diction on hand then that I have available today, but even before my father smashed my stereo to avoid smashing me, and there were several of those instances, signifying the luck of the draw that my immediate family wasn't subject to annihilation, I knew in my pre-collegiate days that Pete Townshend's solo smash was too effective as a corrosive force on my naivete. Elton and Bernie may have dangled homoerotic lyrics like a choice pork medallion, but they did it with an adolescent simplex. Townshend is darker in Empty Glass, a sick perverted bastard if ever there was one, and yet, in the musical traditions that fermented British rock, the album is a work of art, much like Birth of the Nation put the movie industry on the map due to its technical accomplishments, despite the ferocity of its repressions. Blomkamp speaks to this aesthetic complicity in District 9. He was speaking my language before my blogging unwittingly gave voice to my somewhat unrealized convictions, before I butted heads with secular liberalism, whether Zionist, academic, or LBGT.

The plot does have certain inexplicable elements. Christopher seems to be a lone intelligence amid a swarm of alien idiots who cognate slightly better than great apes, and Copley's Wikus survives a paranoid military of a paranoid government and its equally brutal gangland counterpart, but that given, it is a film that has caught up with what it is possible to achieve in science fiction when authors treat the genre with respect. In watching Blomkamp's mock analysts, we see reinforced how our own analysts stand as a bulwark, giving power the benefit of the doubt. When the Petraeus scandal broke, David Brooks gaffed, sitting in his Newshour chair, "I had lunch with him [the general] last week."

This signifies that Brooks gets access in the Beltway, but little else in what the public should know, could know, about the people we pay to run our governments; District 9 signifies this -- it is a film  integral to Africaan guilt (and those Dutch polyglots should feel guilty) but applicable to the rest of us. It is honest in its view that the legal collapse of apartheid does not magically fuse Europeans and Africans like Siamese twins, although Henry Louis Gates, whose chip on the shoulder practically vibrates, says we are all biologically African! How can caste subjugation be so pervasive? Gates makes Rand's ideological lunacy seem sympathetic.

Blomkamp should have won the best foreign film Oscar, but that would have been risky, an anti-establishment gateway.

Breaking Away

As an undergraduate, when I reached Circe I stopped reading.-- my intrepid Ulysses group facilitator, Lance.

I have also entertained the possibility of returning to Ridley Park. The borough was my last suburban territory before I ran, so unsuccessfully, from the block where I listened to Townsend's album so often mio padre stormed out of his bedroom and abused my stereo, smashing it, while I was reading a community college instructor's critique of one of my grandiose hand written stories. "I have no one to help me pack," I interrupted my neighbor Ed last week, and it is petty obstacles like this with which I am making myself ill. Ed is mildly befuddled by my need, my sheer urgency, to get the holy motherfucking hell away from this company, from African American stoic indolence.

It does not surprise me that Joyce had a daughter with schizophrenia. Ulysses is in many ways symptomatic of the illness, just as the novel itself foreshadows the ailments of the Lost Generation. Zelda was the flowering wound that made Scott the voice of the Jazz Age, and nearly all of Fitzgerald's output speaks to me as much through my Aunt Cecily as through my own creative intuition. Cecily was in the twenties as much as her sister Pauline was in the cloister. Telling you that I hate Joyce bothers me less than the fact that my preferences have passion, but I disservice myself by emoting it that simply, since there is much in Joyce with which I identify.

I told Lance not to read my account on Blogger, despite handing him my Amazon download page, lamely, but should he surf by, I am four and a half chapters behind, in Sirens, so it seems evident that spastic has had her fill of literary class instruction, ne c'est pas? Lance is the talent of the next generation, a kind, decent young man who yields to the humorous impulse. I am not in equal measure a decent and dignified old woman: we always continue learning, but with deceleration of a half century and the twilight of my ambition ahead, no more school, however lax the simulation. 

This posits the urgency. I cannot make Ed see it, that without a relocation, my moral compass will collapse. I need to make this happen this season, and if the drama of my sanity hinges on my failure or success, you'll no doubt read to tell the tale.

Exeunt With The Bear

I'm like a connoisseur of champagne cognac, the perfume nearly beats the taste. Pete Townsend, Empty Glass

I spent a very unproductive day chasing after these Tuesday, trapezing on Locust, which I rarely do, kicking myself over my imposing introduction to @PhillyTechGuy. Could have cut my crisis time in half. Possibly saved a few dollars. Getting laid momentarily crossed my mind; their pitch is accurate, however, and the store seems pleasant. Do I ever drop my pretense?

I was not as invested in Dorner's issues as my posts on the event he posed may seem to indicate, not in terms of taking him off the beat and assessing his impaired judgment, but had he escaped it would have been thrilling. The DC sniper scared the living shit out of the east coast. I was there, and like a substantial minority in the media, I thought the US faced the possibility of an insurrection. Muhammad's death was nearly sanctifying in light of that possibility. Dorner's? Idiotic. It seems apropos then that I came in a little late to The Following. Better production values than the CW's tacky rival. Bacon when he is on, solidly grounded. Emma is an elfin echo of Mia Farrow. Muhammad could have had an insurrection; he was methodical enough, cold enough, and this is what made the true aspect of humanity's universal tendency to close ranks behind authoritarianism rear its head against Dorner. He was one of the very few who could boast leverage; he succeeded in illustrating that but had no real contingency thought out so that the abused, the wronged, the angry, could have united behind him. I certainly would have, all things being equal, had he truly applied his intelligence as opposed to raving on FB. Many courageous historians point out, accurately, that the US is democratic in its rhetoric, and tyrannical in practice, re: the moment I committed to paper that I would be seeking legal action against my landlord, they started leaving me alone. After 28 years of dictation on how they want me to live, Presby and their regulators have gone mute, one, because they are fully aware that in their book, spastic has no civil liberties, and two, they are up to no good, so I really need a public housing attorney. Injuries may magnify, but sometimes they have legitimate cause, and my pain is in part a reaction against black bigotry, with their white managers pulling the strings. Presby suits are far more fearsome than Catholic molesters. Let Karen chaw a pithy tweet out of that contention.