Inside Jokes On a Splinter

Within a matter of days, really, I will lose all facsimile of personal security, my only intimacies, those with a monster pig of a man from the Bronx whom I rejected, and with a transsexual I've come to hate with such glittering abandon that there must be more to it, as of course there is. I believed the transsexual's advocacy was once just, however diffident my revulsion of his androgyny. In a Shakespearean comedy, the androgyny is a linguistic tension toward liberation, but in the flesh, despite cellular indifference to personal values, the concrete reality of androgyny is something else, leading for the desire of better disposal of bipedal forms with their own hideousness, affirming in my memory that I probably did finish Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues under the tutelage of Professor Jerry McGuire, and finished it this early Monday once again, annoyed, past the Post-Moderns.

As different as Pynchon and Gardner are, John more driven toward an intrinsic moral veracity, the fireworks in either man's opus fall like tinder in the present era. Gardner couldn't have lived to see the Muslim intransigence he eerily predicted in the mouth of Taggert Hodge's wounded ravings sustained for over 600 pages of human failings. No one, not even Franzen, writes the kind of novel today which Gardner could afford to write as the 20th century would lurch into 9/11 and a black presidency whose initial ebullience invariably gave way to a sense of lack, and all I have as a disabled woman who hasn't achieved much of anything except warfare with statutory demands, is desperation for a different environment which my economic status denies. I speak of hatreds as a kind of shorthand, making it worse than it is, at the bottom, an overwhelming, now self-damning and potentially destructive desire for change, and yet at the end of the day, I am a cripple, basically inert, gainsaid for years by minority abuse, minority insistence, and white indifference, that indifference now capped by family mortality, and an inability to offer support, with an ulcer possibly gnawing my stomach, touch of blood seeping out of my eye, I do actually fear I could get Ebola if I am forced to deal with more African American paraprofessionals, but assume the touch of blood in my watering eye bulb is capillary irritation.

I do not give two shits about my apartment manager Trudy Richardson and her swamp thing from Mississippi Debra Horne. The hate I speak of comes from the psychological toll their constraint places on the most vulnerable and most powerless, and yet this is all Pennsylvania shoves down my throat my entire life, vocational rehabilitation and 500 different black women to keep up the laundry pile, and I thought, in most of my aspirations, that a literary life would offer a kind of triumph, much as Lindsay Lohan makes a cheap bid to toy with her media reputation in the 2007 I Know Who Killed Me. Gaming her audience. Cuttings as an outcry. Prosthetics as a kind of exploit. Stained glass as a more metaphysical threat than a chain saw, tooling religious histrionics. If Gardner wasn't an optimist, Lohan's abrasive edges and dialogue by the numbers certainly evinces the brittleness of the American psyche, white feminine anger for freedom, disarticulated over sexual flaunting, preying on our deepest fears, being clipped by inexorable pressures to succeed instead of getting high or opting out, womanhood itself always hobbled, inextricably damaged.

Erik, in some of the last words we'll ever speak to each other, in lieu of snapping his neck like a twig, asked me who I was to judge him? My answer to you about that is: an honest woman who doesn't destroy the careers of others for the accrual of power. I may sound like a forceful activist in denial, but right there is why I am not. Leaders in the disability movement, want control of the reigns for themselves, until forced to cede to fresher players.

But can Verdi do Chicago Slam?

Let a free woman fall in love, Camille declares, and she will gladly submit to her chains. More than one hundred fifty years later, the question is whether this has entirely ceased to be true. -- Toril Moi, Introduction, location 209

I cannot provide the exact date I flipped myself in my old manual wheelchair after frothing at the mouth with Jennifer Barnhart. June, I think, and I had an agreement with the ex to come after me, and had a technician visit due. Flipped between bedpost and katty corner in such a manner I could not undo the seat belt, and therein lie the danger, as opposed to the fall itself, Jennifer's voice in my head intonating defensive disengagement, I hated the disability center all the more, her voice in my head, breast painfully wedged on the cat carrier. Knew I did not want to die and that independent living centers were nothing more than exterminating enterprises, simultaneously. Jennifer and I didn't know each other. She came in to Liberty under Tom Earle, but my rage intimidated her, as it intimidates most of Liberty. Even Linda emailed me back, "Why are you so angry?"

I suppose this isn't a good way to head toward entropy and putrefaction, this constant inferno of distemper which isn't sure, with the certitude of Islamic State adherents, that she would not enjoy the delivery of a few significant contusions. Why I hate certain figures, like Debra Horne, with bituminous discharge of scorn can be summarized with the knowledge that Presbyterian Homes hired her to intimidate people. She is not a compassionate person, with that new orange dye hair and thick lard ass, sense of inadequacy around black men who possibly find her sensuality to hover around zero, I stood up to her, hard, very hard, and yet I am hardly victorious in making a nigger matron who wields her invisible truncheon eat rust. Do I hate her enough to see her hurt? Only insofar as I remain trapped here. Oh, the activists whom cannot be trusted, they have her number: Ugly women without prospects have only so many options.

Madeleine Stowe mediates being an fairly attractive brunette with traces of elegance in an interesting way with the 1994 Blink. The plot is somewhat contrived, and the contacts the actress wears in the opening, as always, have a Friday the 13th effect. (Putting real disabled individuals in film, blind or otherwise, brings us into the problematic terrain of exploitation.) But the subtext between Madeleine and Quinn is intriguing. Stowe isn't competing with Patty Duke's spectacular and dramatic habitation of the Keller child, who quite ably controls her family until Bancroft, with compassionate cruelty, wants to give the girl a chance. No, Stowe is negotiating the wounded chick meme. 

Haven't we all been fucked over in one way or another? The surgery her Emma undergoes gives her back her sight which all but the blind take for granted. It takes her out of the security of damage and darkness she knew from having an abusive mother, and makes her newly vulnerable with restored senses she cannot trust, with Aidan alternating between an insecure jackass who wants his cake but not the threat of commitment, and the tough love cop, no genius, no glory, but this is Chicago with its smokey interiors and oily alleyways, conscience smote by anger of Madeleine's fist and the anger of the child of one of the killer's victims, Stowe discovers, once faced with the truth of a deranged fixation, that she is resilient. Given her later habitation of Dumas' Mercedes in the ABC series Revenge, the contextuality of Stowe's femininity mediates between deceptive vulnerability, and a woman's pain over lost causes.