Tron Beats

This is the difference between me and a dead optimist who is as vibrant as I am leaden: he keeps making the best of it and he's dead. I am calculating a pitch based on the cost of his saliva cancer as a rational argument for a federal euthanasia standard; if you're wondering if I am that ruthless, yes. What saddens me is the fact that Siskel & Ebert taught me how much I like to argue. I paid attention to the conversation as much as to the movie under discussion. What does Chaz do with Roger's online accounts, or the Chicago Sun-Times with theirs, for that matter?

I could not bring myself to take his twitter account off my following list, and now I'll never know whether it went like this:

EBERT: "Dan I have a dysfunctional groupie for you; look at her comment in response to my post on loneliness..."

Or like this:

SCHNEIDER: He won't mind if I peel off this spastic figure for my Cosmoetica lists. (and a week later). "Look at what I get for trying to be nice. She told me to fuck myself because I don't have a hard on for Marcel Proust."

Lyricism Minutiae

Lifting a term from Naomi Perley in her 19th century literature studies, it is the rich intratextuality of Proust that I prefer over Joyce and his Homeric Shakespearean parody, and in this sense, I am an Italian Germanic Francophile over a Saxon Anglo satirist. Eliot critiqued that the novel as we once knew it ended with Flaubert and James. True, but Joyce and Proust, then David Mitchell, broke the bank.

The novel as a literary form is dead, and Joyce took a deconstruction to its limit and essentially failed. His word smashing may strike the funny bone, but is not a consciousness simulation. Proust, on the other hand, mimics the complexity of biology by turning detailed precision of memory into a musical score. Mitchell then in the 21st century gives it digital connective tissue with historical allusions bound by chance connections that unify from the center.

Nothing more can be done with narrative except for the arbitrary perspective that seeps in the cracks.

Naughty woman with a schedule I need to keep, I should be lying down, but I wrestle with my two bit tap on why the quiet Italians, limping in on the backs of the titans, should have the last word. It turns out I can play Russian roulette with both e-cig cartridges and the simple plastic poke tubes. My constructs are slow to form, but my advantage is I am a stubborn bitch, and I am going to take my place in the field, even if I have to tutor remedial English to grasp at straws. I hate Joyce, so there, but why?

You see?
*
Lazy troping.  I can appreciate certain things in the fabled Joycean virtuosity, and of course, Western civilization survived the onslaught of Modernism deconstructing the fabulism, the assurance, of the Elizabethan world order, but it could not stop personal autonomy from turning yesterday's warrior into the modern terrorist. Is this too damning a charge to aim at Broch, Bloomsbury, their successors?

Sodom and Gomorrah

Charm is something definitively absent, which also seems to be the case for Henry Miller. Looking at this glum old fellow in the Wiki photo makes The Tropic of Cancer a bit difficult to square. The closest I can enter into the charm of Proust's voice that so soothes me, is the small ceramic Madonna grandmother Pauline gave me when my pelvic ligaments were being butchered in my first year as an adolescent, and a nervous British nurse broke the statuette. I never forgave her for that, ever. It is a cue I can recall as clear as day. I am busy writing a letter to a paying editor on my 1987 Smith Corona PWP6. Much like Sean Connery doing Salinger, I like returning to electric word processors now and again, but charm, joy, love? These feelings were never mine to truly experience. I wrote earlier in the year that perhaps I was in love with Jerry's memory, and suggested, then, that this was a pathway to defeat. I quarrel even with my own outreach for sentiment, however, because I do not know what this means.

I do know that nakedness strips off veneer, that sexual contact is a vulnerable exchange, even in the most romantic circumstances, and that was never mine either, not even the so so exposures to married male impotence. Swann's Way is my only hard copy edition of Proust in translation, and it is Marcel's segue way into the girl with her masochistic tendencies for the reward of a kiss that I am thinking of, whether it is in the Sodom & Gomorrah section, or before. I pulled the text out of my shelf, always fond of the vinyl feel. It would not be remiss to review and refresh as I journey slowly through Budding Grove, for I do understand abasement, unfortunately, as a tool to gain a sought reward. Not to be another woman's lover, however, so much as to feel necessary. Is it even conceivable that I can still meet a good man without a lesbian like Josie Byzek to do her unfathomable damage to my anticipation of desire? Do I still have the ability to derive pleasure from desire? Shakespeare had his own somewhat subversive take about passion, and we do not need scholars to remind us about Othello, or that Romeo and Juliet were victims of "a smoke raised with the fume of sighs". I go to lie down awhile, fearing my stability is loosening, my lone submission finished, of which there used to be so many more.

Soirées à Marcel

"There are people who should die." Rose might be discussing the price of milk. "Americans have a hard time with that, because they think everyone who is bad got broken somehow and someone else is at fault."
                   --Timothy Hailinan, A Nail Through the Heart, kindle edition, location 672