Princess Andromache, Croupier

.... not so Agamemnon, who spoke fiercely to him and sent him roughly away. "Old man," said he, "let me not find you tarrying about our ships, nor yet coming hereafter. Your sceptre of the god and your wreath shall profit you nothing. I will not free her. She shall grow old in my house at Argos far from her own home, busying herself with her loom and visiting my couch; so go, and do not provoke me or it shall be the worse for you."-- Samuel Butler's translation

How is it that one can eschew James Joyce and still appreciate the consequences of Modernism? There is much to appreciate in Ulysses, regardless if a pauper invalid spends well over five hundred dollars on cheat sheets and the nullification of her own pretensions, particularly the Calypso section, and then Nausicca, and the disjunctions from Nausicca between Bloom and Gerty leading into Circe which I absorbed with psycho-sexual shock, and will ponder beyond the conclusion of this reading group cycle. Joyce is  on par with the blindness of subsuming into appetite, and still illicits my scorn.

Scorn is a strong sentiment, a reaction against pity and the pathos of Joycean grandiosity, something that glimmers in Dubliners, rises in Portrait, and reaches a crescendo in Ulysses. Perhaps I am more Cartesian than I realize, certainly not as skillful as Nick Davis in deconstructing Greenaway. Nick helps me to see why The Belly of an Architect preoccupies and remains an insufferable pretension, and the argument it makes about feminism and legacy is to some extent historically relevant, structuralist, to say the least. Problematic films like these are needed even more than masterpieces. If you need to visualize what I mean in my charge toward a thesis, there is the gnat chameleon aspect of Jake Gyllenhaal's roles: the sounding center geek in Proof, The Zodiac Killer, a type against his A list swashbuckler bid Prince of Persia, a formula for which I could not sit still. Moving in part, more rugged in its realism than Errol Flynn's output, reminiscent of Douglas and Curtis maiming each other unto death, a film based on a game nevertheless doesn't belie expectations.

I ended my implicit contract with the long winded Timothy Artis, the talking mule of the Torah, and this time, I ended it for good. There is little between me and a major shit fest if I do not find a replacement soon, or return to the Medicaid waiver.

Should I give up, prepare for death? Like anyone has the balls to type in my comment section on accepting limitations and the inevitable. I have only a thin, thinning veneer for African American dominion in Philadelphia-- indeed, the cracks in black identity toward true matriculation into the mainstream has ushered itself in a little late for my adoption of developmental dove like expressions.

Folic Acid

Already [t]he film, and not just Louisa’s husband, seems to feel that childbearing is a woman’s paradigmatic work, wheres a man's is to create great art--Nick Davis

I have to go downtown this morning, and thus I am trying to take it easy with sinuses that have been on the flare for three weeks, angry at myself for putting myself back into an informal course curriculum, anger stemming from the fact that I am going to be dead soon and Ulysses is not the detective game I wanted to play; astonished to discover this degree of antipathy in myself toward the text, this is more than the folly of my immersion with Jerry. I really don't like Joyce, and although I am a failure and now too weakened to do much about that, it makes little sense that a great author such as this pisses me off, another detective game in itself.

I do not know if Sheldon Novick is upset with me. I don't know if Jerry is upset with me either, but Jerry is memory, and Sheldon is an accomplished Jamesian who told me I could accept a gift, and wrote, many years ago, "to my friend," and now maybe he regrets the appellation, maybe not. The alliance mattered, perhaps out of a mutually shared sentiment, his being better disciplined, of course, and mine more disruptive, angst ridden, that James was a romantic optimist, of a sort.

If I have lost the association with Sheldon, this is part of the price of intellectual ferocity whose only achievement has been to get my minority landlord wardens to back off, which isn't much (and yes, I slur them, going off like gun powder, but have to remember who outnumbers whom in this city), but I am sorry to lose it just the same. He is a good man whose nature is not one to see psychic hell on earth as a place of fortitude from which to argue.

I used to feel guilty using slurs of a certain kind. Not anymore. Why do I tell you that? Is this symptomatic of mental erosion? Or in part the honesty of my resentment of having to cope with a plethora of black anti-social behaviors, and, unlike some of you, I am trapped, and have not the slightest way out, of not dealing with them again in the future. My brother would not want any of my minority attendants in his home, but day in and day out I have to cope with it, their insolence, unwillingness to keep to an agreed upon schedule, and those are the small annoyances that do not threaten my personal safety. I do not want to die at the hands of black negligence or black violence, but the odds are about as good as Oxbow's that I will fall before one or the other.

I paid attention to the Preakness on NBC sports because it is a world I do not know, with a pageantry beholden to a fictionalized notion of American aristocracy, one that would have eroded even if Lincoln had managed to avert the civil war. I laughed at it, old men with old money running herd animals on race tracks. Will computer simulations one day become horses?