Inside Jokes On a Splinter

Within a matter of days, really, I will lose all facsimile of personal security, my only intimacies, those with a monster pig of a man from the Bronx whom I rejected, and with a transsexual I've come to hate with such glittering abandon that there must be more to it, as of course there is. I believed the transsexual's advocacy was once just, however diffident my revulsion of his androgyny. In a Shakespearean comedy, the androgyny is a linguistic tension toward liberation, but in the flesh, despite cellular indifference to personal values, the concrete reality of androgyny is something else, leading for the desire of better disposal of bipedal forms with their own hideousness, affirming in my memory that I probably did finish Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues under the tutelage of Professor Jerry McGuire, and finished it this early Monday once again, annoyed, past the Post-Moderns.

As different as Pynchon and Gardner are, John more driven toward an intrinsic moral veracity, the fireworks in either man's opus fall like tinder in the present era. Gardner couldn't have lived to see the Muslim intransigence he eerily predicted in the mouth of Taggert Hodge's wounded ravings sustained for over 600 pages of human failings. No one, not even Franzen, writes the kind of novel today which Gardner could afford to write as the 20th century would lurch into 9/11 and a black presidency whose initial ebullience invariably gave way to a sense of lack, and all I have as a disabled woman who hasn't achieved much of anything except warfare with statutory demands, is desperation for a different environment which my economic status denies. I speak of hatreds as a kind of shorthand, making it worse than it is, at the bottom, an overwhelming, now self-damning and potentially destructive desire for change, and yet at the end of the day, I am a cripple, basically inert, gainsaid for years by minority abuse, minority insistence, and white indifference, that indifference now capped by family mortality, and an inability to offer support, with an ulcer possibly gnawing my stomach, touch of blood seeping out of my eye, I do actually fear I could get Ebola if I am forced to deal with more African American paraprofessionals, but assume the touch of blood in my watering eye bulb is capillary irritation.

I do not give two shits about my apartment manager Trudy Richardson and her swamp thing from Mississippi Debra Horne. The hate I speak of comes from the psychological toll their constraint places on the most vulnerable and most powerless, and yet this is all Pennsylvania shoves down my throat my entire life, vocational rehabilitation and 500 different black women to keep up the laundry pile, and I thought, in most of my aspirations, that a literary life would offer a kind of triumph, much as Lindsay Lohan makes a cheap bid to toy with her media reputation in the 2007 I Know Who Killed Me. Gaming her audience. Cuttings as an outcry. Prosthetics as a kind of exploit. Stained glass as a more metaphysical threat than a chain saw, tooling religious histrionics. If Gardner wasn't an optimist, Lohan's abrasive edges and dialogue by the numbers certainly evinces the brittleness of the American psyche, white feminine anger for freedom, disarticulated over sexual flaunting, preying on our deepest fears, being clipped by inexorable pressures to succeed instead of getting high or opting out, womanhood itself always hobbled, inextricably damaged.

Erik, in some of the last words we'll ever speak to each other, in lieu of snapping his neck like a twig, asked me who I was to judge him? My answer to you about that is: an honest woman who doesn't destroy the careers of others for the accrual of power. I may sound like a forceful activist in denial, but right there is why I am not. Leaders in the disability movement, want control of the reigns for themselves, until forced to cede to fresher players.

Stasis

"drizzle the arugula with the oil"

I keep telling myself go to bed, but having ruined my dinner, I'm wrestling the demonic struggle of my next pithy citizen's review in my head, selling out, as always, toward anything triumphantly mine above standard. I always have John's voice in my head, having read his work above and beyond my studies with Jerry, and if John was a liberal, which I suppose he was, his anger is the common thread that sears his work like a phosphorous flesh wound, let alone the scars of Taggert Hodge's repulsive upper quadrant. Gardner and I share a profligate anger such as dims even the impetus of kindness. I introduced Robert to a local Bay area novelist who shall remain unnamed, anonymous because she visited my dowager account rather than my Examiner page and I believe, reading between the lines, my Blogger posts caused her a mild choking sensation, and then she mailed me her book, which I did not want her to do--please stop giving me books, for the love of Christ enough already, really, but I introduced her to Robert, and was not generous in doing so, but a bit terse actually, as if to say, "See, I am an alien even on the gracious tolerance of San Francisco creative writers and their spouses, so allow me to present you to each other in an undercurrent of snide write off." Wondering why I am so unkind to Caucasian affluence to which I once belonged, so briefly as all that, in a dago leather imitation, at any rate.

Gardner died in such a way as to freeze dry his novels beyond their relevance, not entirely sure what I mean, but close to the sense that he is tragically anachronistic, wielding the Vietnam War like a plug to stretch out the anatomical asshole, and as I've already conveyed, I should quietly close the Toshiba, take my half wrecked P-200 off the charger, make my haphazard transfer to my dirty bedspread with my horrid mattress, and try vainly to go back to sleep, allow my body to adjust to the coming fall, take a break from this account, spend the week finding a fucking lawyer and then take another week to convince the fucking lawyer to sue the fucking state of Pennsylvania to which I am domicile, and good luck with that.

Obviously, I will give compliance with mortality a run for its money, along with everything else. I hope my obstinate aunt expires in ICU, if you'd like the truth, which you do not, oh, the things my rage would make you wonder about whether you should fear me, but then again, testing Google, you know, after pouring my blood into this, if not always due diligence. Yes, Gardner's legacy informs my bitterness, perhaps predicts it; if you'd like me to sound almost like a former middle class Catholic under pressure, this latest family deathwatch has realigned my relations with my paternal, married cousins, and this is not necessarily bad. I am not entirely without alliance, of some sort, not that they can mitigate my invidious hatred of section 202 housing.

John Gardner and the Twilight of Suffering

To the detriment of being on my better behavior with young Lance and his charming efforts to get the untutored through Ulysses, I fell asleep Thursday in near winter bright afternoon reading what I actually wanted to read on the Paperwhite, scowling, The Sunlight Dialogues, really into it when Millie faced Taggart without quite realizing who the demonized little brother was, when I fell into a reverie due to the pain in my hip, right hip, still dislocated, and Steel did not butcher. All that physical suffering as a child so that I can entropy into more now. Dr. Chance and Steel controlled the destiny of many, if not Linda herself. The retarded spastics who might have been under my case management eye at one time, now my limited but happy neighbors, gave me the link, and I saw my future, this problem leg in a splint, while I lie in a bed, a discarded bit of meat, hoping my snotgreen cherry monoxide scarred lungs will prevent me from living long enough to get my jaws broken when I bite a future Debra Horne on the pork of her forearm. Gardner, being dead and dead quick, cannot help being an anachronism, whether or not he was taking a cue from Tarkington to deconstruct America through exposing the Hodge family, making Clumly evocative of a sterile old rooster who carried the mark of death through his white hairlessness. Never finished the novel in school, so I am not sure where he is going, dated and outlived by Wallace, who killed himself less quick, less neat, but with a more accurate tempo that Gardner suspected, but did not survive long enough to hate, media hype. Even if I wanted my trigger of pain to be my swan song, and I am not entirely positive about that although punished, yes, Linda too does not know when to quit, when to stop humiliating, and that because I built her up, trying to hang on to one last tie that actually mattered to me, because I was afraid of the collapse I am still living, even if I wanted to go outside of those boundaries to enact that punishment, and made an effort, I would not be able to make it count, to use it to expose the corruption and cruelty and through taking that action, strike at the conscience. I cannot direct a caustic intelligence to mesh with the reality of a broken and declining body to achieve the affect of the lone hero, the one who stands alone. I can no longer afford upgrades, need a new laptop battery, and either have to save this machine or format my newer, smaller, backup. If someone could explain for me, when installing new drivers, does the machine in DOS equate the ENTER key with SET UP? That is what I do not know how to do, hit the right button to get the updated drivers working. I will not bite, I just do not have the mind to handle mainframe and software degrade issues. It is an HP Pav dv6, roughly six years old, if anyone can explain this to me in simple, toddler, terms, you are one of the few who have my gratitude.

Very small meals, I have to stay up and go to Joes. The chair is nearly on full power, that achieved yesterday, barely enough clean clothes, if we look away from agony, ecstasy is no longer possible either, but if I am going down, I am going in flames, that much I know.

The Sunlight Aria

I am on a semi-lucid search for yet another well thumbed natty paperback from my tribal imagery days (huh? I see you, puzzled, asking what I am alluding to), John Gardner's Grendel, and I am not succeeding. I could, probably should, given the age of the paper, my marks on the typeface, just buy the much more expensive etext, but my used paperbacks are important, they provide clues, and Grendel survived the building renovations, unlike my health; where it was last escapes me. Gardner himself died quickly, violently, days into my swelling freshman breast, and I've clung to his memory ever since, my most beloved post-modernist, even if not the most profound. I have talked myself into an etext edition while my hunt pauses in digging through my musty bins, the paper trail of drafts, the certainty of checking account statements. Gardner, much like Lessing, is interested in the obscurity of origin, but where Lessing sees violence as an innate repression in the evolution of homo sapiens, Gardner has a more problematic view, as does the original epic from which his derivative masterpiece stems. Grendel and his *dam*, if I remember correctly the curious and hard word for the Teutonic view of the feminine, are monsters, perhaps obscure survivors who formed our myths, created our heroes, formed the basis of our territorial empires, the muscle of our modern powers, which, in Gardner's view, is a geocidal insanity (Beowulf as the rationale for the systemic extermination of the Vietnamese), one that makes Grendel a curiously sympathetic, disruptive figure.

Within this paradigm, Grendel's violence is the catharsis necessary for survival, whereas the personality cult evolved around the hero is a horrific, deadly excess. Where applicable, violence is unavoidable, targeted as a means to an end, but when it is senseless, it then becomes tragic. Ajami, versed in feeding our penchant to look for reasons, soothes the Western mind with timelines that provide insight, but I'd ask the Muslim world how it is that you forget the fabulism within your own traditions? Everyone knows the enchantment of Shahrazad's narrative loom, and its cures for palliative erosion that festers due to disillusion, and how European literary traditions copied from it, evolved.

I pity Nakoula, without endorsing his need for a polemic; he was used as a covet instrument, a cover as another means to an end. Vomiting Islamic traditions against liberalism, even into it, for the purposes of identity, is only a devaluation of virtue.