"It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction. [sic]" Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, location 4-11
Even in incidental moments, slicing the dwindling supply of potatoes to get you through a traumatic riddled weekend, not really paying attention to The Blacklist, the Gordon Lightfoot soundtrack craters you in, as Spader methodically wastes another traitor ally with humane ruthlessness right on the edge, his acting, between the emotional wounds and internalized flippancy, though the opening first season episodes offered a wry subversive bemusement, interest waned with all these mysterious processes swirling around the rouge agent character of Elizabeth, her brutalized psycho husband who apparently survives major cavity wounds. No one is that important, and the brutality offered by the directors doing the captures and the cuts is somewhat complicit, served up as fantastic, with Reddington something of a vengeful deity, except that some clever staff member remembered Lightfoot. This was all it took, for those of us who grew up on the emotive breadsticks of Croce's legacy, one which never envisioned Nigerian swaggering with thickened buttocks on the streets of Rome.
Dowager learned of this social ill through Don Matteo, and has no empathy. Let the Italian government ship their charming red light migrants to Jamaica. If these women want to leave Lagos, then they should stop complaining as to the consequences of marginalized, alien status. I tutored Nigerian students, and liked it better when they were restrained Franophiles absorbing western education for improvement. The difference between Matteo and the progressive video journalists soliciting the pity of privilege, is the mystery drama blames Roman lewdness, its sexual excitement over difference. Reporters on the ground liken them to untouchables, confined to their own foreign ethnicity, who cannot pay them well-- which will take us down memory lane to the fickle years of Usenet.
If I've mentioned JoettaB before, it was perhaps with scant detail. In 2016, coming to its close, I cannot flush out my interaction with her to a very great degree. She tried to help me over the CIL rupture, seemed to have a special interest in unstable males prone to violence, and posted one of my essays about smoking on her website, which I wasn't ready to abandon, then she vanished, and I assume this was due to harassment, or being threatened. "It was not I," the dowager proclaims, hands raised in an exposure of innocence. I bring this up because the general rule of thumb is, if it is posted, then it's published, and first printing rights have vanished, even if it doesn't quite feel that way. Nonetheless, I am including a variation of the piece in my collection, because it is a piece of my early post Matrix history, and the woman's disappearance troubles me, and since I take a hideously long time to gestate, "The Zippo Lighter" may lead me to a commission on addiction. Joetta met Kiefer Sutherland online, and she prided herself on that connection. It seemed a credible boast: He sent her tickets. Whatever her troubles were, I regret the space she left. Given what I face in real life, online nastiness hasn't really penetrated in that way; though it is a stretch, I think she was impaired through MS.
Maybe you'll be our leader one day.-- a former consumer over 70 years old I've characterized as The Gladhandler
I should not have written this post, let alone drawn attention to it, the avalanche tumbling on my head, and it shall at some point be revised or deleted, while I have plenty of time to agonize over access to vulnerable actors who may also be classified as cancer survivors, since I have to by necessity reconstruct the piece for which I need it. This falls under nothing anyone can do, even with the best sympathy available, though I will never know that if this is also the case when I contacted Phillips' office about the issue of Oxford Magazine she and I appear in together, never having so much as received the courtesy of a response. Apparently it is far too burdensome for pristine liberalism such as hers to reach down beyond those matriculated students on whom her income depends. A marginalized quadriplegic with disillusioned admiration and aspiration isn't a passing grade for her progressive finesse. I did not want her issue (if she had it). I just wanted a copy of my "Custer" poem, complex and fine as it is. Did she have to respond? No, but what would the harm had been if a TA had searched and made me a copy, simply to help? I'm a product of that academic system as much as she, and can't see that my posts were an issue, ambivalent or not, my voice hearkens her currency. Conservatives may not be beating down the gate to relocate me the fuck out of here on humanitarian grounds, but imagine they would have made me a copy of my misplaced work, had the situation been commensurate. There are nearly as many causes as there are people, to echo Krauthammer: no one has time for them all, inclusive of my subtextual bent to embed policy issues threaded in a bruised narcissism, though immigration is a league outside of this ballpark, all those starving and malnourished Houthi taking a lesson from the Nigerians who've preyed on Roman pity for years, never mind the Italy barely has the ability to salvage its ruins from earthquakes, at least since season 8 of Don Matteo, where whores of village back alleys get the justice of our spaghetti western priest. Catholic mercy never fails, having found a docking grappler for the besieged under the shadow of Boko Harem at a port in Spain, thus a libertarian moment of hosanna. On the abstract level, the dowager has to support the libertarian outcry for freedom of mobility. This embodies what personal liberty is all about, but it is also equally true, as in James Woods vocal retrenchment, supporting the Trumpian border wall, that the European Union's charitable acceptance will one day break the camel's back, already eroding what once made the United States seem indomitable. Doubtlessly Spain won't do a doubletake and ask Putin to find these poor victims of their own government some space in Kaliningrad. The communists do love indigenous tokenism so, after all. After Mussolini was hung like a dog in the streets, Italians rightly slowed paying the piper on the moral debits of history.
