Eliot Page and Virtual Fiction

 He had to rent all the hotels-- John Dos Passos

Many years ago there was a PBS documentary on nomadic fishermen drowning a dugong to death for its food, and in terms of human cruelty to marine life, it was relatively sanguine. Gaunt and impoverished Filipinos need to eat, but the capture stays with me. The dugong was helpless. The men didn’t have to hold it beneath the shallow waters to drown it and lift it into the miserable dinghy to carve it up for very long. It was substantially larger than what the dugong hunters and turtle carvers do here, and yes, please pity the large sea turtle, even though environmentalists always rather lead naïve Americans to conclude the native and indigenous people are barbarians at the mercy of the Australian press. In terms of whose competing interests are more justified, these examples represent why I am not a species optimist, never will be, and conclude that evolutionary mechanisms overcompensated human success in my carnivalesque fun and games with excrement over 50 in this miserable last decade of a ferocious battle lost in the will to live. Fairly soon, given our outrageous numbers, the ineptitude of social media’s populism, China’s centrist methods will overtake all but small communities in enclaves centrism cannot quite control, and individuals such as myself will be euthanized, but avoiding extinction? Slowing a man-made climate crisis? Perhaps my physiology is over-reacting to the non-existent Eliot Page insisting it’s a transgender male. It took a small effort to realize I was familiar with the face of Ellen Page and viewed Juno casually, not enough to engage with it as an armchair critic, but these bait and gender switches are magic, aren’t they? If I desire to walk, it turns out, all I have to do is assert I can walk, and orthopedic specialists can loop straps under my armpits, and quadriplegia then doesn’t exist. This is the totalitarianism and deceit of trans identity.

Flesh Fair: Quest In the Design

Vladimir Nabokov uses a narrative framework similar, but upgraded, to that which Conrad developed with such success. It is an omniscient framework within a framework, like a boxed set of novels that make up a franchise, only on a smaller scale. It is a technique that opens Lolita with blaring trumpets, in the incident report which summarizes the death of all the parties involved. (You might be surprised to know that I do not own a copy of the novel extant, but for me this is not a must have addition to my personal library, not under the duress of my present circumstances. I'm hostile to it as a masterpiece for reasons I shall not tackle here.) It is also present, but in softer fashion, in the earlier title, The Luzhin Defense. I have not seen the film, nor am I ready to view it, though some brief capsule skims convey the disappointment of reviewers; nor am I going to discuss the novel in great detail, except to say that one of its major motifs seems to be that if humans do not search for transcendence in religion, or even divinity, we still search for it through mastery of patterns and formal structures, which is a dystopian subtext when we take up androids, cyborgs, and robots in science fiction, the crux of the matter coming down to a dichotomy between personhood and a set of programmed responses, like kimmy using her piglet self to lie down on the keyboard when cynical adoptive parent is on a roll. I wonder if she'll inadvertently reformat the HP for me. Sulking, she is snuggled with Vinnie on the Quantum, so adorable we should all just die and cede the field to felines, and this too cute moment makes me regret that I cannot join marshmallow heads and upload another 7 billion cat pictures online, and tongue ties me when I say "She's not Joey!" Joey was special in that marshmallow overweening sentiment so very and extraordinarily difficult  to define. He feared all ambulatory humans except those in wheelchairs, and suspect my aunt rushed him and his surviving sibling to me because something happened that instilled fear that left its imprint, at least on the deceased. Spielberg uses the same framework technique in A.I., almost, suggesting that in the end all we can hope for is that testament will survive, but this is an obdurate, romantic review of machine (and man) over the brutal realism of evolution before our eyes. What transforms particles into Being is beyond the scope of our own CPU's to understand, and I am highly skeptical that a mechanical device will ever evolve in the Darwinian sense, although I am less skeptical, and almost alarmed, that through mimicking microbiological processes, we will create artificial life. It scares me, as even cloning sheep and cows seems to create vulnerable immune systems as a residual effect of losing sexual division.

In mulling my quite exasperated conscience, I do not really want to explore the dark side of attendant care too much in this account, and Tim is better than much of the trash I've dealt with, past tense, but the system, designed toward de-institutionalization, is still a highly charged source of class conflict. Tim is basically a good man, and if I could walk, he would not exist for me, unless I was a paternalistic globe trotter like Niall Ferguson or Nicholas Kristof. Do those of you who can balance on the balls of your feet ever think about it? I have no organic sense of what it feels like. I accept it as a fact, our bipedalism, but I can feel my lungs expanding; I'm intimate with what it is to breathe. Walking was ever and only an approximation, and an exercise in pain, as indeed, is much of what mobility I do have.