Persuasion towards Byatt's point

Part of my problem with moving on is that I have such a concentration of negative effects in one place, and those effects have taken their toll to the point that I no longer feel presentable to an employer; indeed, I no longer feel presentable at the Rosenbach, and people disadvantaged as myself mingle there with the Jewish upper crust, such remains of a crust as Philadelphia has, all the time during the museum's business hours-- and if I feel like a piece of shit in a bookseller's house, one that no longer has any stimulus for me-- well, I feel, already, not simply poor, but basically unsalvageable, it is because I keep taking it. Monica Carr did her number on me too when I actually needed a personal attendant's support, and she is still Riverside's extraordinary visitor with her relative here in the building, and her amputee. I have to deal with her, with a dying transvestite and his lover with whom I was once more familiar-- now, wait-- I know I've impacted them and that they're human, just as I've impacted Ed, who still follows this blog, but I am the one eating my feelings, carrying this baggage, and yes, it overwhelms me-- and therein lies your answer. For me, 28 years of this company, and section 202 housing, has been toxic-- and despite the fact that I got blown away yesterday by the Pope's personal assistant favoring one of my tweets, and would have thrown myself out of the wheelchair to clasp the hem of his vestments, why? For faith? No, for the memory of it, the memory of the comfort of belief, the fact remains that all this is a corrosive element of American pluralism. Secularism requires better standards. But by the same token, low income housing is a travesty in this country. Beneath all the regulations and procedures, nothing has truly changed. Taxes subsidize a sterile environment, nothing better than warehouses barely able to wall out low income dysfunction. It has truly destroyed my emotional health and well being, and I do not have any idea what to do about it, even if whatever measly legal protections spare me from the police scraping off the sidewalk into some rehabilitation environment, and progressives cannot repair it when compliance becomes a kind of stranglehold, not even if we satirize writing as therapy.

Fruitful Multiplication

"Do you understand, or is it too tough for you?" -- Faye Dunaway

A veterinarian with Parkinson's disease tracked from diagnosis to demise in a Bill Moyers documentary on degenerative illness was the first video of its kind, a viewing that would lead to almost incidental accretion, dozens of cancer treatments won and lost. Physicians who never talk about dying for the cause and effect of their insurance premiums, say instead "We could talk about hospice." A painter tracked through the unraveling of his sinews due to muscular dystrophy, a pathos Good Housekeeping domestication enforcers sop up with bistro dinner rolls, activists rebel against and the telethon moderates itself attempting to placate empowerment inside of wretched pity. Maupassant can be faulted for this overweening saturation in his later stories as his own disease blew the sprockets in his neural net, but American public television producers never say die when it comes to exposing the free market exploitation of death. Suicide tourists and militants, what we have lost isn't just acceptance, but willingness to see death as routine. The right to control dying, the right of self determination within physical vulnerability are not incompatible. Both are about control, but there is only so much control any one of us can exert without some form of scaffolding. Was Noah Cross as sinister and dangerous as Polanski makes him out to be? We'd have to enlarge the question to examine the American mogul.

I am a right to die advocate, slightly complicated by my belief  that death should be used as a form of political protest, but it is a form of extremism, like the practice of Sati under the Indian caste system. Chinatown is a kind of extremism that makes it one of the greatest movies ever made, and Polanski managed to make it without the hatchet jobs which Orson Welles swallowed into morbid obesity. Some films as pandering trash should have never been made. Orca is what? The burgeoning birth of Eco feminism reviving Melville? There are times when death by stoning for Richard Harris is too kind to ham as an interesting meat.