1348 A.D., Fetishize 2

"I am not going to comment on prosecution."-- Barack Obama

I wonder how well Cooksey knew his Fowles when he conceived his canceled series. I have too much else to do even to borrow the novel of the same title at the moment. None of you bothered to inform me about Terence Stamp and the film. Thank you so very much. Why should I worry about my audience when your timidity belies the necessity of having one? Fowles' irony is not totally lost on me, but I can remember only fragments of The French Lieutenant's Woman, nothing of the alternate endings beyond what the film vaguely calls to mind.

I can see now that Stamp was no doubt cast for the lead in The Mind of Mr. Soames because of The Collector, and some of you may remember my earlier preoccupation with Soames, its analog era thematic structure. Fowles worries something else, and exploits the dark side of acquisition more brutally than Henry James, (in physical aspects) though Fowles is probably equal to Balzac for melodramatic effect.

People seem to worship Ulysses as a matter of civic pride? As much as I love literature, to see a mock epic interior prose poem enshrined in a metropolis that became a backwater about five minutes after the Quakers ceded it to the huddled masses is discomfiting, literally. Once an excellent reader, I fucked up on my five minute passage with Gerty's burlesque so badly I fled the scene of Bloomsday virtually in tears. None of this was an intentional humiliation. I am struggling to keep a grasp on matriculation so wanted to stay involved, and the little museum made an effort to accommodate me, but when Lance offered me an out perhaps I should have retired.

It doesn't really matter when we aren't ready to die, does it? O yes, I will get to a lung center and explore my fucking options, but I'd like to see how you'd feel if you had to depend on slovenly insolent lard asses that make up the paraprofessional class. I hate them. I hate this city. I hate my family. I hate my simpleton ex whose advice is to stay engaged with the Jewish bookseller's enshrined space on Delancey Place.

I don't know that I can; it feels like a tumor, like a lung cancer at a certain stage. I pray for vengeance on their souls. Figure whose souls for yourselves. I pray with all the malevolence I can muster that she will pay for her callousness that has left me in these circumstances. The hate will live beyond my demise; I believe that.

Insidious Possession

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


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

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

Assassination Anthropology

I do very poorly when it comes to handling animal illness, and Joey has a spring influenza that leads him to behave just like his mother, a prima donna in a melodramatic death yowl. I can't handle it, and would accept veterinarian doping in these instances. I woke my father up at eleven last night, called the emergency hospital, orating helplessness, contacted Tim too early today, look like I've been thrown off a train, mopping up cat puke, trying to stop Vinnie from scolding his brother into a third world war, and everyone is quiet now, peeing and eating as far as I can tell. I feel like giving my notice and letting this company put me in a home so I can just stop trying altogether, born out of monotony, born out of lack of pleasure, or the hard hymn breaking fuck of Jeremy Irons in The French Lieutenant's Woman. I wonder if Irons always has his thumb on his power switch, so evident in his best work, the dynamic and perfectly cultured man that silences broken bodies and sexual orientation issues. Not over endowed with beef steak, but just hard enough, and just tame enough, that he is an alpha prize. For whatever reason, my clitoris is having an extended hot flash, whining uselessly for A-list sex, but if Josie Byzek has an aura of rancid mayonnaise about her auto-immune ailing body, I myself am like a drowned dudong. All Pacific based hunters do to kill this animal is hold its head beneath the waves, so that it cannot breathe.

I'd kill the hunter, without adjudicating whether it is unfair to condemn the human animal for its opportunistic methods of predation.


The possible contact I was going to investigate knocked on my door yesterday, bearing prunes, which I declined. She is a wash as pertains my piece, but Asian, and I am more kindly disposed toward her, despite my history with the residents here, most of them dead. Much like my own, her hair has that frazzled greying look, and an investigation of e-cig prices made me decide I am better off with aeros. Maybe I'll tune into baseball. Litters to clean. If you wonder if it is really that bad, no, it would not be, if I could salvage some self-respect, if Jeremy Irons thought I was worth seducing.