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.

Hopkins' Otherness

First up: The movie Proof, (2005) with Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. I am not a big Paltrow fan, (I think she is a bit simpy) and I did not actually see the play by David Auburn on which the film itself is based, but the quality of the production transcends these issues, because the film is about doubt (much as the film version of Doubt was supposed to be and wasn't) about the nature of certainty, and never having the right answer, and what brilliance in quest of solutions actually costs, and what our fears of dissolution actually amounts to. Hopkins is as usual fantastic as the crinkled old man still trying to be relevant within his own self-importance, but vacant in the places where his daughter Catherine would have been better served if he could have fulfilled his role as a father, and Paltrow gets it down as the angry kid who makes too many sacrifices, and isn't quite as healthy as the preppy police would like--the role filled here by the older sister Claire, a nearly perfect foil played by Hope Davis.

Is it okay to be crazy? The film asks this, and simply offers the dichotomy between institutionalization and personal care without offering its audience any pat solutions on the matter. I'll continue on with this and tie it in with the same set of conflicts within the disability movement in my next post.