For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, [...] were ebbing.--Lampedusa, The Leopard, p228
Me being me, my early life ebbing birthday present to myself was to stream Last Tango in Paris, and already knowing so much about it in advance, was more or less diminished by Bertolucci's Truffaut affect, the meta dramatic technique of film within a film. There was an obvious homage to the older French director in Leaud's staginess as an intrepid enthusiast of capture, but shock, awe? Hardly. By today's standards, Schneidner's nascent coyness, coupled with that baby doll face, and Brando's shrewd magnetism, suggested more interesting motifs than Marie's body served in a candy dish. Method acting had engraved itself onto Brando by this point, encasing his defenses, locking away anything raw, except for the impetuosity of his violence, and curious compassion for Girotti's Marcel. Other than that, his performance was a tease, as in so much of his later work. Perhaps he let himself go after the butter scene, because this took what was left, so he exchanged keeping himself in shape for the effortless sating through eating well and over nourishing. Never really my type, I can still see, however, why women like Jeanne would succumb to his domineering ferocity in lieu of true loving congruence. Youth desires penetration of invulnerable pretenses, even if pivotal monologues do not quite penetrate inflammatory deafness, the constant companion to ringing ears.
I still have time to run sections of the film again, review his weaving leg and what he was smirking to this poor girl, before he toyed with the small wind instrument, before this woman who decided to blame a simulated violation for the rest of her *ruined* life. Actors. What we put up with for aesthetics, inclusive of sudden democratic government totalitarianism for a hard look at power shifts between the sexes. As a woman myself, one whose contorted skeleton would be naked exploitation of a different texture, if substituted in the bathroom scene with Schneider's odd bush, with gradations like an inverted pyramid, I can attest that adventurism can lead to histrionic regret, but like so many doomed artists, even David Foster Wallace, my episodes of being chained to a spurious colon begins to give way to defeat: If I once believed myself matriculated, once made love to ambulatory men, now my grandfather's gastrointestinal turbulence is a psychological erosion of self worth. Rainy days are a bitch, elongated lung creping like a failed exercise in origami folding. Not a particularly good day person, I have been dragging since I woke. Maybe I'll rent it again later, or eat my usage last minute to recapture. Saturated as I am, near 60, with the best of the best, masterpieces, classics, believing I could have done better, myself, had I made better choices, I am glad of Bertolucci's tyranny in pursuit of this vision. Is Last Tango a great movie? I'd say intriguing, particularly with its interior strategies. We'd be a better species if we were this brave for the sake of creativity most of the time. Maybe I'll find a way to stop getting weaker and sicker, and get out, somehow, return to limited functionality; maybe I'll rationalize that atheists are wrong, that spirits retain identity, and that I can join Wallace in doomed ego limbo, or lose and die in Philadelphia's excuse for a wheelchair community. None of you know what to say. It is not one or two bad experiences which lead me to defy Medicaid Waiver services. Nine years have taught me that attendant care here at the bottom is legalized pimping; it does not change the fact my legs are going, my rectum is ready made greenhouse topsoil. After all the trauma I lived, my fail year has dawned, and I am, in all probability, telling Gail Sims, the newest assistant manager, that I'm not recertifying. I am also probably not going to find a pro bono champion between then and the initiation of eviction proceedings.
In reading about Pharmo Bro and Duca, without tweeting about it, I in my turn haven't been obstinate enough to harass my enemies in public. The last thing I ever emailed to Josie was I will never be civil to you, then booted her off my group. I know what she would say. What she did by lashing out at a trade journalist before whom I dangled myself, deliberately-- (in contrast, I would not dare breach my interaction with Jeffrey Tucker by complaining about vaginal yeast) was wrong, she apologized, and I do not help myself by letting rabid lesbianism stick in my craw. She's moved on and I am on the verge of death spiral homelessness. I am, however, the spastic quadriplegic all by her lonesome, even with data available which illustrate most cyber flings fail.
That I will never be civil to you was an incoded murderous rage, which my intellect knows isn't worth the trouble. Cecil Morales may have had a passing interest in my puerile extroverting, but he thought I wanted a husband, and his bite was as vicious as my own, worse. He had a failed marriage, and my ghost of a dead spic came later. Killing the den mother of New Mobility won't give me back any opportunity for golden years comfort with the right fellow. Shrekli and Duca have debarked the gen X trail, the shadow of the sixties like an ancient taxidermy model ready to collapse at the slightest motion, an open door. I did no work. After I logged off yesterday I went to the store, yes, sick, for soup, a little fruit, watched most of O'Neal in The Driver again, this time memorizing Adjani's sympathy toward the protagonist, then knocked over a large slate milk crate which serves as an ad hoc vanity table, stacked with tomes. I am, oddly enough, desperate to get in O'Neal's head about this film, and have to move. I want O'Neal. Walter Hill is self-explanatory. But Ryan O'Neal, at least live, with the mask off, seems petty, vain. He had a good run, next to most of us, but not, however, as zealous lone wolf willing to live a monastic existence solely to be the best.
In Siena the Tomasi revealed that powerful and single-minded religious vocation which later made them famous in Sicily. One went to England as papal legate and tried to settle the dispute between Henry 2.0 [my emendation] and Thomas a Becket. David Gilmour, The Last Leopard, p11
I believe I shall focus my attentions on Giuseppe Tomasi for now, then perhaps work my way back to Henry James. The Prince of Lampedusa presents the demise of the petty nobility as a foregone conclusion. Gilmour presents their obliteration as an almost radical reaction, and to the extent that I understand Dr. Cristina Coletta's abstract in her critical study, Plotting The Past, she is examining the diachronic discourse between historic episode, narrative, and how this frames contemporary perception. Dr. Coletta was very kind to me, and told me she would send me a copy of her book but she only had her reader's copy; not a total ingrate, by dint of my own obstinacy I have nearly all my tools at hand, except a visit to the point of origin. I see where I am going with Il Gattopardo much more clearly than with the work of James, and Tomasi may actually give me my framework to back into James [the New Mobility bloggers who follow my twitter account glaze over at this point saying she goes very far]. Mmm, like Mr. Ramsay's throbbing mind in his theoretical struggle, I am defying much more than domestication in my outreach. Cannot the same be said of Fellini's mastery as an auteur? La Strada is more than the sum of its parts; it borders on the magical realism that Shakespeare invented in The Tempest, which means if you are Julie Taymor you are going to be fanatical in your canonical felicity because you cast the magisterial Helen Mirren in the lead.
It borders on post war fabulism, La Strada, but it is not simply a love song to Mussolini, who in turn was a deluded optimist to the point of insanity. All of us miss the Roman Empire, whether we know it or not. We keep recreating the Colossus, not restoring the past, only reinventing the application of power. I cannot bring full brunt of analysis to on La Strada today, but did want to point out to you how commercialism exhausts genre, much as Haggard exhausts great Victorian contributions. His work is almost an Edwardian squeal about the terror of progressive erosions yet to come. The same can be said with European directors against Hollywood. Fellini is nearly Jamesian when engaging in cinematic ambiguity. Identity is a clever knife thrust into liberal pretensions, but never truly veers off the expected prescription.
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.
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 biographer therefore must make a choice---to penetrate that private reality and write a book that gives some sense of a life as it was lived, or to write some other sort of book, a commentary from the outside. -- Sheldon M. Novick
The contusion on my mother's profile from the left, just above the socket, during her survival flight from this excuse she married, erroneously, for the sake of her bastard child, was strangely beautiful. I am forgetful of the direction of the flight. She either followed Stuart to the Midwest and fled as fast as she could drive back home, or it was the reverse, and the fact that her little sister married a deputy chief of police whom Stuart feared, this saved my mother's life. Where the rest of us were also leaves me at a loss, but in a haze, perhaps we had left Mary's care to return to my father, for I was in my house when my mother's suffering could be read in her face. I feel guilty that I could not kill Stuart myself, as Nick Nolte did in his flashbacks that led to more sex with Streisand. (I wonder if anyone ever really enjoyed sleeping with her thus rendering her as PG sex kitten, but that Freudian aspect is as dated as Nancy Friday.)
I know I am quadriplegic and that level of expectation is a high water mark, but I did not protect my family, and got drawn into Stuart's predation trying to accept the man, and he was, in the truest sense. a revulsion, having no corresponding value as an alternate to natural harmony.
When I had my first email exchange with Sheldon, my grievance was a living crucifixion (don't believe the process they have posted, zealous Liberty; they will give you an audience but marginalize you with everything they have if you happen to have a Title II case, legitimately, against them, and, as an officer of the court, Tom Earle did not investigate or penalize Linda for what she did to humiliate me in front of my former neighborhood friends from the suburbs), so I caught him off guard, inadvertently, poor Sheldon, and later lost him and Sarah [for those of you keeping score I have had conflicts or frictions with five Jamesians, and was in the wrong twice, but care about the third--I liked the fact that Greg treated my article proposal with respect and my ego is still bruised that such manner, mutual courtesy, is now gone because I was tongue in cheek about spam] from my group. That is old egotistical tyranny. Smile.
The good Doctor Novick suggested I add my spin to the life of Alice. I am sure Strouse handles the job admirably. I am not a scholar of the lives of those who make the western canon, except for Italian modernists, should I live long enough, I might be swayed to caress such ribs as remain intact of Giuseppe. I think, for the prurient scholars who remain fascinated with Henry's penis, an anthropologist in the other department should apply for a grant to unravel the DNA sequence to gain insight into why a drug addict founded American psychology, whether Henry actually did pinch hit over the chamber pot exit, and whether Alice was muted as a lesbian invalid because she wanted to secretly wed a royal like Vincentio and imitated Isabella, dying in stunned silence.
My printer is not yet installed. But you are able to infer I am always behind.
Whether Giuseppe Tomasi was a true pacifist is debated; perhaps even he did not know for certain. His psyche was, at the very least, complex, even to his psychologist wife. Nevertheless, his defiance of Italian social conformity was very real if often subtle. Best of Sicily
Doing some biomethodology research for a fantasy piece of mine, of all the contemptible genres, yes, a fantasy story that every science fiction editor swears is boring is actually working for me. Now you see why I have only earned about 3,000 USD, and no, I do not know the exact total, never filed a schedule C, not that I would not have, but journalism breaks your heart, lies, and every journalist knows this, which is why plagiarism scandals like this skirt the truth, and no, I never engage in unethical behavior, that is not what the issues are in the fourth estate; it is a huge question, whether or not access serves the public trust, like when David Brooks and Petraeus have lunch and then the general's penis sets the stage for the next international Bourne identity entertainment, but I have other things on my mind, the morning quarrel with Vinnie, which led to a second pair of broken glasses. I was going to go back to bed and simply cave in, and then had a mild second wind and said if dressing is too much writing is not, just do what I am able; my shins are hurting, however.
I know how this is going to come off, given what I have revealed, and how often I have written Linda's name, and my frank exposure of a life in emotional pain, but the demon/saint dichotomy within disability culture is still a real prejudice, and creating a real crippled killer, that an audience would accept, seems an almost insurmountable challenge. We are angels if we're helpless with drooling eye floating smiles, demons, if like me, we tell minor film personalities like Schneider to go fuck themselves, hurt their feelings, and then have a crying fit because said man is a jackass rather than an established connection who might have connected me to real work.
Dan, if I had known who you were when you approached my old account, I would not have ignored you but would have turned you down. You, your wife may not have thought you were patronizing me but you were. However, I apologize, and my upset apple cart was uncalled for. Now that we have that out of the way, no one cares about the chip on your shoulder with the Kenyon Review. You need an editor, and have to understand that the academy, not unreasonably, treats creative writing as a craft, which it is. I came up in literary small presses, and you do not understand the culture, even if, like me, you recognize the problem. The issue is how one markets poetry and fiction that has by necessity become beholden to historical canons. We're not enemies, but regardless of your classes at Harvard, your bakery, your talents at producing inane black television comedy, you are a fool who doesn't know how to apply yourself.
Write about being a minor figure in the industry. Stop complaining and pasting email arguments, and get yourself a better web design. You certainly have the connections. I don't. Use what you have.
