Junk Food Gas

We have no housing suggestions at this time.--Toomey's regional offices

I was a little more unkind to Jayne Anne's legacy than I had intended to be here, was mildly surprised Niume allowed me the ventilation, and shall perhaps make up for it at a later date. I cannot remember much about Fast Lanes or Black Tickets, and have yet to restart the earlier vignettes which earned the studiously silent professor her acclaim; no, I am not pouting that she will not respond to me; I simply thought emailing her would be the fastest method to get a copy of my poem back. I may even no longer have a draft, and murderous contempt for vacant Christian idiots doesn't solve the problem, does it now?

I know the alt.right doesn't give a fig leaf for my liberal brown nosing, blow upon blow. The state GOP, Toomey. They seek my loyalty, my monetary support, and if I have committed nearly irrevocable acts against black monolithic bull dykes, as long as the lava vein doesn't lead to property damage, who cares? So why have I switched sides? Because Toomey would have evicted me by now; there may have been some humiliation involved, but not this slithering nigger poison on its daily saline drip, and I like straight forward talk, think the man got the CIL to declaw my supervisor. The most cognizant rationale I've read about McConnell's breach of Beltway decorum, allowing the Garland nomination to expire, was that the party wanted to keep Scalia's seat solidly conservative: I've enough independence of mind left to be critical of "unicarmelizing" the federal legislature. It only gives libertarians more fuel, as we all grow more suspicious.


Sure, Obama disillusioned me, and his policies did jack to help me, as quads are always dismissed, third class humans, at best, if we require too much mending, but he was still the president. Trump wants the same respect, and in that light, Garland should have had a hearing. Gorsuch gets in, yes, but after I am dead, does Scotus become a dog and pony show off Broadway? If I can be nearing 55-- just barely, and be cynically disgusted, it is quite an erosion. Mr. Delvechio's history student, 36 years ago, was a patriot. She believed in her country. Philadelphia, as a chronic condition, destroyed that by the time the broken half-wit from the Bronx proposed to me. I think I was 42, thinking I'd stay well built for a while. Now I am ejecting myself from the inglorious projects which consumed health, virility. We'll see if JFK security shoos me off, like a mad woman, if I present myself to the Senator's staff, in the interim.

Third Time's A Charm

"Closing The gap takes a deeper look into the gang stalking phenomenon."-- jacket blurb

BIn closing the distance between my psyche still flying under Google's all powerful radar, I actually emailed the recombinant Jayne Anne because Karina Klaus, the fucking white trash I hired, nearly killing my apartment manager whom I am still ready to rumble into an illegal situation over it, this Karina, the Craigslist swiss cheese Air Jordan brain, fucked around with my contributor copies while I was taking a piss and destroying a 60 dollar flea market skirt I bought from a minority vendor. The only thing I have in this world are my contributor copies, and so I overrode any self-effacement and emailed the once libertine southern debutante. I asked her if she could find the magazine, copy my poem, and send it to me. I was terse, not even offering a salutation. I then emailed her at Rutgers again, claiming I found my copy. and this, in point of fact, is not the case, so I suppose I should now wait, quietly, and see what this woman, over whose picture I destroyed a Poets &Writers issue so I could tape her profile to my door in the hard core badlands 15 minutes down Race, will say. I know Karina is a soft-shelled crab. I know she is in Oregon and whoever the dickwad is that she's fucking, I hope unwittingly compensates me by devastating her with a future episode of abandonment.

How vicious? 

What in the name of my long, abusive, spastic life do I have but my work? My anxiety over a future bi-nervous vulnerability to an unscrupulous feminine manipulator is misguided. The next ambulatory individual who fucks with my life, regardless of race or sexual orientation, is going to experience what it is to have a Roman assassin reborn. No one gives a fuck. I know. This is the age of social media, and I may not be a quadriplegic as scorched as a Precious in triplicate. Karina tends to believe we're friends. I am also going to blow my stack with Google, live, in fairly short order, about monetizing. Me and the mighty Silicon giant, round two. Smell a service suspension round the bend?

Arc of Nitrate Decomposition

Let us return to Professor Phillips momentarily, as the representative teacher novelist and vignette author. My first exposure to Jayne Anne was in an 1983 anthology, Matters of Life and Death. I believe this exposure presented before Jerry sent me trotting after Black Tickets, of which I can recall virtually nothing. "Home" is a strong short story and made a strong impression, but it embodies all of Jayne Anne's weaknesses, a penchant for abstraction, emotional coolness, the clipped mildly vicious bite of women in her social class. It points to her lack of sustaining power as a novelist. I blinded myself to it out of sexual frustration and envy, dangerous enough to be generative of bisexual anxiety, despite the fact I never had a sexual fantasy where oral orgasm involved a lithe and more biologically attractive woman making me the masochistic bitch begging in submission, all games, no glory. Deep enough for you? If so, why am I pushing this?

I may not literally die leaving Riverside section 202 after 24 years of hostility and fear. As a practical matter, whatever I do, first responders would be forced to remove me if I get stranded: I am cognizant this expedites what I've seen Presby do to residents for years, and years, since I was 23, but I just can't take it anymore, and I am hoping I am just clever enough to evade the barbarity Inglis House represents. My online voice, however, will not be what it was, so I'm pulling the knives, pressing the most dangerous triggers which usually ends lives of lesbian suckling gluttony, and am capable of a rather close distinction between a feminine sexual threat which would not lead to positive satiation, because the stark existential reality is, I could never be the Jayne Anne whose chic reticence appeals to a man of breeding, the cosmopolitan urbanite I always longed for: her so so achievements as the modern southern female will fade, because it is the standard, literary milk weed that passes for expression. She is more teacher than writer who makes the blood vibrate, and it is the women who reject teaching whose legacy is the most powerful in literary endeavor.

Despite the catastrophe before me, I am putting the strongest parts of my voice together, the Joanne poet who closed the issue of Oxford Magazine Jayne Anne opened. She aspired to the voice of angels. I intimated Custer's Last Stand can be attributable to the modern consumer economy of appliances like microwaves, much more complex in condemnation. I regret my letter to her publisher, forget what the fizz amounted to, but don't regret the torsion of my own self-deception. The cry that I too wanted a lithe eroticism, that I too wanted the power of God's creation in my vibrant woman's vessel, and was denied. Let's see who shall stand the test of time. The visiting professor or spastic survivor of American genocide.

Digressing Clinical Aspects

I just wanted to have a dinner party.-- Meryl Streep keeping abreast of ebullient eschatology

Concentrated dramatic creativity can be detrimental; to iterate it once again, the screen adaptation of Cunningham's derivative novel, The Hours, ripped a hole in my chest, and I had to restrain myself from screaming in email. At Cunningham's publisher, or the author, in much the same way I danced on the griddle of hard copy fan mail for Jayne Anne Phillips, before I concluded, in my maturity, that she wasn't a movement author for me, so much as a secondary iconic figure to cling to Jerry McGuire, which in its own way, is me being rather merciless. Was Phillips sexually attractive in her Poets & Writers heyday? Sure, I am not entirely immune to MacLaine's discovery in The Children's Hour, but neither does it mean I have kd lang's sexual fantasies. I do not gurgle over the breast nipple of which I was deprived. It has never gotten me off. I'm simply so masochistic, and in so much pain, that feminine sensuality opens vulnerability-- but I can never read Cunningham, and have to stay away from the film. It is too intense, however much I am the same.

I am not in particularly good shape. "So? What do you want us to say, go get joy juice." Doing a nice piece on twitter's problems, however, still makes me inexplicably lively, as I believe social media's herd mentality is not always beneficent. I am not here to get hyped, or win popularity contests. I am not Wallace either, but I perceive the price he paid for his laser lens elocution, and I am such a lesser, spastic figure.

Moral Dilemmas in Putrefaction

Even as recently as five years ago, when I in fact just started posting, not so inadvertently discovering affinities with spree killers, the thought that Jayne Anne was not my intellectual superior would have been unthinkable, and that, primarily, because this bastard was a personal deity, and while this may be categorically unfair to southern women writers who only mildly differentiate themselves from urban northeasters, Miss Phillips has systematically left me unimpressed, and I've contemplated removing her from my small mounties of rage on twitter, where she has neither responded, nor blocked me, my ambivalence neither here nor there toward our respective twilights,  unlike Poets and Writers, which blocked me for writing stigmatize in capitals after they invited suburban mermaids to chorus with them at a poetry reading. I may have reacted and tweeted inappropriately about how conformist the organization has become since its early days, but they are the ones being intransigent now, not I.

I have not been rude to Miss Phillips, and retain yet a slight trance of deference in my responses to her normative academic liberalism, but what I read in her, even as a disabled woman who personalizes on the basis of an effervescent clinging, is a white Southern woman who's used up, running the standard leftist treadmill we all know. This is a great deal to masticate in what amounts to a simple binary choice in the complexity of computer binary code, or is it something else, like a disabled woman betrayed by cosmetics? 

Mince Meat, Hytonia Convulsed The Hard Way

Blow me down with a holiday breeze: A PAYING EDITOR JUST SAID YES!
I should go berserk in agony more often, hey Ann? Specifically addressing Ann Tran as a colleague here. Let's discuss my particular conjecture as it pertains to homoerotic elevation.

I have made much in previous posts to my link with Ms Phillips. It both excites and arouses me that she and I share a byline. In my more obscure antipodes, I published a poem dedicated to her called "fortissimo" which is both sexually competitive and dangerously suggestive of foreplay, and not being afraid to challenge myself, I did so, not interested in her sexually, but envious, and perhaps we've been around this bend before, but exactly what am I envious of, other than her privilege of projecting a state of lithe? To be totally, unsparing and uncompromising, did I elevate Phillips because Jerry, whom I deified, recommended I read Black Tickets? It has been so long I only remember liking this early collection as a series of vignettes, and repurchased an e -copy however long ago, two years, despite her relative teaching security against my ironclad welfare death spiral, or does her skill merit my admiration, her accomplished, rural to urbane transference? Last I investigated, she had a stint at Princeton. I have no idea if she has received my ancient fan mail, but where does all this birthday cake icing come from? Machine Dreams lags. I never finished it. Fast Lanes, so what?

This means, to my shock, that the aesthetic sensibilities of dogged eared Shakespeareans isn't always absolutely on the mark. Why exactly then did I deify Jerry so blindly? To hide, not push myself, because I was afraid of giving in to the lesbians who have hit on me, with the mixed race cellulose inner city sow who couldn't keep her paws to herself being the most sordid? I did reject her, violently, and what she did not not arouse or liberate me. I survived. The Hollywood studio system may have long had a celluloid closet, which we'll mine later, as a documentary, but the Screen Writers Guild has yet to really apply itself to the homily woman, the Georgy Girl who snares the obviously appalled James Mason who realizes what he traded in order to be the brow beaten husband. There are no stories out there for us, not really. Occasional cop show. 

Almost Less Than 24 Hours

The last time I sought emergency mental health services was between 1999 and 2000, after Linda was finished playing politics on my economic desperation. I do not bring it up to keep reviewing the respective prisms through which my former supervisor and I saw our interaction. It simply all boils down to the same thing: the image of my brother looking desperate, rabid, while my immediate family commiserated with the juvenile psychiatrist. This crisis wasn't about me, my immobility, but my younger brother's cathartic violence. He died a rapist and a vandal, wasted by AIDS, and I write this for anyone who cares to click the flag to read: I was pissed, majorly, about being pulled from my midterms to talk about Nicholas, and yet I'm pretty much the same, absent the desire to commit sexual violence, as such. My parents were a bad cocktail, a stereotypical Roman male with that singular Italian fury, and a beautiful but suicidal manic who ate her way out of her looks, a couple who manufactured two cripples and a dead sociopath, with my so called normal sister and her fucked up family.

"You need help," my sister's refrain after the CIL got done doing to me what it does to nearly everyone. There are variations: Dr. David Ward trying to get me to accept that I was clinically depressed, before CILS had a legal mandate, or my history instructor before that, trying to intercede in my life so he could sail me off to Harvard. Until I grew up some and got hit with the Tassoni thunderbolt, I wanted to marry Mr. Bruno, smiling at the normal puppy things. 

I should not write this, but despite the fact I am not at the Jayne Anne Phillips level, particularly since I am not a novelist-- and might have a little more change to bring my entitlement up a couple thousand if I was-- be that as it may-- I am fucking tired of the literary submission scene, but I can also never rise to the level of lawyer journalists like Jennifer Rubin, along with the others in her class. My withdrawal is pounding on me, yes, and my lunging hate (my audience should be so glad I am a quadriplegic, as I seem to have inherited Julius Caesar's thirst for war, or I am the -- never mind-- I cannot make my psyche complimentary to spree killers, though I have already) boils like a Georgia peach zombie wresting with the next vulnerable cast member. Even if I give my notice, flee, setting myself up for an unknown sleaze bag house arrest, I've past the point of revitalization, despite the fact that just as Virginia Woolf, we can push an exclamation point on the ecstatic. My fans who used to send me letters said "we'd never try to make a living as a writer," and I certainly never intended to, but re-matriculation? The harder I try, the crueler it becomes. 

Derelict in Transition

"I don't want any surprises."-- a Philadelphia police officer who ignored my request to be placed under arrest as he took my arm and I pivoted.

Or, when you're fucked, you're fucked, like Timothy Hutton as the troubled father on American Crime, a show experienced rather late, without the time for much back episode viewing, but Hutton, like so much in the perpetual motion of the generation gap, is a familiar figure, probably weary of the query I asked on his twitter account about Ordinary People; it is a frightening film, because the taut layer of repression is lethal, to his character and Mary Tyler Moore's, and perhaps for those of us with dead brothers.

Much like the previously referenced novelist, referenced with a mysterious undercurrent of umbrage?, Hutton was never able to quite close the deal with the following he had, and I was one among them, the silent follower who had a hidden reservoir of affection for the cuter, personable, everyman, who, like the stalwart Gene Hackman, could inhabit anything, soldier, con artist, a lost soul threatened by overwhelming guilt. And when the man is on, those undercurrents reach out.

My entire life has fallen apart, simply in shambles, with throbbing maniacal emotional scars off nicotine and doses of salmon oil, with fantasies of physical conflict my diabolical cunning cannot in fact engage over and above my biology, and I keep eating humiliation on top of humiliation and cannot move the needle in a suicide attempt because I am so crippled and so poor failure would simply make it worse, and yet, I'm still not doing the certification HUD requires, deliberately making it very very hard, tweeting to celebrities who comfort me like it's nothing, a casual exchange, and if I was younger perhaps I could cling to a hope of resurgence but I really can't.

Yes, I have the second chair, and I am in it, but the Quantum is not friendly to my independence, and the P-200 may not be worth saving and I can no longer buy a used machine. Too many plates on a stick, and that is assuredly old school variety gawking. I asked poppa to come over. He mistook my meaning. Nicky is always between us, as is his hatred for my mother, miscarrying a first born son, god punishing a bad Korean conflict era hook up with a disaster of a palsied daughter, then a dead imbecile, and his one little boy was a psychotic. Hail to our fathers.

The Strange Psychology of Admiration

I just did Ms. Phillips a favor in microcosm and purchased her debut collection, which I read, in Wolfgram Memorial Library, some odd thirty three years ago, in 1982. Read yes, but cannot remember the slightest thing about it, because of my young vibrating brain fumes. Of all Phillips work, I believe I responded to Black Tickets best, but if I can be unkind about my brain damage and overzealous emotional longing, I can stick a few pins in feminine literary endeavor which has its moment in the sun and then becomes more of a routine expectation. Much like Lorrie Moore, with whom I only have passing familiarity as a reader, Jayne Anne never quite sealed the deal with her modern overlay on the South's agrarian argument with the cosmopolitan North, and I harbor the vague idea that I was referred to her work because of the effective shock value of her plot points about body betrayal-- one of her stories where this is accessible and easy to grasp is "Home", an anthologized piece about a dying grandmother and the battle with "smell". The bonny instructor is less confrontational about fecal matter than I am in my posts, but "Home" is brave, honest, nicely balanced between burgeoning youth and the struggle with age over death.

Why the bottom fell out for Phillips after that is anyone's guess. Writing is a lousy way to make a living. Machine Dreams, her novel, has some interesting tropes, but those figures of speech weren't enough to sustain the book, and like many short story authors, she falters in long form, and Fast Lanes, which I now read at Paley, alone and unhappy, did not seem to sharpen the perspectives of her voice. Why then I cut her portrait photo out of P&W, taping it on my door in Diamond Park, and wrote her publisher a frothy enthusiastic letter, and then my more dangerous poem, "fortissimo" published in Metis, a tribute, yes, but it was also something else, a form of sexual imitation so that I could get laid the way I imagined Jayne Anne herself presenting her body to men as something to be feasted. Heady stuff, eh?

Yes, but both Jayne Anne and I will soon be passing the torch, and to those who will listen, although you'll have to learn this for yourselves: it is okay to get "blown away," by a writer who touches on your affinity, but this doesn't mean they aren't ambivalent about hero worship, that they aren't flawed people too who have to have practiced shields with students, and they will not necessarily offer you the friendship you think you don't have.

I don't think I asked her if she ever got the letter. It was foolish in any case; the poem, however, will be in my book, with her work more evenly adjudicated.

Experimentation

"You are not afraid to confront yourself."-- Monica Carr, living blimp

I may write to Mariel, though with a change in parameters. Personal Best does stand out as a worthwhile examination of feminine assertion, and maybe the woman need not have a transliteration of the toll African American inner city poverty has taken on me. If Blogger wants to chastise developmental aggression, what I lived in North Philadelphia was unimaginable to me. No film, no Langston Hughes poem, no Ellison Invisible Man and his preface scold about legal dollars could have braced me, and in essence, my phantom flight from an instructor I wanted to become and could not, has scarred me. North Philadelphia is marginally safer than Syria, but only on the margins, and that it exists as it does leads to my personal condemnation, knocking politicians by their damn skulls. The most powerful country on earth, with enough urban landfill to wipe out koala bears Australians haven't already endangered 

Even if I yield, unlikely without a fight, and dose myself with legal script, I will never entirely filter out horrific memories of which I've only scratched the surface, despite my posts, of which I've written too many. Perhaps Mariel has seen some things similar, but my tendency to be a forceful writer creates barricades as much as open doors. We're the same age, I iterate with my inner voice, as if for a reason this matters. Well, if it does then spare the time. Years ago, via typewriter, I made a fool of myself writing to this once talented writer, and there are instances where I do not need to admonish my own conscience about being a jackass, but, in tribute to Jerry's legacy, I am proud that Ms Phillips and I appear in the same publication. Being an instructor is her surety, but those shared bylines prove something, in addition to the fact that drafting it right is a matter of importance.

Swinging It

Or I could have married an economist like Timothy Taylor, which is a subversive assertion without the provocation of temptation. He doesn't turn me on, but parses my plight more reasonably than the public housing residents with whom I live so unwillingly, or the disability center staffers who simply outsource institutional compliance and make the disillusioned expendable, and even more than a few believers expendable, as a price for the lie in the paradigm. I didn't have this insight when I was a physically mature 28. It escaped me, that all Liberty proffers is the same centralized institutional care, with blue collar level skill, outsourced within the community rather than the institution.

I had what Liberty now calls skills training at Home of the Merciful Savoir as a precocious child, and support coordination staff start off on their entry level 18k making this lifetime compliance model a rectal scope to shove up our asses.

Ambulatory individuals might ask what the fuck is it that I want, to be able to entertain myself in a cockroach colony? 

Not quite. What Tim's hard driving cerebral analysis grapples is the cost of a domesticated biology, and getting it right isn't always about equilibrium of expenditure so much as the right level of investment early with applied and rational levels of ruthlessness. Hence Vonnegut's assault on Billy in Slaughterhouse Five, or the disjunction between scene locale, precision acting, and the real Americana buffeted and billowed by the great recession that Up in the Air epitomizes to the point of a near gold standard. Jayne Anne Phillips, in whose work I was once enviously invested because I couldn't "fool around" with my teachers, a flippancy that Vera Farmiga throws off so coolly, decries the injustice of mandatory drug sentencing, channeling a Nicholas Kristof column, like good militant liberals.

I no longer have the ability to be outraged by individual trafficking circumstances which have quadrupled the growth of the prison industry. We've already damned ourselves with welfare state corporate models so top heavy they implode with every uptake in the climate shift.

The Flying Nun

"My mother took religion much too seriously."-- David Rieff, son of a famous lesbian

Do television producers mock Catholicism to make it palatable to a Protestant audience? If anything, "The Flying Nun," as an idiotic conception of Jewish assimilation within the industry, is a testament to Sally Field's endurance in her evolution from perky white chick to serious actress. Elements of this doofus aspect are still to be found in more contemporary productions. Whoopi Goldberg's "Sister Act," or the BBC with "Call The Midwife" (fuck the British left, hurrah!)

Only kidding. British progressives are insufferable.

I told you I sent a letter to the publisher of the novelist Jayne Anne Phillips. The franchise author Anne Rice was similarly rewarded, but for different reasons. Phillips offered me a vision of vicarious man hunting between two female writers with similar views, but Anne Rice pissed me off, and I remember what her assistant had to peruse, in terms of my content, with more alacrity. I received a bookmark. I tell you this not because it matters. I shall soon be in oblivion, most likely as a dead alive aggressive fury. I bring it up because I am rarely provoked to communicate by letter in the mindset of a fan with cannibalistic adhesion, and yet here are two exceptions. A literary story teller and a vampirist who lost a child to leukemia and is a bit flaky after all that hysteria in print, a hysteria which doesn't translate to film adaptation. My internal barometer may be closer to Rice's than I care to admit, though I have had enough, tapped out on that histrionic voice. Lestat drinking the blood of Christ. Had no idea where she wanted to go with that fantastical exploitation.

It is not the apostasy so much as a sense of cheap antagonism, but my biographical narrative with faith and lack of belief is similar to her own, especially since I am wrestling with a return to my parish, to shield the fury of my intolerance beneath weak American Catholicism. Mmm. The misery of my old age that you see before you actually started with The Matrix Research Institute. That job, as an advocate, sapped the life out of me. I never truly recovered. Resigning from one set of Jewish executives to scurry back to those who launched me in the first place--this is the end result-- occlusion driven fanaticism.

Interior Palsies

"There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. --Virginia Woolf

It is not so much the embarrassment. I have dealt with that, taken myself apart and reassembled the pieces, frightening off midwestern humorists and dozens of other collagen enthusiasts, no. This is not the wedge; loathing is. Disability center dynamics literally make me sick to my stomach. The endless presentations, sex seminars, legal aid professors lecturing about benefits and assuring downtrodden alumni that services offered by law students are limited in scope, without reference to the mystery of how state budgets get codified in Harrisburg, people like Linda constantly neutering the semantics of the English language: "Attendants are not care givers but assistants." That is Linda's voice. "We categorize it as excess revenue." She complained to me when we argued over our computers that no one wanted to see her for herself. I tried to see her, and discovered a raptor beneath a parakeet's warbling delicacy, which means befriending this former boss was a mistake. The trial for a sterile and segregated case management compliance model that made me promise after promise after promise and never followed through, hurt me physically as well as triggering a crisis is slated to rule for the plaintiff, and yet I am a quadriplegic, who though mainly self-sufficient when stable, can nose dive just as quickly. 

A disabled in action member Susan exclaiming "you have balls," this during the rare strategy gatherings I attended. Yes. Balls to defy Erik and shutting the she-man down when he attacked her.
Balls to confront Linda and take them all on and come away from all that significantly beaten.
Balls to make online users leery. Balls to be totally familiar with the interior cripple who will behave like one when it suits, to don that voice, the little girl inside who in all other things being equal wants to stamp her foot and get a new able-bodied warder like Jayne Anne. Ambulatory women protected me from my mother when I was young. Psychologists in repressed marriages made me dinner; physical therapy aides taught me catechism. Camp counselors taught me the intrigue of boys, so why can't I have more successful writer friends? Like Joanie chasing me. Mentally retarded girl practically falling out of her lap to have me ward her.

As I have shown, however, I have as well the ruthless analysis of my own interior calculus, one that knows I have passed the female novelist scene, not quite so rewarded anymore by literary press culture, so perhaps I am play acting, indulging the regression, the assurance of an ambulatory baby sitter. I have taken charge of Joanie in the past. Taken her out. She's harmless, a child who thinks she fazes me with an admission that she dated my fourth cousin. He is also afflicted (that corrupted Old World genetic code), barely walks. I hardly know him. There isn't much more quality of life time for the sacrifices and choices I need to make, and that forms part of my morose shadings which bloggers are not supposed to indulge. I am weakening; in not so many years, I shall soon be mainly bed ridden. Ms. Dezenski will probably retire with accolades, unless I really have the stones. She withstood the Crothers treatment paradigm for seven years, a daughter of presumable Jewish affluence.

Jayne Anne Phillips Kills Gargantua

On a good day in the future I will do this lady a favor and tell you why she towers over other women authors as a storyteller, and does not fall into that insufferable category of  women's interest suburban satire, the genotype that includes Susanna Daniel. It will not be today, and it may not be even next year if I do not find solutions for what I need to do if I am to keep myself healthy, but if I pull myself through, the real tribute I can pay her is to retrospectively offer an appreciation.

Surprises you, doesn't it? Conspiratorial smile in the offing; I cannot stand women writers currently active today. Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Simone de Beauvoir, whose voices converses with theirs now?

Hypothetical Pull, fortissimo

But woman in God's hands is not only this blade, this burn; the riches of this world are not meant to be always refused.-- Simone de Beauvoir

Dear Jayne Anne,

I gave myself a bit of a turn there, posting about your voice in summary fashion, even in hyperbolic relapse to my memory of my former potential. I have visited your web site off and on between computer crashes and crises and upgrades, always intent on purchasing my own edition of "Black Tickets". I am over-extended with my reading for the time being, and I need to begin taking extensive notes on Giuseppe Tomasi if I am going to cajole any remaining ambition I have left to be respected. I exaggerate when I say idiomatically that the State is going to kill me, but on the basis of what I have lived and experienced, I believe it deep down. (A psychiatrist with cue cards once quipped at me, "You believe the world is against you." And I queried back, "Have you a chronic condition like cerebral palsy?" He reminded me of Bram Stoker's Renfield, or a centurion with jaundice. Wards of the state should be so lucky.) I had a major depressive episode at the turn of the century. I am ashamed, not so much of the episode, but of my own weakness, giving this woman so many weapons to utilize in her humiliation of me-- a punishment for elevating her. I needed rescue financially and overplayed my hand. A political aide told me to stop feeling guilty that I talked to her, but this is difficult. I should have been stronger, less panicked.

When I browsed through Fast Lanes in 1987 I was merely despondent, doing research. My heart wasn't in it due to infantilism over my professor, but your voice was important to me because it reached me like a living connection with its own vibrancy, and this is rare with me, regardless of particular weaknesses, strengths, thus my ode to you which had absolutely nothing to so with your work (giggles at our egos). It was about sexual envy mostly, as opposed to vocational. You deserve your acclaim. I want the validation without the sacrifice of discipline to get there, and it may be too late now, in my race against subsistence. The crack in my bibelot is an obsessive emotional investment, and by the time we wise up, we're dead. I had a few difficult hours this week, wondering if I was going to ask you to help me break my public housing paradigm, but that would not be fair. I was never your student, and in terms of using your influence to ask a writing residency to grant me a length of stay exemption would take more than an online dialogue. Even if you were willing to have that, my psyche is a bit tremulous, and if fans who have that state of mind about my work annoy me, I do not want to inflict the same fallen on my ass impact onto you. I have every single credit listed, no matter how small, but I have yet to complete something to break ranks. Perhaps I can't, and hubris feeds a certain degree of delusion; maybe I fritter and procrastinate.

But your voice held me up in those insular years when I moped because I couldn't be the graduate student who caught her big fish. I am grateful your talent held that degree of consolation. For this reason, it is an honor to follow you.

Red Ball-- Minority Report

I have some nerve; even my detractors have to give me that, as I sit here almost every day with a decanter of unrequited love, and there she is, one of the very few woman authors who has been able to elicit the cooing pleasure of the Gerber baby out of my blunted emotional cynicism. From a fantastical daydream of a literary BFFL like her to a 30 second cryptic tweet as if we were equals, and yes, if Jayne Anne follows me I shall squeal, diffidence about mutual achievements aside; next to hers mine are minute. Despite my length of time online, it is still disconcerting. I frame my past of longing for a nostalgic farewell, slightly frustrated at lack of email access, since I still enjoy the art of the epistle, and she has a concurrent virtual footprint while I am fomenting the arc of lesser and greater influences. Do boomers ever get used to this pancake collapse of psychic space?

In the hierarchy of recognitions, if it was between Mia Farrow reaching out past her celebrity, or Jayne Anne Phillips willingness to indicate she remembers the issue of which I posted, the latter means more to my aging decline. This is unreal; totally unreal. Chill break.

Indelible Banana Peels

I really have you going, don't I? Well, bemusement may be a small consolation for beggars, but what I was straining to remember in Stardust is why I would not offer Jayne Anne any further appreciative missive, or need the mentorship somewhat glazed over by her meritorious caste. She and I appear together in Oxford Magazine, some years ago now. She is transcribed addressing the freshman class, in a rhetorical tropism with angels, why I don't know. Her address opens the issue. My byline closes the issue because the graduate department telephoned me, appreciated my acid pouring forth against the Iraq war, shredding American materialism, and to the extent that this creates a dialogue with a financially secure feminine has been from the south, and a feminine has been who was a has been arriving for departure since she started, it is enough. Perhaps she is a catty embrace your inner bitch type, or has a fragility I cannot hear in my ringing ears. I no longer have praise to offer, nor the power to be moved by her output, nor anyone with which to share. I told myself to stop engaging with my aunt Marie, but I am worried she is going to die, and so returned her call yesterday; the sheer inanity of provincialism never ceases to amaze me. This is why I want to go home to Rome, I ask myself, to listen to histrionic crows screeching in sound and fury?

I cannot live with her again. I can't stay here. Adoption along Rittenhouse Square seems unlikely, and all I wanted to do was watch a movie.

As to the letter I mailed to Ms. Phillips, all I remember is an exuberant gush of the sort I have received from bush babies-- the strange psychology of fandom which may not have reached her, as I sent it in care of a publisher. The only thing I remember about experiencing Black Tickets was the edginess of the authorial voice had its appeal.

Stardust Once Removed

The woman weighs no more than a child. She has a smell. My mother fights it continually; bathing her, changing her sheets, carrying her to the bathroom so the smell can be contained and flushed away. --Jayne Anne Phillips, "Home"

I am not sure why Jerry recommended that I read Phillips. I remember nearly next to nothing about her collection "Black Tickets," but I consumed it as if attempting copulation with the recommendation as a sort of compensation, not being able to abase myself over the penis of the master. I wrote Phillips a poorly expressed letter from the inner city. Why? I wanted to feed off her confidence, imitate her vigorous sexual skills, if possible. I cut her picture out of a Poets & Writers article and published a poem about the fantasy of her competitive literary companionship in Metis, a local Jersey Xerox and staple effort. Admiration, as I have written, can be a dangerous attribute to those with low self-esteem.

Never heard from her, and she doesn't have the sustaining power needed for her novels. Her arc has passed its zenith, but she is at Rutgers, her look suggestive, even conspiratorial, exciting only insofar as if I could reach out and penetrate her shield, then I get to hold onto how Jerry at least enabled me to stay alive. I have weighed it once again, contacting her, in the time it has taken me to write this post, but I haven't read her work in years, and her voice, somewhat ponderous, bowed perhaps by an agrarian weight, has been surpassed; she does represent a sexual charge, not for herself necessarily, but the eroticism is inescapable: "I should have been Jayne Anne Phillips and I am not. I am a broken and pathetic--" a whine a whine. Moth to the flame, but moths are silent, not particularly aggressive and I did not enjoy her later novel Machine Dreams. Again, what is it I would want from her? What could her faded reputation offer me, scarred on so many levels as I am? What could Dr. Phillips heal that Bowie's predation in The Hunger offers in the recognition of insatiable appetite?

When I first saw this film the pace of Bowie's spectacular disintegration made an indelible impact, and offered exactly the kind of dangerous sexual foreplay I have always wanted with a man, one that impinges on the trauma of violation, with the elegance of cool. A local literary instructor, whose name escapes me for the moment, said on Fresh Air that vampirism is the most overused literary conceit. I agree with her, except for where it turns in interesting ways. The Hunger is a precursor to the terror we feel about being consumed, wasted from the inside out by viral flavors of the season: avian influenza, AIDS, ebola, and that wasting, in turn, make us focus on that one sole desire, which is the very damnation of its heat. It still contains something of the romantic in Gothic horror, and the danger of seduction that goes too far, lesbian or otherwise,  but it is also a precursor film to the rise of  retro-fitted zombie genres, like 28 Days Later, 30 Days of Night.

As a selfish outreach, I regret trying to make a connection with Phillips, but perhaps not the poem which is a preserved scrapbook tribute of a sort, saying, in effect, I wanted to be pretty like you, to have accomplished like you, to share gratifications which you seem to convey are in the realm of your experience. I toyed with viewing the film again on Saturday evening, but senile aunts, spoiled felines mewing, the usual things of poverty in tandem with broken bodies making nothing ever go right. 

Bad day, but found an unexpected network opportunity, if a summary skim of my post intensity doesn't kill it.

Virtuous Self-Interest Over Alleviation

Maybe you'll be our leader one day.-- a former consumer over 70 years old I've characterized as The Gladhandler

I should not have written this post, let alone drawn attention to it, the avalanche tumbling on my head, and it shall at some point be revised or deleted, while I have plenty of time to agonize over access to vulnerable actors who may also be classified as cancer survivors, since I have to by necessity reconstruct the piece for which I need it. This falls under nothing anyone can do, even with the best sympathy available, though I will never know that if this is also the case when I contacted Phillips' office about the issue of Oxford Magazine she and I appear in together, never having so much as received the courtesy of a response. Apparently it is far too burdensome for pristine liberalism such as hers to reach down beyond those matriculated students on whom her income depends. A marginalized quadriplegic with disillusioned admiration and aspiration isn't a passing grade for her progressive finesse. I did not want her issue (if she had it). I just wanted a copy of my "Custer" poem, complex and fine as it is. Did she have to respond? No, but what would the harm had been if a TA had searched and made me a copy, simply to help? I'm a product of that academic system as much as she, and can't see that my posts were an issue, ambivalent or not, my voice hearkens her currency. Conservatives may not be beating down the gate to relocate me the fuck out of here on humanitarian grounds, but imagine they would have made me a copy of my misplaced work, had the situation been commensurate. There are nearly as many causes as there are people, to echo Krauthammer: no one has time for them all, inclusive of my subtextual bent to embed policy issues threaded in a bruised narcissism, though immigration is a league outside of this ballpark, all those starving and malnourished Houthi taking a lesson from the Nigerians who've preyed on Roman pity for years, never mind the Italy barely has the ability to salvage its ruins from earthquakes, at least since season  8 of Don Matteo, where whores of village back alleys get the justice of our spaghetti western priest. Catholic mercy never fails, having found a docking grappler for the besieged under the shadow of Boko Harem at a port in Spain, thus a libertarian moment of hosanna. On the abstract level, the dowager has to support the libertarian outcry for freedom of mobility. This embodies what personal liberty is all about, but it is also equally true, as in James Woods vocal retrenchment, supporting the Trumpian border wall, that the European Union's charitable acceptance will one day break the camel's back, already eroding what once made the United States seem indomitable. Doubtlessly Spain won't do a doubletake and ask Putin to find these poor victims of their own government some space in Kaliningrad. The communists do love indigenous tokenism so, after all. After Mussolini was hung like a dog in the streets, Italians rightly slowed paying the piper on the moral debits of history.

An Elaboration

In the life of a freelancer, egos get bruised; even those with name recognition receive rejections, and as it stands today, New Mobility would be within its rights to freeze me out, since I am iterating a private betrayal between myself and a bona fide lesbian who would give my bylines exposure up to a point but no further, since she and her partner think like case managers, and neither of them share my brain damage, so they know what is best for me. When my interaction with Josie was active, I was expected to be obedient to her conventional wisdom, and in my present maliciousness, I pay a price.

However, let's back it up a step: Post 2004, I was not blogging, and my Josie antipathy was the kind of repressed undercurrent we bury to get along in life; due to my cover feature Tim Gilmer included me on his contributors mailing list, and I needed it, the camaraderie. I was not after Josie's job, nor that of any other regular, and Tim dropped me. This is the nature of the publishing business, but it belies everything disability advocates say they stand for, and this is what goads me about such a narrow minded sterile culture. 

Tim is a paraplegic himself, and he could have had one of those electronic conversations with me about why I was cut loose in the time frame to which I refer; it is a disgraceful behavior from a man in Oregon who writes so openly about his own emotional health, after I had worked so hard on what was a difficult cover feature, and it points to why the empowerment rhetoric of the independent living movement is so destabilizing to American autonomy. Perhaps not today, but I am going to confront the publisher on it. Will it do me any good? Perhaps not, but I intend to push the point.