Geek on Shells

The Kenyon Review adamantly supports the widest possible inclusiveness in the writers it seeks out and publishes, as well as in the students and workshop participants it supports, teaches, and attempts to inspire. David Lynn, editor, mass email dissemination shortly after the inauguration

David, although many might take issue with me on how I ascribe the utilitarian value of literary expression and its interpretation thereof, I have something to say: my thirty three years of relentless persistence and publication in print and digital media, from my first appearance in the hybrid English Canadian Slow Dancer as an over-aged upperclassman, to my most recent throw away to the young minority doctorate, Bianca Spriggs, of one of my strongest essays, for nothing, in Pluck, has done jack shit for my welfare, other than to give me a pedigree which the millennial student editors today might find mildly intimidating, hence my cynicism in relation to publishing, perishing, and Kenyom's strident and conscientious cultural appropriation. Indeed, the essay Bianca so graciously accepted did nothing to stop me from becoming a victim, four times over, as a disabled woman, of black arrogance, cruelty and corruption which has denigrated me repeatedly. The essay is just cleverly ambiguous enough, that it can be read either way, how urbanism generates racism or universal identification, and the grand lady of commitment to creative writers, Allison Joseph, who could have paid me for my courage, suffered over the piece, while Bianca read it as "crip became scarred liberal," and took the plunge. It was commendable, but doesn't alleviate how much I've suffered in your cosmetic pretenses to be successfully matriculated in an ambulatory, exclusionary world. Appearing in nearly a hundred publications never got me a job, or did all that much to further any sort of economic security. I'm closing fifty-six, and my next major break, be it computer, power chair, even my bed, may be my last. I never see people like me, let alone my dialectical rival, Vassar Miller, whom dung bitches like Josie Byzek weren't even aware of, and my former editor calls herself an intellectual, but perhaps took too much heat on twitter, truly integrated. In the industry, we're a sidelined cameo. Aside from the Hawking exception, whose condition seems to play into the cognitive dissonance of mad genius, we aren't a major presence in academics, and despite my best efforts, I am probably going to die, pathetic, in pain, in a welfare ward. You might say this puts too much onus on creativity, that using language skills to entertain offers us a valve, but what does the valve, the novel, the poetry collection, or the literary journal, do to mitigate ruthless hardship? I logged on this early morning to ease some flatulence, cut Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw down to size, adapting Philip Roth's imprimatur signature on counter culture. Goodbye, Columbus angered me as little more than orgasms are paramount and loving commitments an affect. Roth knows his culture as well as I know mine, and he's rich, having eroded it. Me, I'm just black balled for challenging community integration models, for raising my voice about women and their need to bring developmental birth defects into the world so developmental birth babies can be enslaved by case management. Sorry to rock your precious, inclusionary schooner of cultural appropriation.

Dung, Bitches, Nouveau Princesses

"this far, and no farther,"--Peter Falk

No one of us, whatever the nexus of our identity we shed to be American, is a monolithic block, and in my eruptions on this account about so called activists, that can be seen in the lack of unity between us. I cannot tell you exactly what the rift between Erik & Jimmi and Josie Byzek was, but it was a rift over how "extreme" Pennsylvania ADAPT should or shouldn't be, and Erik, when the hermaphroditic freak was more lucid, removed Fern Markowitz as Liberty's executive director. Josie and Erik and Jimmi and Fern are all part of the LBGTQ block. There is no love lost between them, and Fern Markowitz, in addition, is a Jewish lesbian, just as Linda Dezenski is a Jewish princess, on the lower end of the scale. Where I entered into it, regardless of my fatal attempt to be close to my overly esteemed peer, is Linda used me in a power struggle to get Fern to violate Pennsylvania state hiring guidelines to hire Jimmi for a job Linda offered me which, after my logistics combat at Matrix, would have been next to impossible for me to do. Linda won the battle but lost the war. Jimmi quit, Erik had who knows how many strokes and cardiovascular issues, and I grew too angry to care, and this is the end product of all that, but I was incredibly naive, to lick my wounds by then grafting onto a Christian lesbian who'd humiliate me in public, bouncing online from one failed disability project after another.
It is of only mild curiosity that Josie's twitter account under her own identity seems null and void. I hesitate to attribute it to my rancor. I haven't harassed her on social media, as, whatever my challenge to her role as caretaker extraordinaire, New Mobility is an undeniably progressive platform whose contributors say the same thing over and over with iterative nausea. Perhaps it has something to do with her run for the school board, but you'll notice, whatever her prominence as a champion for the marginalized, neither she nor partner Virginia foster disabled children. If I were Singh Lion, which I'm certainly not, I'd wonder about this curious trifecta of two women with a significant background in case management rearing Asian children of third world ethnicity, particularly when Josie is so impaired by MS. For the being of the welfare class, Josie is fairly solicitous of those in her care. I will not go so far as to impugn her nurturing impulses. My quarrel with her is commiseration doesn't resolve resource distribution, but she never applies herself to that, like the cost of battling over PVS cases, like Schiavo and Bobby Brown, and how this ties in with my ambivalence toward Roth's barrier breaking exposes is somewhat complex. FYI, I've read a number of Jewish novelists, like Chaim Potok, some Saul Bellow, and I've dipped into a little of everything (so how could I have drifted so rightward?) But however cemented his legacy may be, and I do recognize it, Philip Roth is an egotistical prick. I know the movies better than the novels, and concessions to some of his starkest feints have to be granted, but Goodbye Columbus succeeded in making me antagonistic to all of its character types, Ali MacGraw in particular, portrays her coming of age as an expression of masochistic coitus. I am a great deal like Richard Benjamin on screen. This is why he stays with me despite the blithe inattentiveness to his interpretations of Roth in my past, but even as a pursuer progressive of almost 50 years ago, Neil Klugman is a contraction in terms, as are Roth's vigorous sexual expositions. It never occurs to Roth not to allow his men to be vulnerable to sexual entrapment, not to be afraid of knocking up daddy's little girl by not chasing her in daddy's house, like a hound dog. He is vacuous himself, but wants a monogamous commitment, to which Brenda, the perpetual, debutante, seems incapable. The film had its moments, and our urban life used to feel relatively secure where a boy could look up a girl and then show up, talk her home, but there is nothing here to celebrate in Roth's own hypocrisy, a surreptitious man cave, with its lack of respect, leaving me without even the proverbial suitcase to lug back to the depot in the era without stroll carts.