Two Corners, Many Shades

I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes:
Through it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and Aves vehement;
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it. --Measure for Measure (1.1.67-72)

Foster's forgettable reticence is interesting. Fathomable? This is something that has preoccupied me for the two and half thankless years I have had a blogging account. She is not merely my contemporary, of course, and would not be the actor she is if her talent did not in some sense speak to the American soul. The pretty tomboy, the man girl who dares to transmute a vibrant sexuality, a fast-paced self-reliance that flows with her wit. I tend to think the media backlash she received over Hinckley was a form of moral castigation otherwise unfair to the woman. Taxi Driver was a Scorsese vehicle thick as thieves with Actors Studio methodology and experimentation that doesn't quite pan. Let me put it this way: I have been socially inappropriate with men in order to get laid, and the end result is I am alone with weak legs and a colon which has a mind of its own. Bickle's disturbed mind just doesn't seem consistent with his action of taking a golden girl to a sex education movie. It is akin to me rolling down to the lobby naked after I had enticed the husband, and that isn't an end game, even for a war veteran who is a wounded lone wolf. I have not approached Foster's publicist yet, and perhaps there is no way I could get around the formulaic industry promotional interview to do something different, and this includes the fact that I do not give a flying fuck what she thinks about Hinckley, an assassin of pretend who is notorious for attempting to murder a B-grade actor who had a chimpanzee side kick, an actor who believed in the blacklist during the tenure of his presidency of the screen actors guild before he was senile in the office currently held by a law student who needs to dismiss our highest federal law enforcement official.

I do not agree with McCain about much, but he is an astute politician enough to know when Principals mortally wound themselves. Did you notice Holder's hand shaking in his recent congressional testimony? I did, but in fairness to the Clintonian, I cannot remember any attorney general who was capable of running the DOJ. Holder's competence has been a steady spear in Barack's side since those giddy post-election days in 09 when he opened his mouth about race relations. He just doesn't embody the command and the ability to administer, to adjudicate terrorism, to hold his officers accountable for mismanaged operations.

Near midnight defecation disaster fortunately avoided, I did consider killing myself during the turn of the century. I am not quite sure what force of will stops me, what belief. Defiance has a great deal to do with it. My mind is focused on my leg strength. The level of pretense surrounding Hinckley's nearly successful attempt almost places us in Chesterton's landscape, now that I focus on it. Young Foster was pretending to be Martin's Lolita; Hinckley was pretending anarchy for the pretend kiddie hooker, and Reagan pretended his mettle had solid foundation. I wrote an essay supporting Reagan over Carter and bumped my GPA up significantly. 

Tuning Forks in Urine

LUCIO. If I could speak so wisely under an arrest, I would send for certain of my creditors; and yet, to say the truth, I had as lief have the foppery of freedom as the morality of imprisonment. --Measure for Measure

I first became aware of the controversy over Shakespearean authorship in high school, and initially felt sympathetic to the Stratfordian charge against the Earl of Oxford proponents, namely, claiming that Shakespeare could not have written his plays was *elitist,* but the debate itself is basically what I like to call a false dichotomy, Derek Jacobi's quite sensual stature as a grand thespian notwithstanding. Active research scholars point to the lack of evidence that William was a writer, and that the Earl had an extensive humanist training, knew the theater, and the Globe burnt down, taking its evidence with it. However, an examination of the plays themselves illustrate that whoever wrote them had a scatological range surpassing Chaucer's, and some are difficult to produce onstage. Characters like Lucio populate nearly all of Shakespeare's stories, a rambunctious threat to the not so very established order under the monarchies of Europe. A clever opportunist, if William was that, a bourgeoisie with a streak of ruthlessness, could have certainly written these works. The evidence is in the thriving discontent, in Shylock's mercantile parsimony, in the dynamic gouging out of Glouchester's eyes as Lear wails across the stage. The 17th Earl of Oxford may have had the culture, but he was a courtier of privilege.

Beyond this, the issue is a hopeless distraction. If Shakespeare wasn't his own author, someone must have known the truth, and those persons never made any testament, one way or the other. Jacobi and the Oxfordians are in love with a theory, perhaps buttressed by metadata, perhaps not, but Shakespeare by necessity must have been a man akin to the fictional Nicholas le Floch, a chameleon with the ability to navigate diverse social strata. Would that be an Earl, or a managerial businessman who had a mean streak? Who would be more likely to create a commercial success, rescued later under the auspices of the Romantic movement authors?

Writing, researching, these are indeed more isolating activities than producing a play, or films based on a play, but once a writer creates a work, ownership instantly becomes diffuse, no matter how arcane copyright laws are. I opt for William Shakespeare. Why? Because I'm the great granddaughter of a Roman cobber with just enough education, just enough mingling between the middle class and the indigent-- if indeed we aren't all headed for an economic meltdown that will quake like magenta-- to harbor bitter pretensions toward grandeur, beholden to developers like Ev Williams on the one hand, for my power did indeed ripple outward, but also marginalized by their science, on the other. I hate being cut by outlets like OZY simply because I did not act in the appropriate time frame. One in their number put me on an intriguing journalist list in 2014, but is this truly supporting me as a peer? I reference this same cut by New Mobility after I worked so hard for them to challenge the orthodoxy, and I was, in 2004, still vainly trying to hold onto a sense of family in the disabled community. I had not raised my voice about any sort of betrayal, but the editor, Tim Gilmer, couldn't take the time to send me an email before he cut me off from his contributor list? It hurts. I do not know how to trust any process anymore.

And Measures Forgotten

Little Vincento was disgruntled to find that his prey had vanished so quickly, to continue on from yesterday. This is the advantage of a diverse variety of medical tools and saving ragged bits of cloth. I did not touch the mouse carcass, nor did my reacher, though I rinsed the claw off after I rolled the deceased like a cigar, deposited to the trash, as I might have done with Joey after he passed, and saved on my blood guilt but did not, and did the pedestrian thing, and it is done now in any case. Vinnie, more vicious than his sibling, extinguishes life quickly.

Judith Schwartz was on NPR yesterday, discussing hospice and end of life choices, and to me she sounded quite angry without necessarily being aware that she sounded that way, but her interview points to what I have been critiquing on the American left: We are processing our existence in such a way that it is bizarre and nearly inhumane, making me believe that elimination is in certain cases the best solution. Yes, that is scary, and possibly sucks, but life is not precious. That is only the cry of self-interest, of privilege, or in my case, the ambitious lack of it. I know, I know, senior housing is better than the horrors I have seen, I have computers, a television, and after nearly losing my life myself due to angry and crippled homosexuals threatening our parent company the way I am threatening that company now, I have two power chairs, minus nearly six thousand dollars of my savings, and cats. I do not have it so bad, but did, and have no guarantee that it will not get substantially worse for me very quickly. It may or may not, but my entire life has been managed, brutalized medically, and what, at fifty, rolling down that biological hill, do I have to show for it? Bylines, violins, drooling and barely literate fiance who was not to be below me in his hospital bed, who is managed so much more, giving case managers and angry minority men a salary, or a wage.

I am tired, my friends, and this class on Joyce was not the answer. No, it is not the fault of the young instructor Lance, and I will make an effort to make the best of it, build a bibliography, struggle to write a thankless but respectable essay or two, plodding.

I am also studying Measure for Measure again on my own; it is one of my favorite plays, difficult, Duke Vincentio's escapism difficult to fathom, Lucio's incendiary tongue less so perhaps, but still mysterious. I missed a production in Germantown it would have been interesting to see, but I did not want to go by myself by bus, and at the time, I did not think of querying Ed.

I am going to try to go to Joe's, late as it is, and will continue this thread later.

Rounds

The larger question, beyond those of us who lose, give way to a dissipated waste, some of us not so fortunate to earn a place in the aftermath, is whether we are threatened as a species with systemic collapse, as medical science finds increasing evidence of unintended biological consequences within our domesticated and technological structures. I may be better off in a section 202 unit than the institutional life of my childhood, an unnecessary one, or the phantasmagorical exposure to it later, in my work for Liberty, case managing Inglis House, but my bid for matriculation, in as far as it was possible, failed, and failed brutally, and in this sense, Cassie's tokenism is a hollow victory. I fully understand why William tapped the phrase measure for measure to represent symptomatic disillusion with proscribed formulas.