Subdural Hematoma in the Decline of Randy Quaid

"Well, don't you see, he's typical of the man who has married a whore--" Anatole France, reimagined.

Boris Karloff goes without saying, but then came realism, Randy Quaid's temper, De Niro's ferocity coupled to Branagh's need for succor, Peter Boyle's hilarious send up, Jennifer Beals and Sting, Aaron  Eckhart's  relatively recent fizzled attempt. The Revenge of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing, is a transitional knock-off of Shelley's novel, more minimalist than the time stamped Karloff, it's outer-lying framework, as written by Sangster and James, combines a whiff of vampirism and perpetual reconstitution, with Cushing emanating a false humility and ruthless process, some years before directors suddenly had to display fealty to the Enlightenment transitioning into early Victorian anxieties, treating the novel like scripture. The book endures because Mary Shelley annihilates domestication. Scripts may give Dr. Frankenstein a feminine halter in a tug of war with the hubris of the God complex, but Shelley doesn't dwell on doomed love for long in her fast paced death chase.

Quaid's trappings in the role are of menacing sympathy. Such a creature would be developmentally challenged. What Wickes tapped into in 92 isn't so far removed from Quaid turning dodger of justice across the border today; even when actors snap, they still tap into their greatest strength which now makes them difficult to bridle. There is a wee bit of Frankenstein as creation myth in Vanilla Sky too.

The Cushing reprisal points to where science fiction went after such adaptations, in the analog age: transplantation. It might be far simpler to stay with this macro-biological grafting than manipulating gene switches toward the transhumanism of Weiner's uneven study. Weiner's main problem as an author is he attempts to fuse too many choices.

Lyricism Minutiae

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?

Wandering Rock

...the individual brain, even if outstanding, was lagging farther and farther below the dizzy peak which science and technology in their totality had reached.-- Alexander Blade

Part of the reason I chaff over Ulysses is that I plod, not making the time for an autopsy of due diligence, and should not have then spent the money, though it went to a good cause, as I am the child of the aesthetic underdog, but something about the Joycean idiolect gives me epileptic seizures, and this goes back to my reading of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when money wasn't my primary concern. Perhaps it is not important that I grasp it for you right now, why Marcel Proust is soul food and Joyce is an orbital emergency to battle. I should be able to appreciate the subversive characteristics of the leprechaun, and do, but there is an undercurrent of antagonism when I enter Joyce, as if I am being conned. With Sterne this is central. Frustrated expectations essentially serve as the reader's antagonist in this early post modern exploit, which I read, reread, never seem to finish, poor Shandy, still waiting for me to allow his mum to enter into labor, but it takes me more and more of an effort to accomplish my goals, brushing my now dry and brittle hair, hour and a half to dress, and that on a good day. I am wasting too much time, but if you go, and my physiology allows, I will see you here:

A dinner to benefit Bloomsday

When Friday, June 14, 2013 Where Trinity Center for Urban Life 22nd and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Why Because your support makes the Rosenbach’s largest annual public program possible. Bloomsday is a free celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses that attracted 2,047 participants in 2012.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Charm is something definitively absent, which also seems to be the case for Henry Miller. Looking at this glum old fellow in the Wiki photo makes The Tropic of Cancer a bit difficult to square. The closest I can enter into the charm of Proust's voice that so soothes me, is the small ceramic Madonna grandmother Pauline gave me when my pelvic ligaments were being butchered in my first year as an adolescent, and a nervous British nurse broke the statuette. I never forgave her for that, ever. It is a cue I can recall as clear as day. I am busy writing a letter to a paying editor on my 1987 Smith Corona PWP6. Much like Sean Connery doing Salinger, I like returning to electric word processors now and again, but charm, joy, love? These feelings were never mine to truly experience. I wrote earlier in the year that perhaps I was in love with Jerry's memory, and suggested, then, that this was a pathway to defeat. I quarrel even with my own outreach for sentiment, however, because I do not know what this means.

I do know that nakedness strips off veneer, that sexual contact is a vulnerable exchange, even in the most romantic circumstances, and that was never mine either, not even the so so exposures to married male impotence. Swann's Way is my only hard copy edition of Proust in translation, and it is Marcel's segue way into the girl with her masochistic tendencies for the reward of a kiss that I am thinking of, whether it is in the Sodom & Gomorrah section, or before. I pulled the text out of my shelf, always fond of the vinyl feel. It would not be remiss to review and refresh as I journey slowly through Budding Grove, for I do understand abasement, unfortunately, as a tool to gain a sought reward. Not to be another woman's lover, however, so much as to feel necessary. Is it even conceivable that I can still meet a good man without a lesbian like Josie Byzek to do her unfathomable damage to my anticipation of desire? Do I still have the ability to derive pleasure from desire? Shakespeare had his own somewhat subversive take about passion, and we do not need scholars to remind us about Othello, or that Romeo and Juliet were victims of "a smoke raised with the fume of sighs". I go to lie down awhile, fearing my stability is loosening, my lone submission finished, of which there used to be so many more.

Soirées à Marcel

"There are people who should die." Rose might be discussing the price of milk. "Americans have a hard time with that, because they think everyone who is bad got broken somehow and someone else is at fault."
                   --Timothy Hailinan, A Nail Through the Heart, kindle edition, location 672