Christina Light's Turbine

Hoping, praying for the best, she wrote her letter, and sent it on its way.-- Constance Fenimore Woolson, Anne, p. 120

Unlike Louis Begley, who writes a fine introductory defense of The Other House, yet another Jamesian outlier in the master's long, illustrious, life, I do not immediately equate Rose Armiger with the more villainous Kate Croy, particularly as she is embodied by Helena Bonham Carter with a voluptuousness I do not always wish to see in James' works, which isn't to argue that it isn't present, as it certainly is for Isabel Archer's vitality, acknowledging that Portrait is one of James greatest hits, I simply do not envision sexual repression and its illicit fulfillment in the late Victorian era as being on parallel tracks with Hollywood's version of what James means to imply in his demands on his audience. The latter day daguerreotypes of Woolson betray her wan and downcast weariness, and it may have been the height of arrogance to assume that the aging James, no longer a young Twinkie, could have saved Cooper's niece, even if he had given in to traditional monogamy for the sake of propriety. James suffered intense depressions too, but would have never been so uncivilized as to jump through a window in Venice three stories up. On the immediate level, Woolson exemplifies her uncle's pioneering spirit in the manner of her death. It is the *American* thing to do, meeting suffering head on with like minded violence, take out your despair with a bang, fracture your skull on the border stones hemming in the waterways of sleepy Venetian canals, or perhaps that fracture hit a cement walk below, hard dirt, or even a stoop; perhaps she simply broke her neck, and oh my, an expert has surely set their eyes on Woolson's death certificate by a seedy Venetian coroner who with bafflement finds Americans inscrutable. But Armiger isn't an approximation of Woolson, as May Bartram might have been, towards the end. 
There are, actually, many images of Woolson death certificates available on search, in the innocuous comforts hunting genealogy. Foucault, on a much different wavelength, (in retrospect, perhaps not so contradictory) was a fervent advocate for the genealogy, the illuminating detail, the comfort of arcane points in time. Begley makes an entirely legitimate comparison to James's late great master works which heralded the end of what the novel was, as art form. Croy, Stanton, do have designs which destroy innocence, but my comparisons, in order to justify the rescue of this "ugly duckling" narrative, is with the governess in The Turn of the Screw. Masterful authors always compete with themselves, and what the high Victorians didn't like in 1896 was this: James doesn't allow us into Rose Armiger's mind, and the clues that she will kill an innocent child under the age of reason are of scant brevity, whereas the governess of James's Christmas story, always lunging at Dickens, I write with an irritating grind of my failed 20th century salvaged teeth, loved her charges, seeking to protect them with a surmounting hysteria. We don't see this in the converted text of the failed play of 1896, only a mysterious, unwarranted combat for a widowed banker, haunted in the violence of a dead wife's prohibition and Rose's combat, within varying degrees, with the charming ingenue who is Jean Martle, and with Mrs. Beever, who wants things her way, for the best, without a hitch. I am more sympathetic toward Rose than many of James other heroines, not for what she does, but for what her acuity desires and demands to take shape, believing, if she succeeds Julia Bream she can transform Julia's husband  into someone more refined. The Other House, is, on its face, the last of James's major fictions which I didn't know, perhaps a fitting jettison, whatever I, in turn, enact.

Feline Penalty

[Just to be clear, I am writing this post the morning of 4/26/16, and my last little boy incurred a urinary tract block unexpectedly around 4/21. I was forced to have him manhandled and destroyed by animal control and I am driving myself to exhaustion beating down broken heart syndrome; I'm really not having an easy time.]

Signor, Signor!-- The Tragedy of the Medici

Bonjour Tristesse, as biting social satire, predates New Wave films by a few years, but certainly anticipates the shockwave that was to hit cinema within the next decade, thanks to Otto Preminger's brilliant eye for composition within the frame of the camera lens. Certain wicked correspondences occur to one, even without a full study of the biography of the ground breaking director. Both Henry James and Preminger studied law, and both were masters of structured narrative. Within the claustrophobic grasp of David Niven and Jean Seberg as the genitive father daughter, we not only see hints of incest, but recall The Golden Bowl as well, though there is of course no direct allusion, as this is undeniably Sagan's biting social wit at play, while true and perhaps dangerous exhaustion overtake me. I'll pick it up tomorrow, without back dating as I wished. 

A Good Defecation, Trembling

In our times, as was remarked, no one is content with faith, but "goes right on." The question as to whither they are proceeding may be a silly question; whereas it is, a sign of urbanity and culture to assume that every one has faith, to begin with, for else it were a curious statement for them to make, that they are proceeding further.-- Soren Kierkegaard

Nice old AT&T hasn't booted me. I failed to mention, on Blogger, as well as social media, that sins of overage in my last billing period wasn't simply due to nagging pet children. I've lost my battle with nicotine, and Vuse essentially rekindled dependency, and here we are again, my emotional health doomed to a rhetoric of vehement helplessness. Despite the fact that stuffing Jimmi's balls down his throat is a boring impossibility, let me return to Mr. Shrode's sanction when he spun around on his thick elephant soles to address me with "I read your blog," two weeks ago, the spitting image of Beavis.

Jimmi and Erik are exceedingly disadvantaged freaks, as I've written before, and reading, if Jimmi did read it, that I wanted a laundry list of ADAPT activists dead is a hard pill to swallow; if someone wrote they wanted me dead I too might waffle between context and complaint, but the assertion indicates just how hard loss of faith is, then not being able to leave the source of so much pain.  We all knew each other once, Josie Byzek, Jimmi, Erik, Linda, Cassie, myself, and making assertions like that in public has rental agents justifying their continued dehumanization of my person with rationalizations. 

Erik was a source for my first HTP article, for which I was paid a decent commission. Something I may have also posted before, and I understand why the severity of their disadvantage led to their gaming of the intake center, but they absolutely refuse to admit they could ever be wrong about anything-- hence my emotional health is analogous to Olivier's caricatured sadism in The Running Man. Jimmi said "I read your blog," as if to imply my posts were compensating indicators, and maybe they are, but Jimmi's emotional maturity is that of a thirteen year old in the body of a Shirley Booth who needs a cosmetic surgeon. If he inadvertently winds up alone with me his fear of me makes him sway nervously, which only increases my contempt, this thick, fat child tyrant on whom I've wasted so much energy. He once wrote an article, submitted to Josie, that a disabled lawyer who was matriculated, representing client X against PA's rehab law, would one day "find out" the extent of the jeremiad he was aiding (my paraphrase-- Jimmi doesn't have my diction, and he writes like a wailing tyrant, as well).

It is Jimmi's turn to now learn a hard lesson: Unethical behavior due to a strident and overbearing sense of entitlement can, and does, impact other people adversely, and before I am dead this bully bitch is going to learn why state civil service guidelines have rules discouraging nepotism. I'm going to clip some wings, and the near absolute power Jimmi and Erik had, I intend to see that mitigated within NCIL. Am I really capable of tolerating the degradation of my enemies? I do not know, but I've been known to be unmoved by individual collapse on sidewalks. In Patricia Clarkson, that erosion of empathy might translate as dispassionate reticence. As an actress, she absorbs loss and longing within herself, even while the audience reads her like an instruction manual. She serves her scripts with much the same function James' Maria Gostrey serves Strether. The academics have a term for it, slipped my mind many years ago. We see it over and over, The Station Agent, which, interesting as it is, glosses over her ideation as a mother with irreconcilable losses; in Lars and the Real Woman, she's the doctor none of us have, a real humanist sensitive to the dignity of marginal crackpots. In Pieces of April, she is the tyrannical scourge running out of time. Learning to Drive follows these same reasonable, liberal parameters; I do not need to know how it tests the limits of friendship to everyone's satisfaction, but do know what is broken cannot always be fixed by reconciliation.

Carried, Seize, Outreach

Media promotions aren't always trivial, and on the basis of the fact that she is touting yet another celebrity memoir, the fancy has seized me to pour out some of my anguish in reserved fashion to Mariel Hemingway, a contemporary, eclipsed in the fog of losing my poverty stricken battle in a majority black city. Then the entertainment articles triggered my envious memories of Mariel's beauty, not plastique in the least. Memory: watching Personal Best waiting for something subversive and passionate and never getting a graphic scene. Perhaps it was edited for television, but it was this film which drew my curiosity to homoeroticism, around the same year that Henry James's super-attenuation came to my attention, became a life long fascination, until the nursing aide and her obscene invitation to bring me "in the life." In the life-- that is code, cliched by now, in LBGT speak for the quest for pleasure, but let me not go tearing up the cushions on the divan too deeply just yet. Queer theory draws prurient attention like carrion draws maggots, and my trenchant retraction of equal treatment for sexual orientation is invariably the comfort food of liberal mockery-- but also, I am not satisfied with my plank. I'm not an evangelical, as such, and why should I care what gays do?

I don't, really, and don't focus much on the physical intimacy between my ex-friends. Jimmi is fat and pallid and Erik is a fleshed out version of Dr. Seuss in the morgue. Excellent aversion therapy, let alone me and my lovers, but I send Mariel's publicist a pity-the-cripple email. I know not to expect response and assume I would not receive one, but what if I did? She'd probably post, much as Niall Ferguson did, "I am sorry for your situation," and offer me the usual self-help pep talk, but why the urge to penetrate at all?

Because she and I are the same age, and why not share the misery with a celebrity I came up with, whose impact was more subtle than Jodi Foster's? Still, these compulsions of sentiment annoy me. She's just an actress, made famous in a particular point and time, in a particular way, with an interesting pedigree to an American writer who's oeuvre is basically full of shit. Ernest is a god damn con artist, a melodramatic spin doctor, over the top even in his Fascist Spanish Civil War era. Huff. I'm over a mild panic attack, hoorah.

A box of raspberry sugar, blood thinning

The only time viewers see pitless indigence on PBS is in still photographs of how poverty and public health used to intersect, at least in the west. In every documentary on death and dying, however, and my earliest was the Bill Moyers video narrative I honestly should have skipped, because I never forgot the sheer anguish of the veterinarian with ALS, his raw suffering, telling his physician he was going to inject himself with horse tranquilizer, sitting in a power chair seemingly equipped to tackle any civil war the Russian army might see fit to foster, very close to the end, begging his wife not to revive him again. She had him dressed in a polo shirt, rubbing his chest, regressively. I've seen countless of people dying, live and once removed by the camera holder who must record it all, and the midwestern animal doctor, expiring finally as Moyers went into post-production, penetrated, stayed, but there are limits. Nursing home residents get 30 second feeds. Anything else, whether the early Moyers, the various battles with cancer ending in defeat or remission, the muscular dsytrophy deterioration, which seems to be a favorite in the annals of clinical travail, have devoted loved ones tending to the demise of the stricken. This holds true for Atul's upgrade on Being Mortal. We don't get the demented dying alone in a ward, not unless it is a bad melodrama on the Spanish Civil War with Gregory Peck. I'm not faulting Atul on this. To coax viewers along directors need to soften our dissolution with thick sweet loving empathy, and there is real anguish within middle class affluence.

But barring extraordinary luck, most disabled people die in a war zone, not in hospital rooms with palliative care physicians. Literary eras seem to exhaust themselves in the same way, Henry James not immune to this flaw: "The Lessons of the Master," whatever its aim at Victorian marriage, is an over-sweetened pastry, certainly not a masterpiece, sans Portrait with the immortally vibrant Isabel.

With the death of James and Flaubert, as Eliot later stipulated, the novel of manners entered a curious phase of life support, slowly gasping to death, holding onto Victorian conceits in a more droll one-dimensional fashion, at a loss, ripe for the ravishes of Modernism to come: The Good Solder epitomizes this exhaustion with form. Ford creates types, not least among them the English Catholic, so important to Evelyn Waugh in his heyday and then to Jeremy Irons doing a magnificent rendition of Brideshead. In James, a gentleman of leisure is circumspect, engages in mysterious financial speculation. Ford, while still keeping the conventions of the caste, savages it. John Dowell is almost fatally bored with the recriminations of his class, and yet the two dimensional aspects of Ford's voice couched in his fortunately affluent American is what lends this narrative its humor: Florence the weak heart invalid duping her utterly dense husband. It is free public domain reading, Edwardian enriched sarcasm light enough for defeated savants, only able to struggle with Joaathan Weiner's difficult narrative shape for a few pages at a time.

Reviewers did not like Long For This World-- but as I search for interesting imperfections, I'm sympathetic, if overwhelmed at times, by Weiner's bizarre futuristic stretch. I look at Gawnde, the bubbly Asian Indian who wants to ease the writhing of our departure, while I have Weiner's complex and faulty narrative in my head. Do these agendas ever meet and coalesce in some fathomable dialogue?

Though I am not in immediate end stage, I'm dying, frightened, pissed off,  Medical students have no idea how to optimize my outcomes. I stopped seeing them in 2007. I don't want to get locked in syndrome, lingering like a fucking android, barking like a rabid dog at minstrel niceties of urban ineptitude. This was my plan for joining our newly vaunted shared economy, my guerrilla warfare despite the successful prosecution of the group in Georgia for not doing a double take with a real nut case. Can I persuade them to come get me? If you watch Gawande's docu-drama, observe his neuro-oncologist colleague closely and you can see why doctors themselves snap out, not to be trusted. Someone has to do the brain cancer, but the women's face earned my pity. 

Queens, Courtiers, Something Other Than Bianary

If I write the abstract and submit the abstract and as a proposal the abstract is accepted, I shall then be trapped, and viewers will only see a post like a yelp in the dark while I attempt to gain access to vaunted European film directors. I did not realize Alejandro would be young and pleasing to the eye. There is a distinct possibility an (the) abstract would not be accepted, but that does not rip out the fingernails. Remember Peter O'Toole's no audio screams? Being a dry literary critic is annoying. We want to medicalize art, dice it an slice it in our fascination with our own aesthetic inclinations, distracting ourselves from flight or fight responses to our frustrating inability to ask the Why? about life. Why is the misdirected question. Henry James is an obsession, and this has cycles of love and hate, stupid little patsy, not very well educated, and yet his insight into repression, his mastery of insinuation that makes me look for the damn code to loosen that twist of the screw, I cannot stand it, and my critique of James is essentially life long warfare to catch him, beat it out of him. This is why I forgive his tortured sexuality, regardless of how active it was or wasn't. I see his struggle, but mine was not the same. My brain is too injured for that paradigm, my body forcibly altered and fused, I did not envision lesbian games growing up, and that my own sex finds suckling teats attractive beyond weaning, this was classified as regressive. The Gay Shame cover, recollected, is reminiscent of the advanced homo sapiens body paint in The Quest for Fire, a pastiche allegory of a film, one which no longer impresses me, though it was one of the few times Jerry and I discussed rape as victimology over a way of life. Let us be lenient on the cinematic quality. It is a visually engaging narrative.

Queer theory is an intractable problem, intractable in terms of progressives with "untrammeled" glee (George Will's adjective) salivating over homoerotic subversion in literature and theater when it doesn't reflect real world consequences, and my willingness to make notable exceptions adds to the difficulty of getting out from under; it is an objection based on more than personal trauma, though insecure body image weighs into it, and failed associations cemented the deal. The thesis extrapolated from this is that homosexual culture being given *equal* legal and social status is unsustainable, which is not to plea for elimination, as that would be impossible. This does not mean there aren't gradations, evolutionary values in play, and more than a few of my old associates are on the extreme end of that scale. Jodie Foster is not, but there is more to it than the fact that she is not aggressive about lesbian identity. Sexual choices should not be an identity; sexual preferences as a classification is problematic, and I fail to see why celebrity status necessitates lack of privacy in personal affairs. Why can't we reformulate these membranes? Why do we need to know Ms Foster's personal intimacies, or see Montgomery Clift's war films as code for a faggot outcast who is made expendable? But The Young Lions, From Here To Eternity, these have to be read that way, even if we chuckle at the stigma of Ulysses as the dirty book, the forbidden book, annihilating formulaic stricture to reduce us to mucous. What a mucous, what a damn machine we are, humanity.   

Decadent Pairs

In Siena the Tomasi revealed that powerful and single-minded religious vocation which later made them famous in Sicily. One went to England as papal legate and tried to settle the dispute between Henry 2.0 [my emendation] and Thomas a Becket. David Gilmour, The Last Leopard, p11

I believe I shall focus my attentions on Giuseppe Tomasi for now, then perhaps work my way back to Henry James. The Prince of Lampedusa presents the demise of the petty nobility as a foregone conclusion. Gilmour presents their obliteration as an almost radical reaction, and to the extent that I understand Dr. Cristina Coletta's abstract in her critical study, Plotting The Past, she is examining the diachronic discourse between historic episode, narrative, and how this frames contemporary perception. Dr. Coletta was very kind to me, and told me she would send me a copy of her book but she only had her reader's copy; not a total ingrate, by dint of my own obstinacy I have nearly all my tools at hand, except a visit to the point of origin. I see where I am going with Il Gattopardo much more clearly than with the work of James, and Tomasi may actually give me my framework to back into James [the New Mobility bloggers who follow my twitter account glaze over at this point saying she goes very far]. Mmm, like Mr. Ramsay's throbbing mind in his theoretical struggle, I am defying much more than domestication in my outreach. Cannot the same be said of Fellini's mastery as an auteur? La Strada is more than the sum of its parts; it borders on the magical realism that Shakespeare invented in The Tempest, which means if you are Julie Taymor you are going to be fanatical in your canonical felicity because you cast the magisterial Helen Mirren in the lead.

It borders on post war fabulism, La Strada, but it is not simply a love song to Mussolini, who in turn was a deluded optimist to the point of insanity. All of us miss the Roman Empire, whether we know it or not. We keep recreating the Colossus, not restoring the past, only reinventing the application of power. I cannot bring full brunt of analysis to on La Strada today, but did want to point out to you how commercialism exhausts genre, much as Haggard exhausts great Victorian contributions. His work is almost an Edwardian squeal about the terror of progressive erosions yet to come. The same can be said with European directors against Hollywood. Fellini is nearly Jamesian when engaging in cinematic ambiguity. Identity is a clever knife thrust into liberal pretensions, but never truly veers off the expected prescription.

The Imagined Meritocracy, Rosy Muniment

Everyone has their own views on James. To Ellen Moody he was an aggressive lover of other men; to Sheldon Novick he was coy about homosexual practices. Others believe he was a tortured celibate; this also applies to the lens we bring to the text.-- the spastic dowager

When I raised my voice in transmission to Gregory Zacharias about my weariness in the role of the good lieutenant, perhaps I should have paused to reflect on why I always find myself in the uniform. I have been trying to revise, simply revise, a poem of mine which I like. It sits in my strongest manuscript which I am attempting to take out of moth balls and put it back into the contest circuit. Since the title of the poem is appropriate to cite in anticipation of this evening's spectacle, I will feed it to you: "A Festive Independence". Do you see what the immediacy of the digital age has done to those of us who had some sense of tranquility before it? As a member of the Henry James Society, until the early summer of 2014, I am now coddling the aggrieved ego of the non academic acolyte, and have done so in an attempted sympathy, with doubts in the back of my mind as to whether or not I didn't make things worse. I take no quarrel with Lionel Trilling's attempted rescue of The Princess Casamassima. Lionel's knowledge illuminates Henry's motives for the novel, but here, James's masterful ambiguity fails him, because anarchy is not amendable to the qualities of the fairy tale. Hyacinth is almost a protean transvestite for his beauty, and little convincing as the man in the middle between zealotry and aesthetic appreciation, and yet I think of James at his most invested in his middle years, his most cynical, trying to keep his creations, the doll-like Rosy, from "blowing her brains out." This is how the narrator leaves the poor girl, dreaming of aristocratic finesse and their vivid estates. Yet James did disability cultural a favor by pitting Rosy in a dialogical contest with the fabled Tiny Tim, because we have two extremes on the spectrum, pity, and the tyranny of guilt.

Every time I reveal that cerebral palsy necessitates dependence on my power chair, and that I am one of those in poverty who Henry James varnishes in semi-gloss, affluent white males, either in the vigor of their public roles, (Niall Ferguson), or in looking to me for assertive sympathy, convey the same sentiments, the same sorrow for my *situation*. Perhaps I am better off that Greg assumes the posture that I'm a disruptive force.

This certainly applies to Edward Snowden's mortal fear. Dana balances the bone stuck in my throat, and though I rarely agree with any columnists opinion in its entirety, Milbank touches upon the crux of the problem. Snowden's paranoia about Obama is overblown; Snowden's cowardice flies in the face of the gravity of his actions. Outsourcing security clearances to USIS represents the real problem, more so than whether or not his ass is fried. I'd contend, even if Snowden evades the executive branch for the time being, his ass is fried anyway, but you cannot run the CIA on absolutist free market models.

Austrian Perocet

An ordinary matter. Law is law.
Noblemen were exempt, the vulgar thought,
From racking, but, since law thinks otherwise,
I have been put to the rack-- Count Guido Franceshini

Sixsmith, for an avatar, had a persuasive critical ability within the forum community. I do not know if he is still a part of Chris Beasley's rigid, insecure, and unjust virtual authoritarian play land, nor do I know his gender for sure, but he is a gifted critic who I believe respected my faculties as long as I kept my cyber sexual fancies to a minimum, and in one thread he asked me what I thought of Musil's posthumous, inconclusive masterpiece.

What I'd be able to convey to Six, in light of what I've written in Spirometry, is that Musil also deliberately engages in evasion within the massive tome that comprises Ulrich'es adventurous sexual escapades. It took an Austrian soldier to flush out Henry James jibe to Howells about publishing a story on incest, and at nearly two thousand pages, Henry James would have delighted in Musil's prolificacy. The Man Without Qualities is also the first modern novel to feature what we now categorize in the terms of psychopathy, the predator Moosbrugger. Beyond this assessment, I cannot offer more, at present, since I will be rereading, slowly, as I am rereading Broch, slowly, except to add that the gaming of Robert Musil is more accomplished than anything James Joyce indulges through linguistic playfulness. The great modernists lived through or anticipated WW1; perhaps WW2 killed them because they could not prevent it, despite realizing the consequences of European implosion, and why these men of genius could not recognize the rise of Fascism on the continent and try to stop it remains a mystery. Scholars laud Joyce for Leopold Bloom's metamorphosis, but the reductionist and incisive cruelty of Joycean humor makes me recoil, in light of the horror that launched itself upon the world past the publication of Ulysses. Unlike my former transvestite ally, (and whatever you read in this picture, s/he is a crook) I assign blame; it may be a heavy onus to put on a failed Jesuit with his own vulnerabilities couched in grandiloquence, but Joyce knew better, yes, even for circa 1922, and this is what sticks in my throat. Walt Whitman believed Leaves of Grass would prevent the Civil War. What Joycean frolic with Antisemitism  achieves is the laying of a red carpet for a bloodbath. 

This is no reflection on Lance Walhert; he is a competent instructor; neither is this a reflection on the Rosenbach. It was good to get out, good to engage, despite that my intellectual restlessness needs to push further than a paid discussion group, and if you were wise, and entered a profession like engineering for financial security, but always wanted to read Moby Dick, outsourced class structures such as this would satisfy you, as they did Cassie in the what's cooking pic. She is the gamy legged woman I rolled with now and again, a gimp Annie Proulx would have enjoyed subverting.

Arcane Limey

Pressed for time this evening. Barreling through the hardest part to get done with this damned revolution that is now standard academic static. Need to finish so I can return to my own concerns, but am I glad I did this? No. Simulating the return to class has not made me healthier or more optimistic. I could not even move to the neighborhood where the museum is located, which, if I could, would make me healthier and more optimistic. Am I glad I discovered the museum? Perhaps I enjoy the association with their archivist, but this is where I can use the help of any Joycean enthusiast:

I am trying to ascertain how familiar James Joyce was with the work of Henry James, specifically if there is any proof that Joyce read the James novella What Maisie Knew without spending 5,000 hours researching the question. I did ask the Jamesians and I suppose off hand none of them knew. Does James Joyce offer any evidence in his letters? I will take any biographical testimony any Joycean could point me to, either in affirmation or negation.

Salaam Devereux!

The Real Thing looks at James in the context of the very material world in which his novels were written, published and read. --Greg Zacharias

Hum. Those who know Erik would tell you I am being unfair to the dying doctor. S/He invests his zeal in a positive way, in contrast to my seething due to the fact that his adversary burned me, and burned me at a fairly crisp temperature. My rebuttal to this is that Erik and Cassie engaged in fraudulent activity to the point that the DOJ investigated, and I don't like excusing criminality because the individuals engaged in it have glaring chronic conditions, nor do I enjoy being neighbors with such people, and then expected to be civil due to the fact that they've had heart attacks and numerous strokes, regressing thereby. 

In the aftermath of the bombing, much has been made of the fact that the Russians asked the FBI to investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and that our agents found nothing illegal. I am baffled by this dove cooing by the executive branches involved. Bortnikov is willing to see journalists murdered, willing to kill Berezovsky, but can't imprison an ethic Chechen on suspicions of radicalization simply because the Chechen had legal American status?

Romans know when dead fish begins to decompose, and the stench can overwhelm.

I made contact with a live Google voice yesterday, but will attempt live interaction again tomorrow to resolve monetization, because spastics need to prep the necessary data requirements. Perhaps I should take my proposal that I made on list when Greg and I were courteous seriously. I started this blog to generate projects along these lines, after all. Lot of work; would not need to contact Kidman necessarily. An alliance with Frigide Bargot would offer prodigal cover, nyet? Burn injuries move from acute to chronic with age.

Claudius Collaborator

One reason I do not support New Mobility through subscription is their lack of innovation, lack of willingness to push, write better articles, get scoops that matter. In this sense, disability and LBGT activism, the radical equality thereof, is monochromatic, and it becomes routine. Now I can hear detractors point out to me that I am well aware that homosexuals make extraordinary contributions to arts and sciences. I grew up on Elton and Taupin, and they pushed pop rock in interesting ways. I love Proust, cannot live without my loving frustration of Henry James and his radical ambiguity, and I embrace this difficulty, not shy from it, but still hold that radical equality is destroying our ability to discriminate, to create fences, allowing the auburn women in the Joyce group to make me feel unwelcome by expressive censure, even if I am hurt by it, and even if I wrote an unkind about the woman from Camden and described to you my brief stroll and rejection of her as suitable-- there is no real reason for this. I connect better to the young professor but feel the need to leave him in peace. My pain and failure to have been as he, this is not his problem; progressives are still wrong, and wiping out the cruelty of the human ape makes things worse, in the long run. I stayed away today because of my fading strength, however, not that the auburns may or may not be dismayed with me. My concerns differ from theirs, and charming Lance wants to teach the book, get us through, and on my deathbed, I will tell him thumbs up, and wink.

Shakespeare's authorship is a non sequitur in terms of relevant academic contention, by the way, and I think Jacobi is merely being a coy devil, his camp of the Claudian line a riot, and relevant to our concerns. The idea of authorship was obviously fluid from the time of Homer to William's era, and it was only in the 19th century that content started to evolve into our modern concept of commodity, intellectual property, and the like. Who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays doesn't matter, just as the authorship of the Greek plays doesn't matter, and the same indifference applies to Homer, his actuality and his legend. I cannot compete with Shakespeareans, but with this qualification, I tend to believe he was the master of his domain.

But as to disabled identity, I am a writer and failed scholar first, and that the activists cannot answer for what their politics have done to me, ultimately, their rhetoric, juxtaposed against the reality of my lifelong alienation, struggle against victimization, is doomed to failure. The New Mobility community, at the micro level, cut me loose, rather than offer me continued support, even if I lost my cool in their online zoological excuse for an interactive community. I have listened to sexuality on our sleeves, we need empowerment, for thirty years. It is as exciting as hospice gruel.

A Crack in The Door

Let's talk about my lengthy and long in the making antagonism toward the LBGT community and its advocates, just briefly, despite my subversive, or would be, finger waggle at terms of service guidelines: I do not advocate violence against homosexual orientation in the abstract. Everyone breathe a sigh of relief? Good. Violence against any group en masse is counterproductive, regardless of how fucked up American progressive sanctity has left me, and for the moment, I will tie one hand behind my back and not discuss personal experiences (thank god, mutter the detractors of one really bitter failure of a spastic), but this does not mean I do not intend to generate controversy; I am hanging fire for the sake of being responsible, and gathering data, and some ambivalence in relation to a few things: I use the threat of bisexual experience in my writing, just as the old lady Henry James did in his. I have, in fact, much like James, a bisexual character in one of my very difficult stories, and revealed her to former associate Josie Byzek looking for street cred (waves and says up yours holier than thou backstabbing bitch) and do not know what I am going to do with her and my equally problematic sexual trauma in which she is engaged, and Josie transmitted back that said character read bi.

In terms of my public hostility to Josie, I do not have to keep engaging it. Women burn each other all the time over men, to use the voice of my pragmatic sister, but only in my universe, does this burn come from a woman who is an actively Christian lesbian with multiple sclerosis. Can any able bodied woman imagine the value to me, of a romantic dinner date with an interesting and intelligent man I had managed to land on my own? Josie damaged a prospect for me in an instant, a mere instant, but in terms of the tools with with I have to compete, no well toned calves nor shapely buttocks, the extra time I have to sweat with hose, and shaving, this woman in Lancaster made me pay a high price for my loyalty. I'd love to ask a more pedestrian blogger like Laura Overstreet how I am supposed to keep trusting the disabled community whom have my cognitive capacity, when I have to keep taking blows like this?

Nothing will reconcile me to the American gay community, nothing, even if I was faced with the prospect of appearing on television with Andy Sullivan and had to abide by FCC standards, my civility would be an ice sheet of jagged edges, but when you combine homosexuality with disability civil disobedience, that combination is nearly as fanatic in terms of imposed duress as anything that comes out of the right wing.

Goal accomplished for my character, a as an evolutionary matter, primate homosexuality is here to stay, however. I am not going to stamp it out, put it back in the closet, or stop gay marriage from revolting a succinct minority and making powerful liberals like Kristof weep for joy, as if someone spiced his bland rice with curry. That is what I am not going to do, but I am going to try very very hard to make some of you think about the price tag involved in not being true to ourselves, and examine, much as South Park did, the extra-categorization of hate crime in terms of giving it extra legality, and yes, what I allowed my former supervisor to do to me caused me traumatic doubt, though it did not drive me to seek out a conversion. That I was molested by a mixed race paraprofessional  six years later took care of that. I was victimized, not aroused, and no woman will ever do that to me again. Quadriplegic or not, I will defend myself to the best of my ability. We are going to crack that can of worms, follow that trail of minute waste the poor panicked creatures will leave on your arm, ew boy.

Whippoorwill Quirts

I would not mind going to Edgewater. Frank and I were still duking out the end game of our relationship as a couple when the building was going up; two minutes down the block from my building, and now you definitely know where I live, by inference if nothing else, it might as well be a world away, and in fact, when they were ready to inhabit, sent me a postcard, and I never bothered. Now cursing that lack of investigation, the man I spoke to did not sound sanguine, or if not that, at least vague enough to confuse me, asserting that "you would not qualify as a section 8 tenant." Why not if one of my former clients lives there under similar circumstances? Is it optimal? No, as I'd still be in the same location, a street over, but anything not Presby does remarkable things, lifts my spirit, restores hope, with the prospect of being able to tell Ms. Horne and her cohorts they can go fuck themselves royally making me chortle with glee, sheer delight to be free of shanty town. You have no idea the full extent of what the residents here have done to me-- it was not simply constant harassment by the managers, not simply my near death in Diamond Park, and the mere prospect of anything else not in a crime plagued environment, for my health, I need the hope of movement, after 27 years of dehumanizing bigotry, my god, no wonder I identify with the extremity of Taggart's pain, though I did not lose children and drive a spouse mad. Hesitantly, I believe last evenings pill did the trick, and I am "clear," to use the standard call of television cops, but we shall see. There have been no flares. Before we return to the long dangling Ricos, I want to expend just a little more energy on Newtown's grief, partly due to my own fantasy valve despair deposits, in which I take no pride, trust me, but after years of the action thriller implosions on screen, are we not saturated with these video special effects as an outlet?

The left is entirely correct on its political sentiments about automatic weapons and the ease of executions. I live in a city of which in circumference is 85 percent a war zone in waiting, after all, though I am not entirely sure that mental health services is any more than a polite euphemism, as I cannot say if I was not a cripple I would not have sustained this much damage. I am a cripple and my life was never anything else. The question is why those in pain resort to violence as opposed to those in pain who do not. What lifts lethargy to go outside of legal mechanisms in place? I do not need David Brooks to know that most mental health clients are bullshit artists, preying on the vulnerability of more stable service providers, and would no more be spree killers than my former writing friends, or current friends, like the novelist Gretchen Laskas (who will never speak to me again), or the poet Robert Thomas (who, all things being equal, probably will).

I think if you take the Virginia Tech shooter, the Aurora shooter, the Giffords attacker, Adam Lanza, that it runs deeper than weapons cancer, because guns have always been part and parcel of what forged American identity. We live in an age of  autonomic desensitized alienation, fed on a diet of Kevin Spacey masterminds, and those who are sick get this same steady diet that hammers away at the fact that the human animal is expendable, and more than that, the poor, or those that climb, and then fall, are the unforgiven, and can thereby be bitch slapped in  a bureaucracy that no one understands, nor is anyone accountable to it. All I want to do is safely relocate out of the city, and receive justice, but that is a virtual nightmare.

I have been to Farmington CT, and fell in love with the Yankee sensibility that made the US the beacon of the world, but that self reliance, hardy and firm, the point of departure for much of the corruption of worldliness in Henry James, has all but been vanquished by guilt and victimization, which I, as an ostracized disabled woman, have been very much a part, as much a part as Jovan Belcher, or Michael Vick. Forced social equality has assisted in lowering moral cohesion, whether or not you want to accuse me of oversimplifying, it is still the truth. Had I not fled my life in Ridley Park, I would not be a broken old woman exposing herself before you, not horrified by how tolerance represses the truth of what we live. Nor am I conveying that we should re segregate ourselves according to ethnic contours. But throwing out the cell phones and the rest of our gadgets, and not creating EEOC crimes in email, taking responsibility when we're wrong, and being honest that we are different, for Christ's sake, well, that is a start.

Urethra Knives

The Brothers Rico opens with Richard Conte in a glinty house robe receiving a telephone call, and then in a scene I found fascinating for its time and place, he and Dianne Foster have a fairly frank episode of sexual intimacy while Eddie undresses and gets in the shower. I know some of the pre-33 era black and whites were more risqué, but if you really look at this film, it sells star powered sex as hard as New Wave in the next decade. Eddie is obviously virile in his every gesture at the sink, of which we are offered a nice shot of bare chested beef. Alice is obviously happy with her tiger, and the shoulder bite is permissively promiscuous. The suggestion of infertility in this atmosphere of laden sexual satisfaction is left open for speculation, and this is very Eisenhower era, but it is also very much a part of Simenon's methodology, to leave the issue of a barren, and otherwise happy couple, simply hanging in the air. I have another theory. Italians will never be Wasps, no matter how perfect the imitation. Whether or not this was lifted from Henry James, (cf Daisy Miller ) as much as it might be a standard plot device might be debatable, and you can even tell me I am full of shit, but I have two points in my favor:

1. Daisy Miller positively resonated with the American public; it was a huge hit for James, put the fellow on the map like nothing else.

2. Simenon is European, and 2a. The Saxons, Franks, Austrians and Prussians thought it was acceptable to cast Italians as greaseballs. James does it all the time. Even Prince Amerigo is a somewhat sordid character, royal though he may be, and Wilkie Collins cashes in those chips without hesitation in his major virginal hit.

This still had a hold on the generational Protestants of Eisenhower's day, so, voila, Eddie is cursed because of his provincial roots, no matter how assimilated he is into American material power and status. Italian Catholics, like the Jews, like the Irish, can approximate, but it would take the civil rights era, and perceived  color threat, to implode intramural Caucasian prejudices which flag a film such as this.

Time for a pause, but this analysis will carry me through a number of posts, hampered by my imperfect memory of Brazil's timeline, despite the fact I have seen the film three times. Bridge to cross.

I have taken ill, and because of this, have to resign myself to not reentering a late life academic competition, and in fact, should my posts become inactive, depending how long accessing treatment takes me, you may assume that the interns, or medical students who usually evaluate me, fucked up. This is a health issue I cannot allow to linger, however, unless, unbeknownst to me, I get to decompose in much the same manner as mio bambino, a consoling irony?

Insidious Possession

Satan's three faces are a grotesque counterversion of the three Persons of the Trinity.
--Allen Mandelbaum, note to Canto 34, Inferno


All western countries make bad television series better than the America that gave the world the technology for television, gave the world the technology that makes some of us diffident about the digital age, in fact, not that this is not good. I labored and starved and threw my impassioned energies into the small presses for years, which, just outside of the relative security of small presses in academia, was a small club of loons, alcoholics, mental cases, and hippies reading out of notebooks. By the eighties, nearto the death of Bukowski, a man with whom I have published, and disdain, beatniks were already an anachronism, much like my mentor's late life poetry readings. Listening to his aging YouTube voice, I allowed Jerry too huge an imprint on my life, but am yet able to step out of the narrative, and observe that his pathway ossified, even as mine has stalled, and dwindling into sterility. Where his ambition has settled disappoints me, and my own, we have been over that, my weakened frame hanging in the balance. How we allegorize evil in contemporary tropes has been much more dynamic. My accidental viewing of the Roboticist episode of The Collector reinforces this sensibility. Here Lucifer seems to be an ironic moral arbiter. In a show like Supernatural, he is an angry existentialist. What did he represent to Polanski in Rosemary's Baby? Polanski's genius takes us closer to the truth about the banality of moral corrosion, and most other commercial films do a terribly bad job of actualizing horror to make us take a step back and take measure of the autonomic amoralism we're hurling ourselves through. If I am an atheist, I am one who carries a huge Roman, Catholic chip, at least when I am not looking at the murdered mice of my pets.

I was going to deconstruct the episode in this post, before I spent three hours uploading this blog for Amazon kindle, but let me also step back, since this insipid Canadian production triggered the links between evil and acquisition, a steady diet in which Henry James luxuriated and Fowles updated. The Fowles novel is on my wish list, but I am cool to it at present, over taxed, to the point that I foreshadow what we know now about Obama's mandate. He did not need me. I was busy leaking urine on my poor ancient history hard copy reference guide, stressed, apoplectic that I still do not know how to find the print screen key to take screen shots when I need them. How long have I been online now? Would you like to guess?

The Kantian Concerns in Escapism

One thing that the burgeoning novelist Lee Doty shares with more accomplished authors and conceptual artists like JJ Abrams, and the canonical, like Cervantes, or Thomas Mann, is the fantastical troping of escape from reality. Doty just handles this badly, which is what I do not like about his foray into this much abused genre. His main superhero, Dek, is a boy with Downs syndrome who is plucked, ambiguously, out of a car accident, and is made into a replicant by his wizard father. The same happens to Roy, who is speculatively retarded. Doty never spells this out; instead these boys get superpowers and are conveniently killed in the opening narrative. We can also note, in the fabled discussion thread which followed my negative review, Doty ceased any comment directed at me as soon as I admitted to a disability. I did not expect that he would answer my email, as by that point I was thoroughly antagonized, but it is interesting, none the less.

We utilize chronic conditions creatively in a variety of ways, Abrams with somewhat more ingenuity toward a mythology. There was Locke's real world paralysis, or Rose's terminal illness, all suspended on a magical island transposed from Stevenson into a post 9/11 world. Henry James dollops consumption and other mysterious ailments into fairy tales. The young Mann, who I can only tolerate in small doses, and have placed his corroded novellas that signal the death of the Romantic movement into archive, for the time being, does the same thing, turning the very aspects of deterioration into a melodramatic looking glass. I preface my diffidence toward Mann's homo-erotic tortures with the caution that I have not read his more mature Modernist works, but still feel that James' genius is more synchronic toward my distaste for leveling the playing field over the pursuit of sexual pleasure, which can also be blinding, and in some ways, a selfish escape, however liberating the intense orgasm might be. Henry James knew, as I have learned, to my misfortune, that intimacy, even the purely emotional, can have deadly consequences.

Doty leans heavily on Philip K Dick for his cultural references in Out of the Black, but Dick, in his post nuclear android settings, does not let us escape from the challenge of whether we create worlds of our own destruction, or can hold to optimism for the future, which is another way of conveying that you should not dismiss what bitter would be elitists like myself have to say. Does this mean I am hostile to imagination? Not at all. I just want you to think twice, and whatever you shy from in my behavior, what does Doty's shunning of me entail, especially when he is willing to exploit the disadvantaged on the cheap. Food for thought.

un galantuomo

My editions of Henry James are all over the place: 4 LOA's, his travel writings barely penetrated, battered paperbacks with his strongest shorter works and novellas, free digital editions, and one paid. This is my Golden Bowl edition, purchased before my kindle buying spree:



I have always assumed the cover illustration reflects Maggie Verver lost in thought, losing her infantilism, to use Virginia Llewellyn Smith's term in her introduction to the text, an introduction written for the aficionado, not the novice. I am paused in James' opening, amid his worry about novel illustrations, no doubt a relevant concern to the replete literary mind at the dawn of the twentieth century.

I am very strenuous about my Henry James, despite the occasional laxity in application, and that strain may make the more applied scholars uncomfortable, because I want the revelation, "god fucking damn it to hell, !" and none is forth coming. I will confess that my first try at this nearly last completed work was almost incomprehensible. I was 23, foaming at the mouth for some of that zoological sociability, which, in Jamesian frills and lace, is always concealed. The reader can infer it, however, with as much irony or horror as he, or she, likes.

Richard Hathaway, here is one of his guidepost critiques, was one of my first Jamesian skirmishes in relation to interpreting The Golden Bowl, and my ferocity toward penetration in no way reflects any lack of respect for la bonne instructeur. The glass half full, half empty approach is what creates Jamesian fanatics in the first place. Dr. Hathaway supports his optimism by citing Adam's last words to his daughter about her "good things".  My pessimism is due to Maggie's last perception of Amerigo's pride, "...strangely lighted his eyes that as for pity and dread of them she buried her own in his breast."

I think James, near the end of his life, has had enough of refined mannerisms, and implodes the end of the Victorian age with the only weapons he knew how to deploy. I hear the critiques ringing that I over simplify, but I have only just begun.

A List Pose

The thought occurs to me that maybe I could one day approach Nicole Kidman's publicist about getting an interview in my own right, even if I cannot make the Henry James Review deadline, and it is quite possible that I will not make it, at the rate I am going. I care nothing about her personal life, and do not necessarily have to meet her in person; it is her art that interests me for a feature, along the lines of The Others (2001) and Birth (2004), if I could develop my own track, not that such a feature article has not been done. Of course it has, I believe in WaPo, and make a note to make a concerted effort to dig it out of archive, but not this morning. Her ex husband is insane, but too high in social status for anyone to admit that as obvious. Cruise and I are exactly the same generation, tail wind to the boomers of whom the gen X are so weary, one of us a self-hating sow always on the verge, the other a sometimes great actor always on, and a cultist, dodging trick wires. I wonder if Tom really has a central core, and knows himself for himself, but I doubt it. I have read some, here and there, about his religion, do not understand it, and a good federal conspiracy would set the Mormons and Scientologists up to kill each other. That's a fun idea.

I might be able to derive secondary material from such an attempted effort toward credibility, while groping toward a thesis in the fog, much as it was created by Amenabar on location.