Up for air

"The soup that eats like a meal," a copywriter's cashier check.

The Dreiser estate should have sued Paramount posthumously for the hatchet job that is A Place in the Sun (1951). Whatever one feels about the great American movement authors in their milieu, the farther away we move from them, An American Tragedy is a nuanced labor that deserves the sweat of a reader's commitment and a scriptwriter's respect. Clift manages somehow to project the clueless demeanor that reasonably captures Clyde Griffiths wishful fast track waltz, but only just. I spent a great deal of time self-teaching the novel to myself before the kindle Paperwhite was born and my 2nd generation model was hot stuff, and it is a depressing book, one that upends American culture through deployment of the nuclear option, far greater in literary impact than Majority Leader Harry Reid's institutional scuttle of the filibuster. I'll freely admit I am not prepared to open the fuchsia casing that holds my most charming Amazon device and give you my notes and points this morning.

I rather hit a brick wall after I hired that cleaning company for nothing. A real wall, deeper than the reality of my bigotry. I'm tired, and almost ready to just pay the ultimate penalty, roll myself down to the office and tell my female minority wardens who I would slur but that would be a cheap shot, that they win, and they may inform their superiors that I will fold, and be placed in a hell like Inglis House. If I do that, I only increase a likelihood that a renewed major depression will finish me off, strapped and bound, an intravenous of joy juice burying me in Tarkovsky's voided afterlife. The Russian version is better than the Clooney Solaris upgrade, more in keeping with Lem's genius and mastery of genre that transcends collectivism.

I cannot suicide, but I can no longer truly hope to vindicate myself either and I know it. I can fight vigorously and transfer out of Presby, and that may happen. My sister and I are now in a marginal truce, and my mother's sister wants me back in middle brow Catholic suburbia, trading in little Italy nigger city once again for Caucasian gated sublet life I left behind because of my graduate student obsession, a sounding fury masquerade.

I was a stupid girl and I regret it but I've said that before, but the price has--I can no longer do what it takes to hope for a reasonable level of affluence as I head to my mid fifties. On that note, let me welcome Staff and Scrip. Finally a European who knows how to put on a fiery argument! 

Queens, Courtiers, Something Other Than Bianary

If I write the abstract and submit the abstract and as a proposal the abstract is accepted, I shall then be trapped, and viewers will only see a post like a yelp in the dark while I attempt to gain access to vaunted European film directors. I did not realize Alejandro would be young and pleasing to the eye. There is a distinct possibility an (the) abstract would not be accepted, but that does not rip out the fingernails. Remember Peter O'Toole's no audio screams? Being a dry literary critic is annoying. We want to medicalize art, dice it an slice it in our fascination with our own aesthetic inclinations, distracting ourselves from flight or fight responses to our frustrating inability to ask the Why? about life. Why is the misdirected question. Henry James is an obsession, and this has cycles of love and hate, stupid little patsy, not very well educated, and yet his insight into repression, his mastery of insinuation that makes me look for the damn code to loosen that twist of the screw, I cannot stand it, and my critique of James is essentially life long warfare to catch him, beat it out of him. This is why I forgive his tortured sexuality, regardless of how active it was or wasn't. I see his struggle, but mine was not the same. My brain is too injured for that paradigm, my body forcibly altered and fused, I did not envision lesbian games growing up, and that my own sex finds suckling teats attractive beyond weaning, this was classified as regressive. The Gay Shame cover, recollected, is reminiscent of the advanced homo sapiens body paint in The Quest for Fire, a pastiche allegory of a film, one which no longer impresses me, though it was one of the few times Jerry and I discussed rape as victimology over a way of life. Let us be lenient on the cinematic quality. It is a visually engaging narrative.

Queer theory is an intractable problem, intractable in terms of progressives with "untrammeled" glee (George Will's adjective) salivating over homoerotic subversion in literature and theater when it doesn't reflect real world consequences, and my willingness to make notable exceptions adds to the difficulty of getting out from under; it is an objection based on more than personal trauma, though insecure body image weighs into it, and failed associations cemented the deal. The thesis extrapolated from this is that homosexual culture being given *equal* legal and social status is unsustainable, which is not to plea for elimination, as that would be impossible. This does not mean there aren't gradations, evolutionary values in play, and more than a few of my old associates are on the extreme end of that scale. Jodie Foster is not, but there is more to it than the fact that she is not aggressive about lesbian identity. Sexual choices should not be an identity; sexual preferences as a classification is problematic, and I fail to see why celebrity status necessitates lack of privacy in personal affairs. Why can't we reformulate these membranes? Why do we need to know Ms Foster's personal intimacies, or see Montgomery Clift's war films as code for a faggot outcast who is made expendable? But The Young Lions, From Here To Eternity, these have to be read that way, even if we chuckle at the stigma of Ulysses as the dirty book, the forbidden book, annihilating formulaic stricture to reduce us to mucous. What a mucous, what a damn machine we are, humanity.   

Okinawa Transcendentals

Still, the destitute haven't been completely cut out of the oil bonanza. Chavez has funneled a portion of the windfall to provide an army of social services--ranging from free eye surgery to literacy classes--in the poorest neighborhoods. --Alexandra Starr, Letter from Caracas, spring 2007, The American Scholar

Fortunately for Dr. Dollyne, I do not feel well enough to roll upstairs to the community room to sow discord. She is scheduled to speak here at Riverside about race and disability roughly an hour from the time of this post being in composition. Her Institute sounds slightly along the order of black national socialism, and, if I am this close to making myself homeless to leave the grasp of this company, I'd achieve nothing by utilizing my anger to incite a bunch of enfeebled Adventist grizzled bitches and their warders. Presby has augmented my trauma for many years, and Trudy, if this gets back to you, none of your actions changes the fact that I have lived in Riverside under duress for many years before you came to the helm, and you've treated me yourself no better than Fatso treats Maggio. The line between Borgnine as a sadist with a truncheon and your threats, verbally and otherwise, isn't that wide, my aunt even affirming it.

"How you think they'd treat you?" She screeches.

Trudy Richardson has a job to do, people to answer to, and thus, cripples wind up like this cult hero, exterminated rather than lynched.

It takes a different feminine imagination than mine to understand the appeal of Montgomery Clift. It is as if a studio mogul said hey we finally found a fruit who makes women twit and cluck. Shelley Winters once claimed Clift was "a little AC/DC." More than a little. The entire film seems like an S&M fantasy, here to eternity. Never realized how well Frank could do a pansy ass, and he really looks like one with Maggio. Shudder. The novel and the film both rate comparison with Mailer's The Naked and The Dead. Ennui, boredom, repressed pathologies, against type.

Alexandra is a deft, dare I say luminous writer, but she miscalculated the fortunes of Chavez by a significant margin. The CIA dusted off its Castro file and actually achieved its goal, spastic writes with a margin of pleasurable derision. I think I will attempt to go to Texas. As badly as I want to acclimate to Tuscany, my body would not withstand the stress. We'll see.

Even if I cut and run in desperation, I need a storage facility, and a place for the cats, so on. The Lone Star has border issues, drought, and red meat to kazoo, but torturing my father, who does not care, "it's big," I pleaded. My need to leave is visceral, and I am not availed of this diet so I too can yield to the Stepford model.

Time to pitch, if I am not being black balled, but how paranoid is that?