Princess Andromache, Croupier

.... not so Agamemnon, who spoke fiercely to him and sent him roughly away. "Old man," said he, "let me not find you tarrying about our ships, nor yet coming hereafter. Your sceptre of the god and your wreath shall profit you nothing. I will not free her. She shall grow old in my house at Argos far from her own home, busying herself with her loom and visiting my couch; so go, and do not provoke me or it shall be the worse for you."-- Samuel Butler's translation

How is it that one can eschew James Joyce and still appreciate the consequences of Modernism? There is much to appreciate in Ulysses, regardless if a pauper invalid spends well over five hundred dollars on cheat sheets and the nullification of her own pretensions, particularly the Calypso section, and then Nausicca, and the disjunctions from Nausicca between Bloom and Gerty leading into Circe which I absorbed with psycho-sexual shock, and will ponder beyond the conclusion of this reading group cycle. Joyce is  on par with the blindness of subsuming into appetite, and still illicits my scorn.

Scorn is a strong sentiment, a reaction against pity and the pathos of Joycean grandiosity, something that glimmers in Dubliners, rises in Portrait, and reaches a crescendo in Ulysses. Perhaps I am more Cartesian than I realize, certainly not as skillful as Nick Davis in deconstructing Greenaway. Nick helps me to see why The Belly of an Architect preoccupies and remains an insufferable pretension, and the argument it makes about feminism and legacy is to some extent historically relevant, structuralist, to say the least. Problematic films like these are needed even more than masterpieces. If you need to visualize what I mean in my charge toward a thesis, there is the gnat chameleon aspect of Jake Gyllenhaal's roles: the sounding center geek in Proof, The Zodiac Killer, a type against his A list swashbuckler bid Prince of Persia, a formula for which I could not sit still. Moving in part, more rugged in its realism than Errol Flynn's output, reminiscent of Douglas and Curtis maiming each other unto death, a film based on a game nevertheless doesn't belie expectations.

I ended my implicit contract with the long winded Timothy Artis, the talking mule of the Torah, and this time, I ended it for good. There is little between me and a major shit fest if I do not find a replacement soon, or return to the Medicaid waiver.

Should I give up, prepare for death? Like anyone has the balls to type in my comment section on accepting limitations and the inevitable. I have only a thin, thinning veneer for African American dominion in Philadelphia-- indeed, the cracks in black identity toward true matriculation into the mainstream has ushered itself in a little late for my adoption of developmental dove like expressions.

Bedlam Proofs

I wonder if I should give myself a lone gesture, like Catherine in the opening of the film, and make a toast with my coffee to auspicious beginnings. Proof is not solely an agenda film, of course, and it is charmingly plagued by the romantic vision of mental illness that the West has held since Goethe bequeathed young Werther to an equally young Europe of the eighteenth century. Catherine may stick it in the face of Robert's mourners in the Rockefeller Chapel, but the film can still be viewed as a romantic metaphor, asking the questions I raised in my last post, and yet only touching on the real grit and hardship that comes with handling diseased brains and bodies: Robert stank? Try dealing with incontinence on a daily basis and not come out of that with some degree of belligerence to the ableist majority around you and not get ambushed for it.

I did, and in fact do get subjected to ambushes daily: my building managers, case managers from providers of one sort or another; my career, in fact, when I had it, was based on my ability to case manage those as marginalized as myself, based on my knowledge of the system. The gloriously modern notion of making sure we fit everyone in the right modality, and in turn fitting those into the right paradigm and expecting *compliance*.

The movie resists this aspect of modern society even while acknowledging it, especially in the flashback where Catherine finds Robert sitting at the table outside the house during an evening snowfall, believing that his machinery (mind) had come back to life. The scene might have been taken right out of a Bing Crosby performance of Silver Bells. In some ways the film can even be seen as a meta-accolade to Hopkins himself, for being the Lawrence Olivier of our generation.

I was less enthralled with Jake Gyllenhaal as Hal Dobbs, the former student of Robert's and would be lover of Catherine. He looks and acts like a muppet on steroids in playing his part, and was somewhat better cast as the cartoonist in The Zodiac Killer. Still, he and Paltrow both exhibit a refreshing fragility in a film that challenges us to think without getting sanctimonious about which version of the truth its audience should best believe.