Okinawa Transcendentals

Still, the destitute haven't been completely cut out of the oil bonanza. Chavez has funneled a portion of the windfall to provide an army of social services--ranging from free eye surgery to literacy classes--in the poorest neighborhoods. --Alexandra Starr, Letter from Caracas, spring 2007, The American Scholar

Fortunately for Dr. Dollyne, I do not feel well enough to roll upstairs to the community room to sow discord. She is scheduled to speak here at Riverside about race and disability roughly an hour from the time of this post being in composition. Her Institute sounds slightly along the order of black national socialism, and, if I am this close to making myself homeless to leave the grasp of this company, I'd achieve nothing by utilizing my anger to incite a bunch of enfeebled Adventist grizzled bitches and their warders. Presby has augmented my trauma for many years, and Trudy, if this gets back to you, none of your actions changes the fact that I have lived in Riverside under duress for many years before you came to the helm, and you've treated me yourself no better than Fatso treats Maggio. The line between Borgnine as a sadist with a truncheon and your threats, verbally and otherwise, isn't that wide, my aunt even affirming it.

"How you think they'd treat you?" She screeches.

Trudy Richardson has a job to do, people to answer to, and thus, cripples wind up like this cult hero, exterminated rather than lynched.

It takes a different feminine imagination than mine to understand the appeal of Montgomery Clift. It is as if a studio mogul said hey we finally found a fruit who makes women twit and cluck. Shelley Winters once claimed Clift was "a little AC/DC." More than a little. The entire film seems like an S&M fantasy, here to eternity. Never realized how well Frank could do a pansy ass, and he really looks like one with Maggio. Shudder. The novel and the film both rate comparison with Mailer's The Naked and The Dead. Ennui, boredom, repressed pathologies, against type.

Alexandra is a deft, dare I say luminous writer, but she miscalculated the fortunes of Chavez by a significant margin. The CIA dusted off its Castro file and actually achieved its goal, spastic writes with a margin of pleasurable derision. I think I will attempt to go to Texas. As badly as I want to acclimate to Tuscany, my body would not withstand the stress. We'll see.

Even if I cut and run in desperation, I need a storage facility, and a place for the cats, so on. The Lone Star has border issues, drought, and red meat to kazoo, but torturing my father, who does not care, "it's big," I pleaded. My need to leave is visceral, and I am not availed of this diet so I too can yield to the Stepford model.

Time to pitch, if I am not being black balled, but how paranoid is that?

Fangs In The Profiteroles

Set in my styles with a beady eye,
I got connections with the underground.-- Bernie Taupin, Caribou


Eddie and Alice Rico are a fortunate couple in their connubial bliss, but the underlying tensions fray their marital complicity almost immediately into the opening of the film. There is anxiety about the adoption (acquisition) of a child to flesh out their near wealthy status as a 50's family was then defined. There is the argument, not successfully suppressed, about the telephone call Eddie receives about harboring your traditional Americana thug, and the untimely meeting with Gino, the revelations of which you would tend to think would make a pack rat imitator wary. Perhaps it does, but if so, Karlson takes the time to show us how Conte keeps it under wraps with one of his truckers who recently had a child himself (no aura of victimization here, not overtly) until he then gets the call from Kubik.

IMBd, user generated, lists the film as shot on location in Miami, seemingly accurate, given the atmosphere of seediness, something that plagues the eastern corridor of the US well into the 20th century, Philadelphia, DC, and the entire state of Florida in particular. This is the state where Sherman (I wrote Grant in error when first published) tracked down indigenous Seminoles for being threats to civil order some years prior to the fictitious panorama of our civil war, but our plastique Disneyland peninsula, not quite the paradise it is cracked up to be, forms an interesting vector between our agrarian and cosmopolitan norms, as well as the subculture of the American mafia, which has yet to be truly demythologized, and will not be by me to any great extent. I cannot speak for Sicily, as my family, on both sides of its peasant roots, is Tuscan, though we interbred with Austrian officiers and thus have a strain of finer bloodlines, not an uncommon thing in the modern struggle for Italian unification.

I am now as sick as the proverbial dog, and suppose this can serve as your intermission and a place to pause in my labyrinth. I missed the Joyce group Saturday without meaning to despite my poorly stated petulance, shaking a defiant fist. I thought tossing my money at patronage would be a good thing for me, without meaning, inadvertently, to recreate a tepid link back to Temple University, and the young instructor is, as I have written, affable, but I am not forming any real sense of acquaintance with the men and women who also pitched their Joyce pennies, and though I am the dumbest shit in the world for sinking myself in quicksand in my various rationales for thinking I'd succeed in an urban environment, I could have plotted my own study of Ulysses had I wished, without spending 500 dollars for a future essay on which I am likely to earn only a forth of that back. I am not claiming that I have Lance's resources or skills, but as a metafiction, the text is not all that intimidating, and like any other classicist, I would have found my way. To paraphrase Charlotte Stant, making myself stupid, in this instance, would have been a virtue. I have to rest and decide if I am well enough for the 6 PM session.

Convalescent postscript: I have yet to read Grant's memoirs, and I meant General Sherman from the start, but I was multi-tasking, getting a huge attack of bronchitis, thinking about Joyce. This is why I substituted the future victorious drunkard scandal riven Ulysses for his more ruthless and efficient understudy.

Cranly's Arm

I may have been inadvertently misleading when I linked my dismissive sentiments about Irish folklore to my fading mentor Jerry. That hostility came about because I made a serious misjudgement about staying in a graduate level course with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. He did not want to pass me and I did not want to do the work. His ego and and my weariness with a life of protective campus cubic journeys collided, and it turned out that I had exceeded my credits to get out. I booted with the skin of my teeth. Interacting with him was the worst experience of my life, and I sold everything related to the class, no acrimony intended. I enrolled thinking one thing and he expected a dissertation on folklore, I cannot remember, and would have dropped it, spared myself a burning shame, but the government, well meaning, dissuaded me. He'd no doubt suspect I'm a fatal masochist tackling Joyce. I can hear a sharp "ach" out there in Dublin. Do eighty-four year old's use apps?

I may have also been hasty dismissing the labor of Ulysses, reminding myself that Lance is a young teacher who is not grading me and will not have the same level of expectation. I am driving myself here, maybe stupidly-- in my deepest insecurity, I am just a cripple to be patronized, right? But driving myself to leave at least one critical, worthwhile observation behind me before I can no longer, and Joyce had valid reasons to obfuscate in his allusions, burying what at the time was a radical subversion. I did study his pre- Ulysses output and will reluctantly have to reread Portrait, meanwhile researching Mia's past as if I was Faustis with a ms. You can blame that on the anniversary of the scandal cracking the scarred and mortally wounded poet back open. I am hoping since she rears disabled children that she will allow me journalistic access, poem or no poem, she was certainly proto-anorexic to Frank's quasi-mid December impotence. If any of you have any tips on how I can access the film Secret Ceremony (68) [not silent, apologies, retention error] without renewing my Netflix account, do pass it along; if you have streamed it on hula without many technical issues, for instance. New York Magazine's feature is the investigative journalism that would suture my wormwood, but here I sit; it also in its own way obfuscates the truth, or lack thereof, of humans trapped in these celebrity casements. I'll leave you there this morning.