Schismatic Espresso Breaks

"No you're not!" Timothy Artis admonishing me after I asserted I was rotten.

What Tim and I never say is implicit in our actions, our tolerance of each other out of necessity. He needs my ready payment unregulated by Medicaid waiver administration, and I need his relatively non-judgmental ability to handle my domestic interior, though this is slowing due to the fact that my freelancing is all but brain dead, with my recent laptop setbacks, and the fact that I am utilizing delay with one tenth that of Laurence Sterne's timing.

Let's cut to the chase: Am I a racist? Not in the evolutionary sense. As a matter of biology Tim is superior to me in many functional respects, but in terms of sociological dynamics I suppose many of you would feel comfortable giving me that label because of what Kevyn Orr signifies, even in the 21st century. Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, places like Compton in California. All black cities that seep into the cracks and filter through the white working class, sometimes striking the truly affluent. Is it fair of me to suggest that the black inner city is responsible for Garrett's propensity to addict and od himself? It happened in my family as well, and Nicholas did not need black drug dealers to destruct in the end, but enablement is a relevant issue, and the fact that a mature man of sixty two has to engage in infantilism, asking the disabled woman still struggling on the straight and narrow for a cash advance because he "needs cigarettes." Well, we have not come that far yet, not in my terminology of community integration. Although I dream to get good enough so that my voyeur viewers will one day give me enough support for this small happiness. It would be more convenient for you to download me to your kindle, and I'd only work harder. If you are working, what is another 99 cents?

I have not installed my apparently cheap laser jet yet, and need to take care of that, at least to ensure that I will not have to return it, tweaked some minor revisions here, I will attempt to take a break, plow back into rewriting what I have to, having rode out my pc illiterate grief (it struck me hard). I have held up on continuing with my conspiracy theory analysis because I do actually see it as applicable, and not simply a matter of reaction. To disagree with the state of Israel does not make one automatically guilty of anti-semiticism. Sheldon is a weighty and cerebral optimist in his Jamesian scholarship, and more than that, he is a delight to read while his thesis gains in illumination, so get to it. I have sworn myself silly that I am starting The Young Master later into Saturday morning. Perhaps you too would join the chorus led by Leon Edel.

I think the sheer audacity of Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes jacking off is an indelible source of amusement, and there is nothing to suggest Sheldon's homoerotic imagination is wrong.

If I change my mind I'll be back later.

Wandering Rock

...the individual brain, even if outstanding, was lagging farther and farther below the dizzy peak which science and technology in their totality had reached.-- Alexander Blade

Part of the reason I chaff over Ulysses is that I plod, not making the time for an autopsy of due diligence, and should not have then spent the money, though it went to a good cause, as I am the child of the aesthetic underdog, but something about the Joycean idiolect gives me epileptic seizures, and this goes back to my reading of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when money wasn't my primary concern. Perhaps it is not important that I grasp it for you right now, why Marcel Proust is soul food and Joyce is an orbital emergency to battle. I should be able to appreciate the subversive characteristics of the leprechaun, and do, but there is an undercurrent of antagonism when I enter Joyce, as if I am being conned. With Sterne this is central. Frustrated expectations essentially serve as the reader's antagonist in this early post modern exploit, which I read, reread, never seem to finish, poor Shandy, still waiting for me to allow his mum to enter into labor, but it takes me more and more of an effort to accomplish my goals, brushing my now dry and brittle hair, hour and a half to dress, and that on a good day. I am wasting too much time, but if you go, and my physiology allows, I will see you here:

A dinner to benefit Bloomsday

When Friday, June 14, 2013 Where Trinity Center for Urban Life 22nd and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Why Because your support makes the Rosenbach’s largest annual public program possible. Bloomsday is a free celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses that attracted 2,047 participants in 2012.

Nabokov Émigré

"If he is capable of love we have to assume he is also capable of hate."
--Sam Robards, A.I.



I finished The Luzhin Defense today and instantly reset it to read again, because so many things are inextricably entwined here, and there is a kind of shared identity between a cripple who cannot reject what the state imposes on her without incurring more serious constraints and Luzhin's rather vacuous problems with identity due to loss of his homeland. The title character is just shy of being an idiot savant, just shy of mental retardation, almost the antithesis of Humbert. Nabokov's diegesis strategies please me more than those of Joyce, despite the structuralist strains of the Russian who is nowhere and everywhere, European, dislocated, and an incisive critic of the Eisenhower Era. I am mad at myself for banking myself at Ulysses, all the same, as I am rereading Homer in blank verse and three other texts for every allusion I am highlighting and tracking, but if I want to play as an independent scholar with one or two bylines, then I need some familiarity with the grandmaster and his nonchalance on accessibility.

I should be sympathetic to it, given how much I hate those who cannot think outside the box, and I am, but gimmicks are gimmicks, whether the year is 1904, or 2004. Mitchell's book could not exist without derivatives, like Calvino, but his genius is more dynamic than that of the poverty driven gentility of Joyce. Mitchell wants me to work, but also expects that I will enter the narrative. Joyce seems to thrive on dissonance and obscurity and I curse his grave, comparisons to Sterne be damned. My sympathy for Irish pathos is lacking, precisely because it was all for nothing, and history is also written by those with the best propagada tools. Everyone knows what the IRA was, but most of you would draw a blank on those Italian anarchists targeted before the modern unification of the Italian Pennisula