Trivial Decadence: A brief Christmas Post

Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod. Diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin.--Against the Grain, Chapter 6

Kafka may have been skeptical of the midrash, but he succeeded in becoming a canonical author because biblical guilt carries over in his work. Scripture is two dimensional; Kafka is absurdly abstract in his cockroach as an extended metaphor of patriarchal judgment. Spastic has not read her St. Joseph's edition in a very long time, but remembers enough to know the Gospel of Mark presents Salmone as a collusionist to her mother's will. The queen wants the Baptist silenced, tells Salmone, less a figure of peace, more a hedonistic nullification, to dance for Herod. The rest gives way to Hollywood's variation on Apocrypha which is a disservice in the conflict between faith and rational progression.

In comparison to what we're beset with today, 1953 revisionists were a placid bunch, but the critics should have castigated Dieterle for casting Rita Hayworth as a clean run girl whose innocence is duped in an era of Gnostic flowering which created the second branch of monotheism. Getting a script past the censors is one thing. Transforming Semitic deviance into an American chorus line erases what the metaphysical conflict seeks to teach. Sexual gluttony perverts the gift of duty to a higher purpose, and Salmone, at least in the Baptist thread, seeks to subvert the coming of the Incarnate through offering appeasement to insatiable appetite. The Silent Generation as represented by mio padre may be dying off, but one thing which hasn't changed in all these years, keeping tempo on the American scene, is how shallow we are as a nation. Huysmans may be cloying, and claustrophobic, but he doesn't walk away from the threat of annihilation which sensory fulfillment poses, and narratives from a camera should never be the last word.

Hayworth had a troubled life in her later years, and if lacking depth is a flaw, her tormented alcoholic rages seem amply deserved.   

Barack Requiem

no faith teaches people to massacre innocents"-- our 44th commander rhetorician

Mr. President: When I was growing up, I was a fervent and occasionally rude Roman Catholic, and though Protestant and church fathers differ on textual interpretation, and it is also well known through the midrash  that Hebraic scribes engaged in hyperbole with a fluidity equal to that of their Hellenistic competitors, monotheism nonetheless does indeed justify the slaughter of innocents, particularly when Joshua invaded Canaan to create the state of Israel. Pagans were put to the sword. Does this mean that the twelve tribes engaged in genocide? Probably not on the scale we see today, but griot  is never entirely inaccurate, transcribed even from the distance of the judges to the courts of the corrupt rulers who led Israel into the Diaspora.

In the Gospel, as well, a pair of hypocritical converts drops dead at the feet of either Christ or Peter, or Paul, for that matter, the zealous torturer who conquered Rome. I did not realize James Foley was Catholic. This pierced my eroding conscience briefly, light as a fallen feather of a falcon. There was a tenure, perhaps as briefly past as Clinton's administration, when the barbarism of ISIS would have been equivalent to the showers at Auschwitz, but what has blurred the niceties of this distinction is the inhumanity of the paradigm, couched in fealty to the procedure. A significant percentage of persons gets weighed down by this, and rather than absorbing this unspecified guilty charge like a rat on a ninja course, they become hardened, join ISIS, a militia. 

Unless an extraordinary 2016 candidate emerges, you will be the last President I voted for. Reagan was a liar, and by the time of the Iran Contra testimony, obviously in the early stages of dementia, but he was the last leader in whom decency of conviction made me happy to be an American; now I'm a fascist promising immolation to myself for a hard life in the land of Negrodelphia. I despise Eric Holder, and you, poor fellow, should have been dean of Trinity College. You disappointed everyone, acolytes and adversaries. George Will has pondered whether or not your second term approaches *Carter territory,* but I see your lame duck standing as closer to Woodrow Wilson working himself into that ineffectual stroke.

Extraditied Appreciation, Lacunae

The only female foreign minister in the world, Golda Meir was also the only foreign minister who had no use for formalities, who flew tourist class, who shocked hotel staffs by handwashing her own underwear and shining her own shoes, and who entertained foreign dignitaries in her kitchen, in an apron, serving them her homemade pastry along with a stern lecture on Israel’s security.--Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I stabilized my old Quickie on the charger at approximately 4:38 AM Monday morning, flicked through Browning, struggled to drift off. Cats stalked me awake at noon, and the charger was still going. I waited until two and then had to get down to business, washed in desultory fashion, droned to lack of inspiration by my own weakness, why am I doing this if I am already bored?

How can I explain the struggle with palsied muscular contraction to those who are fortunately limber, or under thirty? It takes me 50 to 70 minutes to get stretch slacks on over flaccid toneless shins and flaccid toneless buttocks, heft and pull, heft and pulling, biting my lip in pain, essentially taking me all day to appear at a scheduled and a somewhat laconical event where I was already a known and disruptive element in horridly old sneakers, because I told a staffer of whom I had no clear memory that I would make an effort.

Make an effort indeed. So this is what I hoped would give me connections, a late bid to stay matriculated and advocate for a revival of patronage. Throwing my money around to appease my interior pretensions which do not translate among ambulatory eclectic whites was a failure. I do not belong to this clique, not that anyone would tell me so. I smiled at old women and brayed "I am a failed writer and failed scholar hoping to connect...." Yet dimly, I could see what it must have been like when the upper crust in the city of Philadelphia was less egalitarian.

Egalitarianism is actually somewhat disgusting. "There he is laughing," I observed to the director when young Lance appeared as one might have envisioned Nicholas Nickleby in evening dress. The young and charming Lance kindly got me cheese cubes. I talked about my imbalance couched in a vivacious scatter; he talked about the exhibit, his fellowship. Why am I here? A reverberating outcry not just about the fascinating and oddly a little off world at Delancey Plaza, but how the fuck my life ended up in a very small circumference of a center city grid, my alienation being relieved by compassionate blondes whose grooming makes me feel like vermin, but I could not tell Dana she did not have to obviate my discomfort. I am not so much pointing to lack of inclusion in the activist sense, but about belonging, knowing where you belong, and I guess Aunt Evelyn and cousins Frankie and Robin surfaced to my vocal cords because Evelyn, who is Jewish, would have fit right in with her coif, waddles, her progeny.

And yet, and yet-- something in me finds this little microcosmic preserve of old world caste fascinating and satisfying to the pretensions I harbor. Brilliant and insane?

"Maybe it's both," young Lance suggested in accommodating fashion.