Up for air

"The soup that eats like a meal," a copywriter's cashier check.

The Dreiser estate should have sued Paramount posthumously for the hatchet job that is A Place in the Sun (1951). Whatever one feels about the great American movement authors in their milieu, the farther away we move from them, An American Tragedy is a nuanced labor that deserves the sweat of a reader's commitment and a scriptwriter's respect. Clift manages somehow to project the clueless demeanor that reasonably captures Clyde Griffiths wishful fast track waltz, but only just. I spent a great deal of time self-teaching the novel to myself before the kindle Paperwhite was born and my 2nd generation model was hot stuff, and it is a depressing book, one that upends American culture through deployment of the nuclear option, far greater in literary impact than Majority Leader Harry Reid's institutional scuttle of the filibuster. I'll freely admit I am not prepared to open the fuchsia casing that holds my most charming Amazon device and give you my notes and points this morning.

I rather hit a brick wall after I hired that cleaning company for nothing. A real wall, deeper than the reality of my bigotry. I'm tired, and almost ready to just pay the ultimate penalty, roll myself down to the office and tell my female minority wardens who I would slur but that would be a cheap shot, that they win, and they may inform their superiors that I will fold, and be placed in a hell like Inglis House. If I do that, I only increase a likelihood that a renewed major depression will finish me off, strapped and bound, an intravenous of joy juice burying me in Tarkovsky's voided afterlife. The Russian version is better than the Clooney Solaris upgrade, more in keeping with Lem's genius and mastery of genre that transcends collectivism.

I cannot suicide, but I can no longer truly hope to vindicate myself either and I know it. I can fight vigorously and transfer out of Presby, and that may happen. My sister and I are now in a marginal truce, and my mother's sister wants me back in middle brow Catholic suburbia, trading in little Italy nigger city once again for Caucasian gated sublet life I left behind because of my graduate student obsession, a sounding fury masquerade.

I was a stupid girl and I regret it but I've said that before, but the price has--I can no longer do what it takes to hope for a reasonable level of affluence as I head to my mid fifties. On that note, let me welcome Staff and Scrip. Finally a European who knows how to put on a fiery argument! 

Permeable Gray

"Permeable Gray" was the title of an essay I had started when I was twenty-four, but never completed, during my first year in Diamond Park,  during my first experiences with the assault of the barren, like drywall and plaster, on my aesthetic sense. Every urban skyline in America probably looks like the urban skyline of Philadelphia, unpleasantly garish, thus my title, which more readily found its thematic intent in my dead cat, and so became the essay I wanted under another title.

I believe I tossed the original hard copy, or will, if any pages are left in my folder bin, but today it looks like the callow transitional day I had in mind, a garish permeable gray that deters me from driving outside, and yet is also a signature of my defeat, my failure to succeed against the merciless indictment of American poverty. Like Studs Lonigan, which I indifferently purchased last evening, as if I need to keep replaying An American Tragedy in a thousand variations, I am apparently in need of hardier mettle, though it could be argued that I've read enough of Dreiser and company to not need anymore educating on reality by the American left.. Books have to be everything for me now, absorbing all the passions of failed lovers, absorbing my inability to travel safely as affluence might allow, and return to my origins; this is to what my life has to cling, the damn text, the narrative, the homosexuality and hetero-romance that subverts itself within it, that is repulsive to observe as I have observed it, and contradicted myself within its planks rather than found reconciliation, and I mean this as a progressive matter, not that I am tormented about a personal homoerotic experience that Linda once gave me and made me feel threatened. I can look back on my conversation with her and objectify it: she was being literal, knocking down my longing by giving me a picture of how fantastic it was for her to fuck her then spouse Bruce, but it was still insensitive. She knew nothing about my personal life and made assumptions which were inaccurate.

My desire to get laid just cracked open, out of nowhere, evidently, except for seeing Linus Roache as Merton Densher. And I have no male on me to seize the moment. I may not be the only one in deprivation and sensual starvation, but I do not know how we accommodate it and come out with a happy ending when war wounds come into play.

For those of us who know The Wings of the Dove Densher's name is ironic, a prelude to his retirement from the world, because his guilt is weighed upon the innocence he trampled. Maybe I will finally publish something in The Henry James Review to please the dead ghost of my memory of Michael C. Clark. I scribbled out an idea on the James list, an idea derived from my imperfectly tortured account here, and I have a year to send the editor Susan an acceptable abstract. I have not written a damn abstract in years, but let's engage in hypotheticals:

I put my wounded intellect to the grind, complete my task, and let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it passes Susan's peer review, and is published. What happens then, the pearly gates open and I can get the fuck out of Presby?  There is no joy juice that in turn can reconcile how much time and strength I've lost, that can offer me achievement, the foundation of any happiness.