Open House

"That was something else. "-- The Rosenbach director correcting my veer off topic.

If I was savvy enough with graphics, I would screen shot the Rosenbach events email and embed it for you, but suffice to say, their open house is September 28, from 12 to 6, and if you have not been yet, and enjoy eccentric historical preserves in cityscapes, then go take a peek. My first time I practically fell over myself to unload my small change in their donation vessels, and we will not dwell on my economic folly of maintaining my contributor membership; it is a folly I wish upon myself. The docents are friendly and know the history of the family. I did not spend a great deal of time in the Jewish history exhibit last evening, primarily out of consideration for Jewish tribalism and the museum's more important moneyed donors, but it is still an accessible and informative exchange, and the Civil War gallery is well designed, interesting to amateur and professional.

I shall not be in attendance, as I am a member now, and will conserve my energies in the direction of events, or future reading groups, so my absence will no doubt be an added inducement. Eh, let me hedge: If I am well enough maybe I will drive over and play mascot, but stay on Delancey. My sore spot over my reading fumble of Ulysses during Bloomsday this summer past is minor in the scale of things, but perhaps nerves led me to broach the issue. I know I am not upscale, and perhaps irrevocably falling out of the meritocracy. I may also secretly desire to try again one day, but that involves politics, like anything, and I am the Italian who hates Joyce!

There are lesser and greater inclusionary practices, however, and what quirky little Rosenbach represents is the greater, though I do not have the knowledge beforehand to know if the bookseller installed an elevator in the home as it was when it served its primary purpose as a bourgeoisie dwelling. Do mark your calendar.

Spirometry or Cornmeal

"Why we are mired in this virtually unsolvable problem is the reason I wrote this book."-- David Stockman

Paul Krugman's oblique critique of conservative alarm is patently ridiculous. Economics, sciences, humanities, health, physics, literary endeavor, agriculture, demographics, third rate quality controls which have decreased population pressures a billionth of a percent, none of these are divorced from each other. This relates to Ulysses hostilities. As superlative and versatile as Joyce proves to be, and as indebted post modernists of the future are to the man of schizoaffective verisimilitude, James Joyce evades a great deal of responsibility with his "damned masterpiece," to corrupt one of his complaints about his novel, and channel Mads Mikkelsen as a derivative virtuoso. Other authors beholden to the modernist tradition do not evade their responsibility. Hermann Broch. Marcel Proust. John Gardner. Even Laurence Sterne, who is a Joycean pater familias, does not evade responsibility.

I am still in Ithaca, after having made such expenditure as I have, although my aging family made up the difference of my support for the tiny and ensconced Jewish bookseller museum of nomenclature in this provincial urban backwater that fomented the birth of the United States, but now that I am past the guidance of Lance Walhert, who has two names because he was warned to be wary of furious spastic mettle, not that my family consciously decided to underwrite my contribution to the Rosenbach-- I had a birthday, veterinary bills, and mother's side and mio padre write off their guilt. Perhaps I will finish Molly's chapter by Bloomsday, perhaps not, and if you would be happier if I focus on small positives, I like young Althena, who looks like cousin Dana, and the guy with the glasses who listened for five minutes to now significantly ill and angry invalid's tale of misery-- I need to get back to my own concerns, however, before I acquire the scars of lung reduction surgery. The Mayo Clinic chastises that COPD is not the end of the world.

Of course it is for those with ambition and aesthetic desire and livid hatred of brain damage and a body broken with never a chance for its own beauty over indolence. I have had a craving for cheese puffs and in indulging it, breathed better. Breathing now. So why do I not behave and be compliant and script myself on the appropriate steroid combination before a machine takes over for me? I did observe that Amy seemed delightful, didn't I?

Stymied

Few of Joyce's books appear on the Irish school curriculum. His play "Exiles" has not been performed in Dublin for many years. His poetry is almost unknown in his homeland, and "Ulysses" is widely regarded in Ireland as an impenetrable and pretentious folly (which, in parts, it magnificently is). Joseph O'Conner for WSJ


The Hill County Farms case illustrates the loathsome underbelly of the American welfare state, that small pockets of our country are no better than dangerously disintegrated communities in Somalia. I do not care what your politics are. I do not care if I have raised more than a few eyebrows with the depth of my internalized scars. I do not care if Angelina Jolie forms a Tinseltown Exploratory Committee and wins all 50 states in a landslide in 2016, this horrifying instance of slavery is why I hate you, why, if you are of African ancestry and I have hurt your feelings, you have nothing to say to me, and why if you are a homosexual, I'd wire your mouth shut sooner than pay you a farthing in respect, and why, if you are white and suburban with your two children, what these men had to suffer is the fault of your despicable self-interest, and why, if you are a disability center consumer, you're deluding yourself. Next to the conditions these men endured my poverty is rich, but I have seen situations that do not leave much in the lack of imagination in terms of a crumbling existence that the least of ant colonies would not endure.

You see this story as an aberration. To me it's civilization's end, just beginning.

There are very few active Joyce forums online. I joined a Joyce serv akin  to the James list model  that hasn't seen a post since  2007, driven in my bid to find out to the degree possible how much  of James Joyce had read before 1922. Bloomsday makes me wrinkle my nose and avert my gaze, as if I had caught sight of my brother's dead hamster in the basement, drowned and floating. I do not really wish to read a fucking passage of Ulysses on June 16th. Charming Lance asked me if I would be well enough, if I wished to; no doubt I shall. The exercise and celebration is pointless.

Brown Nose

John has a good memory-- Erik von Schmetterling, before he lost his

After I was banned from this online community portal, circa 2002, I spiraled downward in Yahoo Groups, and unsubcribed from the atheist community after a time. Posting like a blackguard wasn't exactly home cooked meatloaf with mash potatoes. I have not crossed any boundaries with this non-fiction community, one of the few very active on which I remain, because I cannot keep up with their reading pace, and do not post often, and this is how I have marked my existence rolling from my bed to this desk for 15 years, give or take: who bans my account, who doesn't, which communities I leave voluntarily.

My health is beginning to fail-- not the best case scenario for sticking my anguish inside of how Joyce utilized his lack of balance crammed into one evening, unintended double entendre as this is. Joyce crams deconstructions, and I crammed over three hundred pages, now find myself disoriented, trying to relocate my gravitational center and mitigate my need to freak fuck myself into a stroke. I read all night at the desk, dressed at nine and drove my blocks in somewhat somnolent states of being  Rather dramatic way to rediscover my analytic decline, that I am not a student anymore; the goal is close, I am nearly finished with Ulysses, the sordid reflection of Leopold's Dublin like the crack in my psyche: if I stay with this landlord through this summer I am as good as dead, and if I give my notice this is tantamount to no more than executing the sentence.

The people with cerebral palsy with whom I live basically horrify me and I have little to say to those like the Gladhandler, or Sherry, with her happy retardation, and the ablests? They will listen, give or take, to my brutalized indignation, but how viable I remain among them is an unspoken question, how realistic it is for me to remain defiant.

The guy with the glasses who lets me in to the group, almost over now, is still good looking to my unloved trollop within.

It's been a wonderful life.

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.

Breaking Away

As an undergraduate, when I reached Circe I stopped reading.-- my intrepid Ulysses group facilitator, Lance.

I have also entertained the possibility of returning to Ridley Park. The borough was my last suburban territory before I ran, so unsuccessfully, from the block where I listened to Townsend's album so often mio padre stormed out of his bedroom and abused my stereo, smashing it, while I was reading a community college instructor's critique of one of my grandiose hand written stories. "I have no one to help me pack," I interrupted my neighbor Ed last week, and it is petty obstacles like this with which I am making myself ill. Ed is mildly befuddled by my need, my sheer urgency, to get the holy motherfucking hell away from this company, from African American stoic indolence.

It does not surprise me that Joyce had a daughter with schizophrenia. Ulysses is in many ways symptomatic of the illness, just as the novel itself foreshadows the ailments of the Lost Generation. Zelda was the flowering wound that made Scott the voice of the Jazz Age, and nearly all of Fitzgerald's output speaks to me as much through my Aunt Cecily as through my own creative intuition. Cecily was in the twenties as much as her sister Pauline was in the cloister. Telling you that I hate Joyce bothers me less than the fact that my preferences have passion, but I disservice myself by emoting it that simply, since there is much in Joyce with which I identify.

I told Lance not to read my account on Blogger, despite handing him my Amazon download page, lamely, but should he surf by, I am four and a half chapters behind, in Sirens, so it seems evident that spastic has had her fill of literary class instruction, ne c'est pas? Lance is the talent of the next generation, a kind, decent young man who yields to the humorous impulse. I am not in equal measure a decent and dignified old woman: we always continue learning, but with deceleration of a half century and the twilight of my ambition ahead, no more school, however lax the simulation. 

This posits the urgency. I cannot make Ed see it, that without a relocation, my moral compass will collapse. I need to make this happen this season, and if the drama of my sanity hinges on my failure or success, you'll no doubt read to tell the tale.

Oligarchs

"Snakes don't eat people."-- the incredulous Jennifer Lopez

Luis Llosa may have been offering a homage to Spielberg with Anaconda, but the film was ridiculous, barely lucid in its underlying subtext of preserving the Amazon's mystique. At this point in my life I fail to see why mechanical sharks and snake machines with a malevolent sense of humor shouldn't be made Secretary General of the United Nations, and if I ever get through The Feast of The Goat by Llhosa the novelist, I will have to view the filmmaker's adaptation, and this unwittingly brings me back to my trouble: my literacy fluency has done absolutely nothing for me, not in terms of personal security, and Llhosa has stated to English media repeatedly that he belonged to a Latin American left which thought it could change things. But that seemingly took forever in blue jeans.

Modernism changed literature and left it for dead, which does not mean that content will not continue to be sold as impulse products for consumers, but what has modernism done to the moral glue, the third chimpanzee's empathy? And by that I mean us, culling Jared's title. I have spent my entire life consuming the English novel and science fiction, and only later getting into the subtlety, sheer marvel, of the action taking place on the continent. Stendhal is more than Balzac's equal, and I can only wonder at where Marcel picked up his cues, not quite 100 years later-- but Joyce? If we were to superimpose Ulysses onto the scripts for The Following, aren't we saying that an abstract modality, taken to its absurd forms, makes it easier to clear the way for immolation? And yes, I get the subversive irony of the fact that James Purefoy brings the terminal degree scholar into the ever burgeoning tent of the American serial killer (hello to my internal vengeance driver). Late 20th century cold war thrillers were an early version of this video game mentality, with the real monster being the American operative flipped for money, or the thrill of it.

In the good old days, I would not have feared a Soviet agent. The Soviet agent believed in what Lenin and Stalin bequeathed, but today's Russian thugs lead us back to Bulgakov's ridicule, which doesn't need an apologia for its reductionist, dystopian tendencies. Bulgakov may not be the best counter example for me to use to bolster hostility towards Joycean meta-fictional overlay, because I may hear the jazz in Mikhail's masterpiece, but cannot say he is right about Christian orthodoxy, but unlike Joyce, Bulgakov is empathetic to the need for hope.

I said something stupid in group when some there asked me if I was a grad student. I said we have a lot to blame the Modernists for, in the accusative. Let me put it this way: I doubt Joyce could have foreseen Osama Bin Laden, but I can see what the rise of Al Qaida means when I read the mock epic of this over educated Anglo-Irishman.

Since I had my bowel impaction yesterday, went off schedule, and have to go to the store, I leave you with that questionable lucidity.

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?

The Black Irish, Consiigliore

"The blind stripling did not answer. His wallface frowned weakly.  He moved his head uncertainly."--James Joyce, Ulysses, p 165

Typical of cognitive brain density limitations, getting bluCigs down, the timing, charging, and usage, this is no easy feat, but I have the basics. It simulates real inhalation better when the battery and atomizer are fresh, but should not be held in the mouth like the simple Aero. I do not have the discretionary income to keep myself amply supplied with both, but freely confess I do not have the physiological strength to break dependence on nicotine's narcotic grip. When I cramp due to withdrawal, my mobility is further impaired, never mind my psyche, and stress. All that is an extension of my existence is my small personal library, my bylines and the detritus of my intellect striven against a poverty that flakes my emotions like brittle mica. That's it. Nothing else defines me. Dead felines die with me, and I have no idea what Google's policy is on memoriam accounts, as Google may freely do what it wishes with its services. I have never had my own place, or a husband, a family, a home, my own furnishings. Objects in the Jamesian sense, far and very few between. Is this what bothers you about my foray into difference, and its macabre insinuations?

I wonder. This studio is devoid. A tangle of wires and not enough outlets. Obsolescent electronic devices. Bins of dead letter bills entitlements, cheap cat toys, thick and outdated telephone directories used as antenna props. I should be reading for group, but the kindle is charging, and so I am here, in time honored Dickensonian fashion, I am going to work for mio padre, in a vain attempt to offset illustrious destitution while my seventy-eight year old progenitor still lives, pondering my antipathy to Joyce. It may have something to do with Jerry's driving energy for the destructive correspondences, and the Joycean gamesmanship, which I don't like even while appreciating, which is curious, since all modernists have some national pathos at play. That which James deploys turns my stomach, however. I haven't written much about the museum where I participate in these activities, as opposed to writing around it, due to my column, but it is not quite Upstairs Downstairs so much as brimming with dialectical tensions, and the black security guards who patrol in residence wear a look of perplexity:

"Are you Jewish?"
"No Italian."

And I am studying Irish literature, white welfare trash under the auspices of a sometimes intolerant black urban city state, watching those beholden to MLK's lack of content in character spin their wheels. Ho ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Key West, in Penury

"I'm not touching it." Jerry McGuire's motto against my varied efforts to penetrate and burrow.


Wherever this post is going, I am writing it 2/3's brain dead, but for the pedestrian in you, I enjoyed myself in group last evening, and if I was 28 years younger, would have lept off my chair, kissed Lance, kissed the archive librarian who I troubled with my arcane preoccupations, and the old man from from the Saturday half who said hello to me kindly, and the Camden group mate, though I would have left out the blonde. Call it the bitch radar. And there! This is what you say, was that so hard? Grasp these small pleasures. What is vengeance and a Valentine's Day massacre in comparison? It is vile, poor spastic, what you force yourself to carry, and your curiosity about Herlihy's demise is a case in point.

Allow me to qualify that all I am after is facts in evidence. In 93 I was in fact thirty and had no idea who Herlihy was, barely knew that Midnight Cowboy was Voight's signature vehicle, and I am cognizant that no one truly understands what motivates life taking, whether they involve Capone's pecuniary interests, or an aging homosexual who could not recapture the vitality of the Keys, and that even under the guise of Wallace's selfishness, and my anger over it, cognizant that his suffering was a piss in the wind, and he had everything I feel that I secretly deserved (and what is that adverb dear, secretly, when you bray loud and clear?), that these things are mysterious, and the intrepid academic has been there and back, enough already, all you have is indignation. True, but I am stubborn, and plow on with my own dialogical efforts. In David's case, the pedestrian can only point to the medical model, and that his clinical depression went off the rails, and yours has not, stronger in failure. In Herlihy's case I think there is more damning evidence, and that is what I seek.

Regardless of my militant stance, I pity the BSA, and while not sure I have fully digested Lillian's analysis, she is right that dodging is not a solution. Democracy may not be easy, to quote Obama, but when faced with the possibility that now something as pedestrian as your local scout troop will be hit with a gay rage scandal, this basically leaves innocence with no safe havens. Intolerable to idealism and honor that goes with it.

Risorgimento

I can only theorize who was tracking my address on probtheme, and have several of those, the minute conveniences we utilize, theories. LBGT activists can be a militant lot, but no, I do not waste my energies stalking strangers online merely to harass, and I am not hounding their chief operating officer either. Counterproductive, which does not mean, once I am finished going my legal circuit, that I will not engage their board of directors. I intend to exhaust all my options before deciding my next step, whatever that may be, in declining health, but whoever you were, obviously, you wasted your time. I learned my lessons about foaming the head on the beer glass, and actively trolling doesn't earn money, does it? Your SB event sounds like fun, DW, reasonably priced, but I think I am staying home, passing up any possible sexual overkill with a pot belly.

I spent over $470 on the James Joyce reading group, and unhappily realized I did not need another undergraduate audit, and I am not enjoying myself, lagging in my studies, in my reading. Do I drop it, and just go in for research on my stronger days? I like Lance, told him as much, and reluctantly tapped him as a resource for, yes ssis, academic support, but I feel like an alien at the table, whether or not my perception is accurate, and have not made friends, (though the question remains, whom I would like to adopt, and that would not be the instructor, since I see myself as an imposition on his youthful volubility) and regret not waiting for a really motivating study choice. I have not made any decisions, one way or the other. Five sessions to go, while the weather is warm today, but bad for me to engage. Winds, with storms coming. How do I get out of this city, keeping my humanity intact?

I cannot handle full time career pressures to the extent that you can, not anymore.

Mulch

It was after this failed interview post that I noticed the probtheme link in my traffic sources, (it was also my birthday) and it led me to speculate on what my isp trackers  thought I was capable of. Scalping sweet briar on a spear shaft? I care far too much about my own ego to pelt lesbians with egg shells, and leaving vitriolic imagery with boiling vats aside, the reasons I have drifted rightward from the progressive advocacy Catherine represents in her Barack deification (I know, I have been there, though not, insofar as it concerns the Obamas, with them) is because I have been tortured on the rack of the lie of social equality fifty ways from Sunday.

And my interview, fuck wits, was to campaign for Planned Parenthood. It is incumbent upon me that I did not ask the girl on the phone, whose name was Emily, the right questions before I showed up, and so I gift wrapped my parachute when I realized it would be next to impossible for me to field that degree of inner city travel.

However, my point to the gay marriage girls is exactly the reality check my physical limitations represent: Gay marriage is cosmetic. Including people like me in the real world is not. I might have been able to handle in office clerical duties and was shot down. By what metric my exclusion on the basis of my brain damage is progressive in terms of reasonable accommodation, this eludes me. Perhaps when Catherine lowers her brimming temperature, she'd have a few thoughts in response.

A Purveyor of Necessities

The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. --James Joyce, Ulysses, location 2112


How comprehensive one can be following a 4:40 am dash on the most frigid day of the new year is a good question, but let me dial myself back slightly, for your understanding: When Greg Zacharias admonished me about conspiracies, he meant my James list posts were not being bounced on purpose, not realizing I was attempting to make a sardonic joke. When my half brother admonished me, he meant my family was not engaged in collusion to put me back in a nursing home, but fuck that. My baby bro and my full blooded sister are selfish whining materialistic parents who let me down and feel guilty about it and are headed for a legal negotiation, while my family elders wish I'd shut the fuck up, and mother's sister has reverted to loving inclusionary noises, all well and good, but la damage has been done, though I grant you, in stealing my mentor's title from an old workshop piece de resistance, that I am the primary purveyor of my bubonic plague. If Rico was a Simenon morality play that the studio turned into an uneasy hatchet job that has a great deal to say about Caucasian caste, then Arlington Road is positively operatic red meat, and on my last viewing I paid very careful attention, and there is enough ambiguity about Hope Davis as Brooke, and the blond operative in the ponytail who closes the film, to leave hanging some interesting questions, and a film like Brazil, satire it may be, ties this up nicely, but I am still thinking, and am thinking now of sleep, and my wry smile when Catherine, the blue-eyed bright progressive, chatted with me and the North Philadelphia minorities, about hostility to the LBGT community. Little did she know I was bitter, disillusioned, and how victimized. She would not, none of them knew, and no, they will not, this ACLU offshoot, be able to accommodate me to do their canvassing. It will be too difficult, though the young woman involved in the Cairo uprising interested me, and though you know not to what I allude, she talked back, and the half century old cripple stood firm, unmoving, a virtual edifice of granite, watching humanity knowing not what it reaps.

Fangs In The Profiteroles

Set in my styles with a beady eye,
I got connections with the underground.-- Bernie Taupin, Caribou


Eddie and Alice Rico are a fortunate couple in their connubial bliss, but the underlying tensions fray their marital complicity almost immediately into the opening of the film. There is anxiety about the adoption (acquisition) of a child to flesh out their near wealthy status as a 50's family was then defined. There is the argument, not successfully suppressed, about the telephone call Eddie receives about harboring your traditional Americana thug, and the untimely meeting with Gino, the revelations of which you would tend to think would make a pack rat imitator wary. Perhaps it does, but if so, Karlson takes the time to show us how Conte keeps it under wraps with one of his truckers who recently had a child himself (no aura of victimization here, not overtly) until he then gets the call from Kubik.

IMBd, user generated, lists the film as shot on location in Miami, seemingly accurate, given the atmosphere of seediness, something that plagues the eastern corridor of the US well into the 20th century, Philadelphia, DC, and the entire state of Florida in particular. This is the state where Sherman (I wrote Grant in error when first published) tracked down indigenous Seminoles for being threats to civil order some years prior to the fictitious panorama of our civil war, but our plastique Disneyland peninsula, not quite the paradise it is cracked up to be, forms an interesting vector between our agrarian and cosmopolitan norms, as well as the subculture of the American mafia, which has yet to be truly demythologized, and will not be by me to any great extent. I cannot speak for Sicily, as my family, on both sides of its peasant roots, is Tuscan, though we interbred with Austrian officiers and thus have a strain of finer bloodlines, not an uncommon thing in the modern struggle for Italian unification.

I am now as sick as the proverbial dog, and suppose this can serve as your intermission and a place to pause in my labyrinth. I missed the Joyce group Saturday without meaning to despite my poorly stated petulance, shaking a defiant fist. I thought tossing my money at patronage would be a good thing for me, without meaning, inadvertently, to recreate a tepid link back to Temple University, and the young instructor is, as I have written, affable, but I am not forming any real sense of acquaintance with the men and women who also pitched their Joyce pennies, and though I am the dumbest shit in the world for sinking myself in quicksand in my various rationales for thinking I'd succeed in an urban environment, I could have plotted my own study of Ulysses had I wished, without spending 500 dollars for a future essay on which I am likely to earn only a forth of that back. I am not claiming that I have Lance's resources or skills, but as a metafiction, the text is not all that intimidating, and like any other classicist, I would have found my way. To paraphrase Charlotte Stant, making myself stupid, in this instance, would have been a virtue. I have to rest and decide if I am well enough for the 6 PM session.

Convalescent postscript: I have yet to read Grant's memoirs, and I meant General Sherman from the start, but I was multi-tasking, getting a huge attack of bronchitis, thinking about Joyce. This is why I substituted the future victorious drunkard scandal riven Ulysses for his more ruthless and efficient understudy.

Petite Sentiments

Before I return to my futuristic medical catastrophe of poverty induced stroke, barring poverty induced subcutaneous embolism, a few spare thoughts on the kindle paperwhite, spare, because I wish to cash in with a digital angle, though I never can write as fast as Yoffe, which may be just as well.

I am more comfortable carrying the paperwhite around, as the older kindle keyboard model has taken a beating, though it has stood the test of time, remains functional, and I am not ready to trade it in yet. Still manually easier to subvert the location issue through bookmarks and highlights on the older and technically more spacious device. Touchpad is still frustrating, though divining menu operation did not take me too long. With a little effort, I can read the paperwhite in dim light, and as long as I do not buy a text accidentally, Amazon's special offers, though no friend to the over-educated, do not trouble me, as this giant retail monopoly represents the best and the worst of Friedman's holy grail. Amazon's claims about battery life are so so, but since I am normally near a power outlet, this is not much of an issue. Relaxing into a text itself might be, but this may also be the residual effects of my bloody and asinine bid to becoming a patron of local color, and expending money I shall never recoup, much like the drain from felines dead and alive, and sibling rifts and expenditure, on the conquest, semi-lucid at this point, of Ulysses. (Lance, dear fellow, I take back what I said about "not deciphering," bloody fool spastic is!) Still cannot distinguish the period from the comma, but in terms of modern alienation and agony, figuring out which is which is a minor affair in Sebold's flickering window candle.  Certain classes of least functional cripples may not benefit from all this that is derivative of the cell phone.

One thing I have not done is transfer my periodical content, not yet. Less pressure. I am also entirely ignorant of comparisons to other models, but I am not seduced by the Apple device fetish as the rest of you, so you may deem that mild generational resistance. How much I can still absorb and maintain my dignity? The fact remains, this technology would have made me a better student; for that, a great deal of regret. This may seem like opaque reasoning, but the physical act of researching is a touch harder for wheelchair users, however much larger universities pride themselves on access, library architecture seems welded to the Victorian age, not that this was a conscious issue in youth, but in contemporary terms, it does begin to matter, and academic electronic fair use issues might include disabled access exemptions.

Somi's Bark

Well, now we know. The end of the world will include Christ making a pit stop in Missouri. Hilarious, and this man is purportedly brilliant. I despair of you all this evening, and you can take it or leave it, though I have made an effort to moderate my tone in recent weeks. My edition is out on loan and I have no regrets as to that, as I do not despair, quite, of my young Ulysses instructor. He is affable; he is busy, but should he stop by, my seal of approval is in the air. You're doing a fine job.

I am busy as well, but not affable, quite, and will return, hopefully around Monday morning, with new post, revisions, maybe the ghost of Eliot and his gentlemanly prejudices. I should be able to leave section 202 housing without it evolving into a death sentence, and that is so humorous that it should be good enough for a stroke at my wake.

Nabokov Émigré

"If he is capable of love we have to assume he is also capable of hate."
--Sam Robards, A.I.



I finished The Luzhin Defense today and instantly reset it to read again, because so many things are inextricably entwined here, and there is a kind of shared identity between a cripple who cannot reject what the state imposes on her without incurring more serious constraints and Luzhin's rather vacuous problems with identity due to loss of his homeland. The title character is just shy of being an idiot savant, just shy of mental retardation, almost the antithesis of Humbert. Nabokov's diegesis strategies please me more than those of Joyce, despite the structuralist strains of the Russian who is nowhere and everywhere, European, dislocated, and an incisive critic of the Eisenhower Era. I am mad at myself for banking myself at Ulysses, all the same, as I am rereading Homer in blank verse and three other texts for every allusion I am highlighting and tracking, but if I want to play as an independent scholar with one or two bylines, then I need some familiarity with the grandmaster and his nonchalance on accessibility.

I should be sympathetic to it, given how much I hate those who cannot think outside the box, and I am, but gimmicks are gimmicks, whether the year is 1904, or 2004. Mitchell's book could not exist without derivatives, like Calvino, but his genius is more dynamic than that of the poverty driven gentility of Joyce. Mitchell wants me to work, but also expects that I will enter the narrative. Joyce seems to thrive on dissonance and obscurity and I curse his grave, comparisons to Sterne be damned. My sympathy for Irish pathos is lacking, precisely because it was all for nothing, and history is also written by those with the best propagada tools. Everyone knows what the IRA was, but most of you would draw a blank on those Italian anarchists targeted before the modern unification of the Italian Pennisula

Leitourgos

I am a liberal Row-Ark. What I am not is a card carrying ACLU radical
-- Matthew McConaughey

Many people are turned off by Joyce's meta-textual efforts, myself included; the saga of Ireland's violins are wearisome, even if this is a callous modern sensibility, and makes me pea green, and thereby inducted, when I think of the money I spent. You do not want to know what I paid to become a patron of a small slice of Philadelphia's cultural history, but it is comparable to what a three credit course went for when I was a student. One among the group is a novelist, and he and I were the first two people in the room, generation divided, I read and typed notes on my kindle, and he had three huge books. Our exchanges were clipped, heightened, and I caution myself to remain passive and let the clover patriots indulge themselves. I am only there to contrast Joyce with Lampedusa and Proust and Broch, who I am slowly rereading, scribbling notes in the book. I did not know The Sleepwalkers was in the Modernist family when I bought the novel, and only remember the anarchist, with a strange jolt, a pang, as if his death was my loss. I am more familiar with Joyce than I let on, but harbor an ambivalent hostility (you gasp! no!). He is one of the greatest writers in the English language, but those Irish violins, the Troubles, the Celtic warriors who corrupted my Roman legions, I sigh... Perhaps the novelist is published, not play acting an amateur. We shall see, and I suppose I should reread Portrait and really make an effort and be a good girl; tis my money, but I think Joyce, and perhaps Marcel, were creating a secular liturgy, and that is my very simple defense of Ulysses and Finnigans Wake. Not sure I shall ever attempt the latter, though I cannot be definitive.

Hoping to get to the DMV today, but not positive. Partly the problem is the distance of the drive; the Septa routes are bothersome for such a short distance, but I do need to get the mug updated. If I hate PresbyHomes as much as I assert, I am not on an intracounty transfer list because I fail to see the point. Every other location is problematic, and I was on the suburban transfer list but DCCC HUD lost me. I can go as blue in the face as is survivable, but this doesn't change the fact that I have set myself up for trouble, barring charitable private property. For all the nerve it took me to write to Babette, getting an acknowledgement is elusive, which does not bode well for my late life cause of independent living center reforms; my public avatar and private sentiments are slowly merging, however, because I do believe that disability centers kill the disabled through incompetence, I really do.

This is the danger inherent in building managers like Trudy Richardson and her bulldog, Debra. They are handed power without the professionalism or training to handle it without violating the very civil liberties the ACLU holds dear, but the ACLU spikes a fever on fusion centers and their infringement of privacy, right of association, or sex, or fringe protest; if I was in Columbia having Marxist orgasms with trade unionists, I'd expect the FBI to have a hard on for my hard drive data. What compliance and case management are doing to our basic rights, however, never mind; it's an afterthought, like me, the scars I carry. The glare  Obama bored into Romney is my own, except the odds that my injustices will be rectified are virtually nil, and yes, it was in part my social fear, and the knowledge that the cruelty of my former employer destabilized me.

I worked last night during the debate, and I'm pushing my body beyond what is safe. Have a good one peepbles.

La Vongola

This was Joyce before he was Joyce, Lance Walhert, Ulysses instructor.

Susan Hayward certainly fits the part she was to play as Barbara Graham, and I Want to Live! represents a superb movie conflagration, with the Mann Act representing a continuous growth, from the Jazz Age of Fitzgerald, encapsulated by Warren Beatty, with varying degrees of success (cf The Fortune with Stockard Channing), carrying us through the Depression with a more hale Spencer Tracy escaping certain darkness, to the regulation of womens' make up and attire during the war years, well examined in feminist studies, and perhaps relevant even today, with Nicholas Kristof's ever omnipresent guilt tripping our suffering against the animal tripping third world. I list his wife's documentary to raise the interrogative possibility of helping these girls with a McCarthyesque law that everyone feels, intuitively, as sinister, but might be used to decrease trafficking? I am also a little sore with the almighty liberal, as he followed me on twitter using his other account on my other account for less than two days, and brother man, my admissions of bigotry does not mean I do not have relevant arguments, and perhaps not one to be dismissed so readily. You are a big enough brand that the boost helped my esteem. He can tackle vultures stalking starving children in the Sudan, but a struggling disability journalist dying on her own lung fluids and her own abuse from the left, ah, Nicholas won't absorb that, merci vous! I think he is still on my list, but I have not checked recently. Do I care?

How authentic Hayward's Graham is remains open to question. If Barbara was arrested in the process of coitus interruptus with her gang, this is somewhat less than sympathetic, but Hayward seems merely to imprint her own brassy attributes onto her parts. Again, having a telegenic command is an intangible, difficult to penetrate, but it can obscure the truth and the nature of complicity, even if it represents an ongoing conversation with a more brutal narrative, like Monster.

Joyce started this process of interlocking roots, along with his dialectical rival. The effort I took, getting up, getting to the class, gnashing my teeth, getting what I expected in a young post graduate and a cluster of ethnic plebeians, deferring to him with awe, knocked me out, took me all day, not that I claim to be more erudite, but I could have done this study without an analytical boy wonder who seemingly handled me with diffidence. I am really really ill, more so than I have realized in quite some time, living on light roast hot coffee, toast, a constantly upgraded temperature, and an inflammation that expectorants no longer ease, entirely. One use of phrasing where Lance and I would disagree is what Joyce achieved, if I heard the man correctly. Ulysses does not push realism to its limits, so much as linguistic intricacy, which makes being versed in the work of James seem like prep school.

It begins with Dubliners, which indicts authority and progressive modalities alike, exposing the limits of imperialism, the tunnel vision of ethnic unity under which we're all bound, suffocating in it, the brutality of caste, whether it leads to the loss of control in a hot toddy, or inhaling your own asphyxiation in cyanide, with all its complex and complimentary flavors