Ego

Determined to try to save this before the crucial date, I need to stop rushing publishers after busting my ass overnight. Remind me I made this stipulation before I fling my keys in Trudy Richardson's face and roll back to the father who put me away and let orthopedics create a monster more terrifying than Shelley's creationist fears ever envisioned. ( I actually don't have enough data left before my billing date to sit online with Google Docs to fix my voice, not without an overage.)

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.

L'Amore Non Bastina por Mary

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.-- the opening.

Some authors imprint better than others on damaged neurons. Henry James, whose list serv I miss but remain off of because I would prefer to contribute intelligibly and lack confidence to tango with a group of catty overburdened teachers whom I annoy, at the end of the day, relieved to be gone as well. The dwarf female who precipitated my departure did not intend these consequences, but my pique remains. Should I email Dr. Hathaway? Perhaps. He was a favorite, even with his cataracts. One of my first scholars. 

David Foster Wallace. I am still evaluating how much genius Wallace had, in contrast to pretension, but his narrative voice is stitched into my self-hating faculties.

These are two examples. Those that slip away might surprise you: Dickens, Lawrence. Shelley is among them, not due to her flaws so much as she writes in such a fashion as to anticipate screen plays, and I can barely remember her epistolary novel. Her sympathy is far, far ahead of its time, especially when her voice is compared to Maupassant, Henry's contemporary, whose lucidity fails when tackling blind family members left to starve. Mary's blind man is the creature's educator, ironically, its humanist who doesn't judge.

Jerry once conveyed to class that he hated the Enlightenment and refused to teach it, in a charming moment of Celtic petulance; following in that vein, I disdain the Romantic Movement as much overwrought-- not to say Keats doesn't melt the heart -- but this was a very imprecise literary generation, who made drug dependency seem exotic, and left us with the eternal argument over what Romanticism means, god-fucking-dam-it-to-hell-sounding off as a joke, don't be alarmed,
but this morning they're banned! The Renaissance makes sense. Even the Medieval period makes sense. The Victorians are guilty of collapsing into Modernism but even they make a perfectly sound argument for knowing one's place. The Romantics wanted to dance and space out in poppy fields. Fuck that.

Fidgets

"It's hard to find much of a pulse."-- Drew Taylor

For a high functioning quadriplegic, reliable power chairs are the difference between life and death. Even with two models though, snow storms strain already vulnerable survival skills. Getting to Trader Joe's tomorrow or not with which chair is an issue, and I've been gently starving on tuna and eggs a bit of fish, for over a week. During the blizzard of 96 I cracked a castor on dry ice and went through hell with a black woman who sat at my table and played solitaire and walked me in my manual to my closest Dunkin Donuts franchise so I would stop discussing my failed engagement. I detached myself from any further working relationship with her for no real valid reason, and she moved on to an ancient crone of her own ethnicity. "Do you clean up dog shit?" her soul sister asked her. This was before the renovations, and my studio reeked of fecal tobacco and urine, and in 2014 the pungency may not be the same, but years of Tim the Mule and the failed cleaning service hasn't changed much about lived poverty in a studio with six year old carpet, dander, fur, flaking ceiling, stained drop ceiling over toilet because David, the toffee gang banger casualty, cannot cease and desist from dislodging his toilet from the flush system. Is it this level of powerlessness that breeds spree killers like maggots? We need to stop this, despite Aaron Eckhart's persuasive argument about technologies and trade offs, even if I cannot speak to Taylor's lampooning glee over Mary Shelley's original zombie. Even my rage is now passe, transmuted, it seems, into an argument about modern capitalism and confusion over rights and entitlements.

Guns basically have one design function, and in the best of all possible utopias, the technology which have given us this kill candy isn't going away, but I have to break with conservatives on treating the Second Amendment like any other form of retail. It has to stop, despite the sociological undercurrent of the American reality. Like Islamists, our disenfranchised utilize violence to settle disputes, and even as a form of conversation, a dialogue that uniquely ends in cessation and anti-climatic death tolls. The kill rate isn't really a good evolutionary check on the population, as it is not an efficient predatory cull. Wielding weaponry, through most of human history has been a privilege, not a form of radical equality, one on which the NRA seems to insist.