Designed by Giambattista Valli

"I don't want my former students dancing over my corpse."  --Michael C. Clark, stoic lifelong forebearer

How much things have changed, even in the incipient nuances. ABC keeps up on those educating captions that it used in Lost. Madeleine Stowe and Henry Czerny are atavistic blood sucking comforts, meant to be. Vampires without the fanfare, either Gothic or overwrought in the histrionic sensibility of  Anne Rice. If you had to choose between mothers who outlive their children and the pulse of that living scar which diminishes them, and a rabid elitist such as I, would you find the decision agonizing? Sontag also died of leukemia, like Anne's daughter, and I can enter into the impact this had on her son, how it magnified for him, felt it in his words, how he kept repeating "she wasn't the same person," over and over to the interviewer, relating her medical battle with the blood cancer.

Michael, in contrast, is my beast in the jungle, a manufactured construct of the sort whom I should have married. This is what my philosophy instructor wanted me to see, but it actualized too late for my realization. What it points to, however, is why I am so invested in the James list and the scholars in it, whether they are gracious or catty. I just want to publish a few good articles to honor the memory of my stalwart academic advisor. He never abandoned me, whatever imposition I became so many years after the fact, and I simply haven't found my angle, cat fights with Greg Zacharias over my lack of regimentation notwithstanding.

Largesse in Bed

...like The Mount, it has numerous rooms and a bewildering array of windows.    --Sandra M Gilbert, The Whirling Princess

I can understand why Sheldon Novick tossed out Alice James and her morbidity as a project for my morbidity, and I was always morbid, a horrible child, if that satisfies the mood swing advocates that I am in self-denial. I throw tantrums-- but let not my narcissism stray too far afield. As fond as I am of Dr. Novick's generous spirit, I would become impatient with Alice as a subject, a charge that bedevils Susan Sontag's output. I would prefer not to dismiss a project solely for the hope of money, though if I knew the invalid left a diary I had forgotten it, and remain curious, even in my apparent indulgence for forgiving bad metaphysical quests. Liam's After.Life (09) falls into the same category and is interesting despite itself. Natasha had not yet had her fatal accident at the time of filming, as far as dates go, but for all the intents and purposes of Deacon as character, Liam might have already been cocooned in morbid grief. I want to resist the story line's literalism that our morticians may indeed be serial killers, and for an actor of Neeson's caliber, the plot  might have offered up a more textured ambiguity on Western origin myths, but the premise is indeed interesting, as I mull.

There are lesbians and there are women who grow immeasurably weary of men, and I suspect Sontag had little internal anchor, as opposed to a preference for women's breasts. Her son is still out there, and would probably disabuse my ruminations if I had any name recognition, but I am having trouble remembering why Sontag had a public mantle in the first place. I'd like to read her work on AIDS as metaphor.

I will not hold my breath for audience support on acquiring a copy.