Quantum Errors

 

For all my complaints about genre, I have only published sparingly in it. With the exception of poetry, and articles and columns which, in brevity, I earned enough in commissions to merely supplement disability insurance, not compete with nearly any of my previous salaries in relation to  it, I managed to nibble the etch-a-sketch around subsistence, after my minimal white collar dalliances. Some of those dalliances failed due to my significant disappointment at not joining the ranks of collegiate instructors, an indolence of ego. I spent all that time in college learning how to think to join a press clipping service, which involved manually clipping clients company logos out of newsprint. I wasn’t there very long, still don’t really understand the utility of the organization as a contractor, and then lasted in accounting firm proofreading a little longer. I did not live at Riverside at the time, and ironically, if I had, commute stresses would have been easier. By my early forties there was a glut of PhDs on the market. This in no way indicated that it was incumbent upon me to close the door on teaching. If I couldn’t handle special needs students who could, after all?  But I was never entirely comfortable around the myriad guises of human deformity, my skeletal ligament contortions included, and there we have it. A new generation of the disabled community is coming forward, and I do not even know what my mission entails anymore, rather like Philip K Dick’s Isidore crafting a very vivid image of kibble for the mentally slow androids on a post nuclear Earth. Dick’s work, beneath the surface, is less about science in speculative fantasy, and more about biological depreciation. It doesn’t translate particularly well on screen, though the Amazon Prime hires from Hollywood diversifying the long dead, or decades dead, studio monopolies, make an effort to validate Dick’s humanoid organisms ultimately overwhelmed by defeat. Indeed, The Man in The High Castle is grand theater as an Original, but it is not Dick’s original story. Couldn’t be and still be a series, although Amazon does better with Electric Dreams.

When we compare these to contemporary parables like Domain or the overly ambitious series Counterpart as conceived by Justin Marks, what we see is an alternate reality, transposed from individual, tortured psyches, into the macro reality of the digital age. As a throw away forget our troubles DVD knockoff, Domain was better than it had to be, manipulating its audience, deflating the gravity of the surely soon to be dystopian end of ourselves into a finger wagging cautionary tale about outsourcing the most malevolent American criminals we’ve delineated into types, within our ever evolving psychoanalytic maturity. The two women in their pods, the usual space milkshake providing nutritional supplements, were the family annihilators, and the men? Spree killers, slashers, doxed into yet another sociological experiment, conceptually worse than the brutality which inspires it, ever advancing on A Clockwork Orange , which was actually written as an absurdist morality tale, engaging readers with its vibrant anger at Western mores and not knowing what to do with the tribalism to which we’re beholden still in our evolution. I loved Counterpart, and praised Marks accordingly from the other side, despite Baldwin’s décor lesbianism, and the softball black botanist included as one of the origin managers for an unforeseen quantum error. Are we all in an alternate time space continuum, happy or less happy elsewhere? Do I try sucking tits and thereby, with Google’s approval, earn a secure living? I barely have the requisite training to comprehend the elegant computations and sign language of physics, but Greene’s affability notwithstanding, it all seems a little too convenient, a more rational juxtaposition of heaven and hell, so that we have a more palliative olive branch to restrain ourselves from vengeance, like turning on the cruelty of the oppressed. For nearly 12 years, Trudy Richardson tormented me, carte blanche, for how I dealt with my bodily needs, and the only thing she achieved by dragging my now widowed father into my tactics and methods, was virtually ensuring I will have to be disposed of like toxic waste. I consider the death of this woman to be a matter of political self defense, and I am hardly a seventeen year old who may be the penultimate libertarian of our age.

Midpoints

"Can I still play the violin?"--Lois Smith

Where Defiance ends and The Man in The High Castle begins in 2015, there is a thematic congruence, one superficial, the other overly dramaturgical. Both series suggest American values have been tested and raise questions in relation to our global role in the aftermath of successful blows on our soil. The “races” of Defiance address pluralistic tensions. The nuclear device in High Castle which incinerates the White House in the Smith family flashback resonates with the same sobering shock as watching the Twin Towers implode on 9/11, not that it need be translated in that fashion, since the series’ creators are faithful to the spirit of Dick’s unsparing depreciation of American sensibilities, however heightened the realism for the sake of Prime’s competitiveness with Netflix, this too something of a retail fiction. Streaming is streaming, whatever we put in the pipeline. I have not gone into High Castle at great length because I sequenced it rapidly after the start of my still ongoing personal crisis, and there is a great deal of material to peel. Whatever viewers feel about Berlin as the superpower du jour, the cinematic quality of SO1 & 2 seems well done to me, and one hopes the set personnel received worthwhile compensation. Amazon proved itself rather shrewd as opposed to SyFy, since revamping Kennedyesque authoritarian alternatives is easier than bringing otherworldliness to St. Louis and beyond. The outer framework of the Defiance plot falls well within the traditions of the genre, and isn’t anything we have not seen before, particularly in print. Megalomania pits itself against the upright and the just. Asimov may be able to get five Foundation novels out of that, but cable television can’t expect its audience to join all those threads so seamlessly. High Castle’s writers have more dramatic tensions and complexity, and Julia Crain manages to play both sides against the middle, just as we aren’t altogether certain about Joe Black’s moral compass, especially given the revelation that he was a Leidermoif [sic] newborn.

The most fluid episodes, those of the Trade Minister’s visions of history as we know it, are more tenuous, though they expose what the citizens of today are meant to appreciate: how fortunate we are to live in a constitutional republic where the descendants of bootleggers were de facto royals who kept us out of war with the Soviets. Dick wasn’t quite so highbrow, and his aims nearly juxtapose those of Ridley Scott and his team. Everything Dick did was an attack on our pretensions, not a tribute to our national innocence.

Soft Spots in Ten Story Girders

Like many public housing tenants who end up becoming agitated and enveloped, literally, by lack of mood health, I am caught between inextricable forces: If I do not leave Riverside Presbyterian Apartments, I will wind up losing my ability not to engage in law breaking conduct, one way or the other. Some of you may say that marginally competent black women come a dime a dozen, however aggressive, cruel, and conniving they've been, focus, hang on, you've been through the worst. I know all this. I just need to leave. So leave, but doing that gives Presbyterian Homes exactly what it desires, and if I am not clever enough to get from destination A to (temporary?) destination B by August, what choices would first responders have, even if I hypothetically leave the borders of the Commonwealth? What the fuck would I do in a shelter, with this chair, if I could keep the more hopelessly deranged from an aging and damaged machine, with bedpan, and whatever else I could carry? It simply isn't fair, this delusion that I could be an independent woman who had options. I can barely sit here without some memory tied to this building, in my 23 year history in it (31 total under the same corporate 202 contract with HUD, I've never had another agent, just corrupt Presbyterian owners, basically a 15 minute Septa ride between Broad and Race), without a trigger begging me to strike back, and I cannot continue. I need to go, and I cannot manage. It is literally, as we speak, killing me, but in the interim, I've always had a forgiving blindness toward Philip K Dick, and as with ... _ElectricSheep? it will be fun to compare High Castle. Dick is one of those writers, flawed, on the mildly raw side, whose tendency toward abstract composites leaves screen writers, directors, room to breathe. I really do not know what I'm going to do otherwise.
Yes, I beat back Presby's escalating and illegal aggression toward me, but the price I have paid has destroyed intonations within which I'll never recover, and I write this without hyperbole. The system has destroyed my compassion. I am not capable of anything, but I am capable of unbridled fury which needs relief.

Maggot Larvae

Where I first heard of David Frum? Perhaps Charlie Rose. Moderate conservatives like him always reign in Libertarian militancy toward the two party system with statements such as these. Once you get past a certain age, Brian's dictum evinces itself through politics. The laws of nature tend to repeat themselves. Frum is Douthat is Johan Norberg, is Niall Ferguson, and I happen to be an enthusiast of Ferguson's ideas.

Frum's chastisement presupposes that NSA and the Defense Department are powerful enough to keep rare specimens like myself in check. For a while, but I have serious doubts about what comes after the post-Obama era. I make the assumption that most of my viewers on the outside don't understand Medicaid Waiver services, what a lifetime of entitlement is like against ecumenical insistence on the inherent value of human life juxtaposed against medical warehouses like Inglis House, which belie such pluralistic niceties. Most of us don't dwell on beneath the surface insecurity all the time, not even I.

But I've lived it most of my life, and at 53, it threatens to suck me down the drain; this is the kind of rage which permeates revolutions, velvet, or otherwise. Remember Philip K. Dick's short story about android political candidates? Remember what it signified? But there was also what Dick didn't say about electing representatives, about the limits of political processes.

I'm living off my father's guilt at the moment, and don't like it, having come full circle, little spastic slum dog, repeating the same thing over again, like one of Patricia Highsmith's lesser known protagonists.

I'm never going to vaunt past the sterility of the welfare state, simply because I could not stay inside it to earn a living, and allowed you to read what a vicious maniac its scar tissue has maimed within me, to the tune of Google's reluctant unease. What do I have left to aspire to? Beneath the surface, the entitlement system is like a lava slide. Slow, molten, deceptively destructive. Heavy enough to make the West Wing's security apparatus as thin as a thimble.

Bauble Feet

Martian colonists become preoccupied with Perky Pat Layouts, small sets representing penthouse apartments inhabited by a Barbie-Doll like figure and her Ken-like mate. --Behrens and Ruch analyzing Palmer Eldritch


Senator Kerry approximates a human being remarkably well. Surely he is flesh, blood, cartilage and orifice like the rest of us. This was my impression of the man during my obligatory 30 seconds of interaction with him after his 2004 consolation tour, and yes, it says something about this country that a failed piece of tripe like myself could discuss the wrong Treasury Secretary with a New England blue blood, but the yawning gulf between this failed presidential nominee and the urban herd who purchased his global warming book (I am selling my copy back, eventually, and I'm sure you'll snap it up like ginger grahams), says something else about American caste. The wall between the Senator and myself was more impenetrable than any bulletproof vest. Susan Rice  is closer to the ground, a slightly better maintained version of Debra Horne, local dementia calculator, and in that vein of competence, the ambassador has done little to impress me. Unlike Lindsey, I do not consider her intelligence feed on Benghazi fatal. Kerry is simply a more recognized national figure, and has earned the soon to be open Principal slot at State.

If I had the ability to take McCain and the Congressional Black Caucus by the scruff and bust their heads for them, the pharmaceutical industry would begin to worry about its Prozac profit margins. Can I discern the policy differences between Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice, or the departing Hillary? Only in the most cursory fashion, but neither Ambassador Rice's ethnicity nor her intelligence is at issue; the question is one of her temperament. The three women who were Secretary had it, but I have my doubts about Rice. That Kerry is rich white and old school does not discount the fact that he has earned this post. He served his country, (this is me not examining the Swift Boat tactic very closely) and he has been loyal to his party, and to Obama. Be glad I do not have real power, because we'd revert to the original thirteen states within no more than a bling. 

Question for the Harvard elite: If I do not have the right to tape Ms.Horne's mouth shut and cut off her thumb that hits the intercom switch to announce coffee hour or the budget grocer, or bible study, simply because I do not have your economic resources to keep my living space private, why in the world would I worry about Facebook or Google? Seems to me, cerebral palsy precludes the implied rights under western constitutional norms that you feel sacred as an ambulatory individual.

Clint in Ellison's Invisible Ink

Philip K. Dick long ago predicted the cosmetic nature of democratic choice in a story about robots created to simulate human politicians, where an older prototype is operated by a short black man who pauses out of exhaustion and asks for a beer, and in many senses, Obama is still this figure, uneasy in his own identity, neither black enough in the civil rights sense, and not quite accepted by white America on its own cultural terms. What Romney shares with Barack is that same invisibility, and though Gwen Ifill was not entirely off when she remarked that Eastwood's speech evokes Ellison's famous opening, she gives the country too much credit for being able to pick up the allusion, and I am doing my best to tune out national politics on either end. My sentiments about actors and the two party system seem only to be confirmed. The best the Democrats can do is offer me compliance with a regulatory system that is brutal in its own right, and the Republicans have nothing to say to me as a disabled woman who believes in success through hard work, and wants her own autonomy, inclusive of more fluid mobility options.

The disabled community views Eastwood as an enemy, and indeed, John Hockenberry shredded the former mayor for his objections to the ADA with a better effectiveness than anything I have at my disposal, but my view is more nuanced. Million Dollar Baby was about escaping bleak entrapments, not killing the crippled. Neither the right, nor the left, seem to realize that the American conception of individual liberty is virtually paralyzed.

The Kantian Concerns in Escapism

One thing that the burgeoning novelist Lee Doty shares with more accomplished authors and conceptual artists like JJ Abrams, and the canonical, like Cervantes, or Thomas Mann, is the fantastical troping of escape from reality. Doty just handles this badly, which is what I do not like about his foray into this much abused genre. His main superhero, Dek, is a boy with Downs syndrome who is plucked, ambiguously, out of a car accident, and is made into a replicant by his wizard father. The same happens to Roy, who is speculatively retarded. Doty never spells this out; instead these boys get superpowers and are conveniently killed in the opening narrative. We can also note, in the fabled discussion thread which followed my negative review, Doty ceased any comment directed at me as soon as I admitted to a disability. I did not expect that he would answer my email, as by that point I was thoroughly antagonized, but it is interesting, none the less.

We utilize chronic conditions creatively in a variety of ways, Abrams with somewhat more ingenuity toward a mythology. There was Locke's real world paralysis, or Rose's terminal illness, all suspended on a magical island transposed from Stevenson into a post 9/11 world. Henry James dollops consumption and other mysterious ailments into fairy tales. The young Mann, who I can only tolerate in small doses, and have placed his corroded novellas that signal the death of the Romantic movement into archive, for the time being, does the same thing, turning the very aspects of deterioration into a melodramatic looking glass. I preface my diffidence toward Mann's homo-erotic tortures with the caution that I have not read his more mature Modernist works, but still feel that James' genius is more synchronic toward my distaste for leveling the playing field over the pursuit of sexual pleasure, which can also be blinding, and in some ways, a selfish escape, however liberating the intense orgasm might be. Henry James knew, as I have learned, to my misfortune, that intimacy, even the purely emotional, can have deadly consequences.

Doty leans heavily on Philip K Dick for his cultural references in Out of the Black, but Dick, in his post nuclear android settings, does not let us escape from the challenge of whether we create worlds of our own destruction, or can hold to optimism for the future, which is another way of conveying that you should not dismiss what bitter would be elitists like myself have to say. Does this mean I am hostile to imagination? Not at all. I just want you to think twice, and whatever you shy from in my behavior, what does Doty's shunning of me entail, especially when he is willing to exploit the disadvantaged on the cheap. Food for thought.