Showing posts with label toni morrison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toni morrison. Show all posts

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Hail the Hinderland

"She was tied to a tree and shot in the head."-- a forensic entomologist whose expertise is fascinating in a repulsive, macabre gawk

If I simply iterate racial slurs with repetitive vehemence like a raptor species, say a bald eagle, lacking capacity to embrace veterinary rehabilitation of its injuries, then I am just a shade closer to the finality of derangement which takes all our strength, debating plagiarizing myself, but that is double the effort in my end game of extraordinary duress, as if the curation team under Ev Williams will allow the grim reverberations of despair. Galahad doesn't realize the depth of my rage, my sheer relief at visualizing weaponizing this punishing machine, the worst fucking chair I ever had, against that stupid old bitch bellowing like a calving whale. Trying in vain to preserve what hearing I still have, the force of her screams set off my tinnitus, and I can't keep fighting my now crystallized hatred forever. I don't glorify in it, that this uncouth old woman contributes nothing to the world, and if someone likes me uses machine power to break her fucking legs, she deserves it; she isn't worth it, but any progressive who dares to tell me minorities who engage in such aberrant behaviors on a daily basis is my equal hasn't the slightest idea of what they are talking about. Common courtesy? She did not stop to think that many people here are ill, and don't need such volume in building front vocalizations. Vivian, another long term dead resident, told me I spoke too loudly with a great deal of frequency. That was just in terms of outside portico conversation. I no longer doubt that primal fictions like The Purge
have already seeded a reality we're starting to face, and it's the price of progressive totalitarianism. I'd sell my soul to see governmental contractors, led by the nose by the avarice driven Presbyterians, annihilated, all because I made lust driven, obstinate choices. If I run, even the idea of running, it is just too late, and I live in the greatest republic on earth. And yet, it's true, I wept for Morrison, more courageously sordid than I ever could be. She certainly would have been deplatformed for her "black bitch" of her first novel, driven insane by an incestuous rape.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Centennial Autumns

"No one is going to put you away!" -- a beloved and weary padre.

The very existence of Presbyterian Homes is predicated upon fungible exploitation of medically dependent people. Trudy Richardson's salary and her hire, as well as Debra Horne's, is predicated upon cut rate assessments, and my own rise and fall through Liberty Resources past the Matrix Research Institute, through the crash of AccessLife, was based on the same premise: use the marginalized themselves to shepherd the flock. My father putting me away under lock and key was no different. Minority women abused me in a centralized institution then, and now everything Trudy does is designed toward containment of my autonomy. She is not merely a rental agent authority, but a collusionist on the cheap, without the requisite training for it, pushes the line daily. In a Toni Morrison novel, a woman like Trudy would be anchored to something psychologically firm through this line of work, as Morrison construes it in Song of Solomon. In my eyes, this is nothing but a travesty. Four black bitches holding the whip through their sense of entitlement, doing a two step on my better diction and resistance to the collective. What is a civil liberty when we grant huge federal exemptions to it in the ownership and maintenance of property?

I once saw section 811/202 housing as a pit stop toward a presumably successful teaching and publishing career. Ha. Instructors themselves are in crisis, whether in secondary or collegiate ranks, and publishing for money is still adjusting to digital conglomeration, and now the cruelty of America's not so secret socialist paradigm is a way of life-- my failure, yes, I boomeranged myself back to the city, turbulent for reasons written in past posts-- but what I was really doing was trying to imitate how my father abandoned me as a nine year old by abandoning myself in an alienating and regressive black culture that over reaches like a high tide and recedes when white anger barks. Without realizing it, I decided to make myself expendable to the permanent welfare class because I wasn't able to pair bond with the appropriately humanist male of a certain type. I cannot undo the extraordinary level of damage to which I've been subjected.

Most likely I can litigate myself out of this insane classification in exchange for another, but we have to change how we regulate public housing. We're destroying ourselves through it. Tenants and warders alike. Trudy has puffed out like a balloon in yellow chiffon, a tell tale symptom one can find in any of Morrison's Southern racists who use rape as a source of amusement.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Phillips Head, Stripped

"You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name." -- Beloved, p. 137

It was a surprisingly cool day. Normally, I do not get much fresh air on this back end of the building which faces the Schuykill, and it is pleasant, the need not to scurry after my life long concomitant triggers with animal waste and feline maintenance. Cats. Spend how many ten spots on trinkets for them and they prefer to practice their hunting skills with our Homindaen accouterments: the ear plugs for the Apple, a device whose touchpad interface still has not merited the need to fetishize its convenience, or my endless supply of plastic cigarettes.

This is scant consolation for my frayed relations with the Jamesians, and I bitterly rue my gushing ease of familiarity with Louise. I almost hate her for my flawed ease of intimacy with crippled strangers. I had a major disruption on the list years ago, before Louise lurked on it, (or so I assume, as she would have been very young and perhaps still an undergraduate) when Carrol Cox wrote a controversial article for HJR about the list serv itself. Marcia was still easily conversant with me back then, and explained to me that Carrol Cox flustered a number of her colleagues, not just me. I thought Dr. Cox made a stab in my direction, however. Feeling slighted, I unsubscribed in a huff. Returned later, tail quietly between my legs.

I cannot unsubscribe and re-subscribe as the whim seizes me, but I no longer feel welcomed, encouraged, supported, and this friction began when Louise approached me, unwittingly creating the cripple to cripple affinity, and now I’m pissed off. I liked being the underdog with these scholars, liked the hope that I could one day submit an article, and join their conversation, only to be called upon to be a mentor and good lieutenant for a girl of nascent naiveté who was impacted by the force of my writing. I cannot remember what led to my opening up with her.

Initially, I thanked her for her praise and left it at that. Much like more successful authors, I have enough experience to be wary of admirers (my obsessive clinging to the memory of Jerry McGuire being a case in point). If I thought anything else about it, I speculated incorrectly that Louise was a graduate student who knew nothing about the furious chip on my shoulder. I forgot about it. She approached me again, followed me to LiveJournal, where I have yet to wrap up my account. I made a fatal mistake at that point in the extent of my interaction, allowed her to telephone, posted something facile to the list serv which upset Greg who in turn upset me, post openly about all this, and cannot glue that fellowship over a singular and esoteric appreciation back together.

As a virtual community, small straw that it is to cling to, the list was my haven away from disability and civic strife, and I am pissed. Really, but being pissed doesn’t grant absolution, nor make Greg and I easy again. I had the right to decouple myself from the girl. I have been in a precarious state of living for a long time. More than likely my emotional state will continue to rock under duress. Louise has a federal job, and whatever security goes with that. I have the nightmare of recycled indigence, and whatever her fragility, she has not sustained my abuse. I no longer have the strength or psychic space to carry other disabled people due to my ability to survive hell, and in the same vein, Dr. Ian has the right to cut me loose, for whatever perceived breach. It was a small thing that mattered to me though, belonging and contributing to those appreciative of Jamesian mastery. I’m left at a loss, growling of little consolation.

I will bookmark the idea to one day expand on my displeasure with Toni Morrison's masterpiece. It is still important to be responsible towards the aesthetic dissonances we harbor.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Crabs

I am not on this morning, and since I am not on, debating the worth of tweeting a youthful aging cripple's shrinkage, my drying up scurrilous sentiments. Not that I'm the first to worry brain plasticity once it is over the age of 50. What I am going through now is what Jerry was going through when I was his student who wanted to fuse herself to his corduroy blazer in my own quite tortured psychic guilt for wanting to sleep with him. I was nineteen when I first met him while Susan sat in the car. Nineteen, and I still can't shut the fuck up about my aging Shakespearean post modernist whose intellectual force wasn't enough to maintain the decency of my conscience.

Jerry: "Joanne, what the fuck do you want from me? I was kind. I encouraged you as best I could to imitate me. I am sorry your path was more obstructionist than that. I am old, and as I've written you, had a heart attack. You're over 50, presumably frigid over a duress you've struggled with for years which had nothing to do with me. I kept my mouth shut. Your former supervisor did not. That is the price you've paid for using words to get you from A to B in deploying subversive behavior."

Joanne: (sniveling): I wanted to be happy being loved by someone like you. I subjected myself to date rapes trying to find you in men who approximated your appearance. I sublimated our necessary detachment to my career and that died, fast and furiously.

Call in Smokey's commercialization of French baroque, hey? The tracks of pork like collagen. Toni Morrison's work angers me, and I meant my damning praise against the herd to be angrier than it turned out in barreling my dissatisfied sentiment, delayed over my domestic assistance anxiety. I found a woman, white, whom I like. We'll see.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Eschatological Targets

"I wouldn't know where to find such people." Tom Wilkinson.

When Howard Stern had syndication currency, simulcast from his New York station to WYSP, he claimed, in less than scintillating fashion, that black authors wrote to capitalize on the white guilt market, and I probably believe that about Morrison's work, though I am not entirely certain about Beloved in particular, like a snake in the grass, choking on marshmallow. Did she write it for the chimera of canonization? For herself? For a paucity of comparison to the estimated 4 million lives taken in the division of the Korean peninsula?

We read fictional narratives for many reasons, the most prevalent being an enjoyment of satire, or the need to escape ourselves. What Morrison has provoked in me is guilt, guilt not for her characters, some so abused, so wretched, that they snap into a madness, pleasure and horror intermingled, but guilt in my own identification with her bleak exposition. There is nothing wrong with softening the toughness in her courageousness in being explicit, as she does in Beloved. It has the standard ironical undercurrents, humorous interludes, comparisons to Salman Rushdie's ending of The Satanic Verses, descending into the escape hatch of schizophrenia, but the hymnal wail of Morrison's communal voice of expiation was too overly lavish. It led to a regurgitation of my sympathies. This doesn't mean I resent Toni the way I resent Oprah's rise as America's shadow empress, but a cop out is still a cop out, though it would be too much to feel the grand dame implicitly modulated her tone for a Danny Glover/Winfrey deal.

I do not know the truth about myself anymore. Jimmi Shrode cut me socially first because I was having an emotional breakdown over what Linda did to me. He had been my friend (supposedly), but refused to understand what he and Erik von Schmetterling did was wrong, and placed honest applicants at a disadvantage. Since Philadelphia ADAPT, as a whole, cannot rectify its moral turpitude, I cannot reengage the group. I have absolutely no intimacy in my life, not a soul to speak to who cares about me. Think about that, how hard it has been for me while Linda still buses into work, has her social extensions and a paycheck, and I can't leave the building where so many of her consumers still traffic in and out of her domain. Both the staff who knew me and the staff who didn't say "I transferred your case file." Why don't we close your case file?

Are you that relegated? 

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Sheeba's Dirge

"I seek to root out the phallic mother from her real and imaginary place at the heart of what I call psychoanalytic modernism."-- Marcia Ian in her introduction.

I was fascinated by Milkman as a young girl, and yet, I have turned my back in defiance on the old guard of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker in my old age, and yes, it troubles me, especially as I accept the science of evolution. Our DNA is primarily African. We're all hermaphrodites modified from a basic female template, and embryos go awry, much as I did, but biological explanations are one thing. Social dynamics are another, and I am not predisposed to be optimistic about transhumanism or our future, merging ourselves to technology and robotics. Perhaps I demand too much of Toni Morrison, demand solutions of her that I absolve in Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison. I respect Ellison. Invisible Man is as yet an argument in my psyche, still wrestling in the ring, with little love lost, on my part, for African American contra indicators as Philadelphia and other venues have presented it. Certainly there is a difference between behavior and the equality of opportunity, but equality is a bad thing. It lies about strata. It lies about caste and it lies about difference, dependence, and fails to address what liberty and freedom are in a world burgeoned with a successful species that is toppling under its own weight. The stupidity of how we entertain ourselves, whored to impulse products and mediocrity of content, and by the same token, to dazzle with masterpieces, is at the same time disjunctive with routines, patterns we fall into, aging into risk adversity, sating appetite with culinary ambitions, intensity of erogenous sensation.

The deft cruelty of Baker's character in Prada toward Hathaway's Sachs is something no woman ever truly gets over. She moves on, wises up about sexual motives, but that deflating blow against superlative romantic inclination shows what can be done with a golden boy vanity in the right hands, despite the fact that Baker comes off as vapid and somewhat clueless when lending himself out for interviews, or doing banal move to DVD flicks like S&D 101. Nothing wrong with a light sexual comedy that makes fun of itself, but no idiot would mistake a sick old woman in the dark for a centerfold offering coitus for being a good front. The script and direction could have been slightly more integral, biting, at least sufficient to offer pause. Oversexed as we are, we shield ourselves from the consequences of aging, the inability of the medical model to do anything but contain the decline, offer props. Oxygen, catheters, face lifts. We break, yet epitomize the vanity of perfect chic and the convenience of style, with less fortunate in looks relegated to being lesbian office assistants.