Gorilla Out of Shoulder Blades

In the literary genre, there are better and lesser credits, just as in journalism. The brand name credits have always alluded me, sometimes by a nose. APR hexed me as an undergraduate, handwriting a precious consolation note beneath its then 1983 standard rejection slip: "sorry to say no!". Even as a student I was baffled. WTF did it mean? I have supported APR intermittently, and would and shall continue to do so, with the luxury of resource, even if I never get a slice of their space, but like Kenyon, APR is a status brand; in marketing terms, I have few of these, the best being a minority anthology out of Pittsburgh, another fallow destitute period where I abused the young man who accepted me in it-- and yet, even today, simply by taking blind aim, I wind up in the laps of African American scholars who see my suffering as a corresponding voice to their historical memory: I had the gall, if you like, to ask one of these if she might consider writing a forward to my long tortured poetry manuscript, the strongest of them. "I am not sure I am the right person," she wrote, but if I do trouble her with it, why does such hypocrisy offer momentary glee? My psyche is far more interesting than that of Lee Doty's nurse (to pick an old scab).

I make the damnest effort to stay away from lesser known student journals, precisely because of the scaffold of credits I do have, but this is because of a towering giant who is no more. Len was truly independent, and he never humiliated me as did the Poets and Writers community, but I am caught with my zipper painfully pinching my crotch: I am too established not to ignore a great deal of what Allison transmits and writing magazines advertise, but cannot limit myself to APR and the Atlantic, creatively, and expect to survive. I am even less as a freelance journalist, but face nearly the same difficulty in getting commissioned for content. The digital world imploded an already wobbly pay for play patronage system: It killed Len's singular loyalty driven Small Press Review. I miss what the man meant to me.

Drum Roll Ready Exasperation

Now I am being asked to review certain genres for kindle, that is when I am not being excoriated by the likes of Lee Doty and then abandoned by the likes of Susanna Daniel for their fear that my perception of their work as being relatively shallow is accurate. Although we might add to this by saying Susanna ceased any response to me because I do not medicate my emotional response, and that violates her suburban Christian fastidiousness, and is not true to the revolutionary intent of Christianity in its early formation; it still hurt my feelings, because I had no original intent, not on twitter, of being unfriendly. As to reviews, I turned one fantasy writer who praised me for knowing my stuff down, but this time I do not know. There is as much collusion in publishing as anything else. I wish Susanna well, and of course, she has the perfect right not to see me as one among equals, but all I wanted was a normal interaction with a female novelist who had what I did not, a happy life. I can never have whatever that is, but not being able to build bridges defeats my goal.

Toying with the idea of constructing a mass email to Amazon writers: "You want a review, I want my blog downloaded for kindle." Then WaPo will unearth a price gouging scandal, and I'll be investigated by the FBI.

The power of monopoly.

*
Not that I wish to make overt assumptions, but the aspiring(?) science fiction novelist from the UK has, at least since my Monday transmissions, remained mute. People, look: writing, to me, is not a parlor game, nor is it an Amazon sales ranking. If you are going to approach me hoping for my interest, then don't inconvenience me by vanishing because you suddenly feel intimidated. I have published over 300 poems, I became a semi-established journalist been 99 and 04, and have a small press issue of the now defunct Crawlspace 17 devoted to my work. Small presses are a marginalized joke whether they are training grounds for MFA students or the winsome nostalgia of the radical left for men like Steinbeck and Dreiser. If I had understood this when Jerry and Michael tried to talk me down when I was your age, I would have listened to my father and gone into accounting. I will write until I am dead, but being a publishing whore, that is another issue. Public arguments between established pundits, or even the head bashing between Lee Doty and myself, or Poets & Writers and myself, or my umbrage at Daniel Schneider for making me feel like a fucking asshole, is not what it is cracked up to be. My body is a half century old and might as well be three times that. I have nothing except a small library and an indulgence for cats. If you write shit I'll crucify you, and if you sweat blood and tears and do something from the heart, then I'll recognize that, but if you are going to solicit Joanne because her insights into what she likes or doesn't impresses you, more to the benefit of Bezos bottom line than ours, then Joanne needs help too. Those in the top echelons who get paid for critical review analysis are far and few between, and as a professional, cosmopolitan breed, a dying class. Grow up.

The Kantian Concerns in Escapism

One thing that the burgeoning novelist Lee Doty shares with more accomplished authors and conceptual artists like JJ Abrams, and the canonical, like Cervantes, or Thomas Mann, is the fantastical troping of escape from reality. Doty just handles this badly, which is what I do not like about his foray into this much abused genre. His main superhero, Dek, is a boy with Downs syndrome who is plucked, ambiguously, out of a car accident, and is made into a replicant by his wizard father. The same happens to Roy, who is speculatively retarded. Doty never spells this out; instead these boys get superpowers and are conveniently killed in the opening narrative. We can also note, in the fabled discussion thread which followed my negative review, Doty ceased any comment directed at me as soon as I admitted to a disability. I did not expect that he would answer my email, as by that point I was thoroughly antagonized, but it is interesting, none the less.

We utilize chronic conditions creatively in a variety of ways, Abrams with somewhat more ingenuity toward a mythology. There was Locke's real world paralysis, or Rose's terminal illness, all suspended on a magical island transposed from Stevenson into a post 9/11 world. Henry James dollops consumption and other mysterious ailments into fairy tales. The young Mann, who I can only tolerate in small doses, and have placed his corroded novellas that signal the death of the Romantic movement into archive, for the time being, does the same thing, turning the very aspects of deterioration into a melodramatic looking glass. I preface my diffidence toward Mann's homo-erotic tortures with the caution that I have not read his more mature Modernist works, but still feel that James' genius is more synchronic toward my distaste for leveling the playing field over the pursuit of sexual pleasure, which can also be blinding, and in some ways, a selfish escape, however liberating the intense orgasm might be. Henry James knew, as I have learned, to my misfortune, that intimacy, even the purely emotional, can have deadly consequences.

Doty leans heavily on Philip K Dick for his cultural references in Out of the Black, but Dick, in his post nuclear android settings, does not let us escape from the challenge of whether we create worlds of our own destruction, or can hold to optimism for the future, which is another way of conveying that you should not dismiss what bitter would be elitists like myself have to say. Does this mean I am hostile to imagination? Not at all. I just want you to think twice, and whatever you shy from in my behavior, what does Doty's shunning of me entail, especially when he is willing to exploit the disadvantaged on the cheap. Food for thought.

How The Cymbals Reverberate

When I reviewed, or interpreted The Others earlier this year, I was unaware that Nicole Kidman had followed through on her psychological thriller arc with the equally creepy but possibly more uneven Birth (2004). Though I missed few, the minutes that escaped me were still crucial, and I'd like to screen it once more, but Cameron Bright was used to much better effect here than he was in the stupendous and confusing Ultraviolet, another film that has drawn my mention during my unfortunate LiveJournal stint. Endless revision, tying in the old posts and the new, for what exactly when I cannot solve my application problems, but this will wait until after the holiday, as the dynamic between the new little lady and my poor Vincent has exhausted me, and I am close to giving up the love of feline parenting, though it will break my heart, already rife with fragments. I will not be celebrating tomorrow; indefinite at this point, but I may try a weekend holiday ride to Penn's Landing. In all my years at this location I have never taken the 21 bus to the pier. For me, during the active years of my field work, it was always in the opposite direction, to Darby, smaller maybe, but to my memory the Darby borough is just as bad as the city. Drugs more concentrated, and I have more graphic memories of my mother's drug use, the purple bruises in the fleshy crook of her elbow, the rubber tubing I wasn't supposed to see. What was it that I said about reticence? But the irony of Doty's continued lunging over my review is that particular review was of no consequence as compared to what I write here for the sake of testament, alienating my family, and those who knew me. I think Doty has a lot to learn about what can be controlled in public domains, and what cannot; in contrast to his desire to be loved by his readers, I do not care about my audience in that way, so much as the integrity of my work itself, and if people are dismayed by what I produce, I do not go on a boner about it. I have been praised for the power of my poetry, for how hard hitting I am, or impressed poor Louise, who I abandoned through no fault of her own. She is a perfectly nice young woman who found my work *very raw,* and we should have left it as that. I have been criticized as pretentious, but unlike Doty, I did not harangue the now inactive Usenet poster who threw out that red meat. I like the complexity of my imagery, though it leads to the flaw of a certain top heaviness that can topple my poetic construct. I have been rejected as many thousands of times as the paltry dollars I have drawn in on my work. I have been accepted for publication in sometimes unexpected ways, and I have not been as successful with marketing paradigms as some, including those whom I actually respect, like Cheryl, (not liking the Oprah juggernaut and my expressed frustration at comparative trajectory is not the same thing as disdain; Cheryl is authentic--Doty is a crock, a load on) but there are reasons for this beyond talent, very much related to my vulnerability, strained resources.

Lee Doty Lives

And still it does not die!

Doty is back, claiming he made a bunch of money, that he is not a professional, and he is obviously trying to be humorous, and I sit here gritting my teeth, in a bad mood, in trouble because of a cat barely into adulthood. I have standards for my published work, and do not make money on entertaining my audience with lowest common denominator character sketches senselessly slaughtered by drug addicts sans demons under the mind control of magical spiders. Sometimes I fail my standards; sometimes I do a fairly good job and stir controversy. See my New Mobility article in the 2004 archives even if they request that you buy it. I have read at least five fantasy horror texts on kindle that made me puke. They sit in archive, discarded. If you wish, by all means, keep this thread going, suggest that Doty read some of my other reviews, and perhaps he can distill what earns my respect, and what doesn't. or maybe he does not care. It should sadden me, that authors, as a class, fall in such a range that so many should be beneath contempt. I am moving on, staying with talents like Ferguson, who make me think, but this is not to say I don't feel a little pissed off at the man for trying to put me in the wrong for not liking how I wrote what I wrote. His lack of maturity on this matter sickens me, regardless of my disadvantages as a disabled woman. Amazon tolerates much less polished opinions than what I wrote, and since my mettle is up, I am thinking of turning this issue into a column or article. It seems we could all use a lesson about the virtues of reticence. I emailed Mr. Chicago Punk last night, and so far, he seems to lack the balls to tell me exactly what he wants to stop deploying his Plumber Joe victimization.

Forge of Valor

As much as I love the convenience of the Amazon business model, this aftershock in light of my negative review of Out of the Black will not die, and I see this in part as not just a contest between two writers who may never break ranks out into successful authorship, but a critique of digital immediacy. Would I have purchased this text had I viewed it on a bookshelf in a book store like Borders? Hard to say. Quentin Tarantino may opine to the ever plodding Charlie Rose that he "likes genre," but I am more diffident than the stylized filmmaker, who needs a transfusion, if the failure of his Jewish revenge fantasy is any indicator. I tend to prefer the next generation when it comes to authors who can challenge the conventions of  genre, and Lee Doty is not such an author, but rather a talented hack who cannot escape comparisons to Rowling and come out worse for wear. In a very real sense I am tired of discussing this, wish Doty well in all his future endeavors, but will not let it go that his novel drops the ball, not once, but four or five times, and screams out for a brave editor who would have helped this fantasy operator clean up his act. I bought the text on the strength of another customer reviewer who asked, "When was the last time a fat nurse was the hero?" A lesson in here for keeping faith with professional critics, as per my training.

As to my Amazon reviews, I do not write them for the sake of the Common Reader, or to move products with the company, per se, but to keep my critical faculties engaged with the intent of a future project for publication. My distaste for Lee Doty's notable and continued cop outs did not receive the full weight of my intellectual censure, but this is precisely because it was not worth my time and effort to point out its defects. My review is a write off, and not a real effort, and no further exertion on my part will be forthcoming. Doty behaves as if I killed his daughter's teddy bear just to be a bully. Due to this I'll never read another work by him knowingly.