If I write the abstract and submit the abstract and as a proposal the abstract is accepted, I shall then be trapped, and viewers will only see a post like a yelp in the dark while I attempt to gain access to vaunted European film directors. I did not realize Alejandro would be young and pleasing to the eye. There is a distinct possibility an (the) abstract would not be accepted, but that does not rip out the fingernails. Remember Peter O'Toole's no audio screams? Being a dry literary critic is annoying. We want to medicalize art, dice it an slice it in our fascination with our own aesthetic inclinations, distracting ourselves from flight or fight responses to our frustrating inability to ask the Why? about life. Why is the misdirected question. Henry James is an obsession, and this has cycles of love and hate, stupid little patsy, not very well educated, and yet his insight into repression, his mastery of insinuation that makes me look for the damn code to loosen that twist of the screw, I cannot stand it, and my critique of James is essentially life long warfare to catch him, beat it out of him. This is why I forgive his tortured sexuality, regardless of how active it was or wasn't. I see his struggle, but mine was not the same. My brain is too injured for that paradigm, my body forcibly altered and fused, I did not envision lesbian games growing up, and that my own sex finds suckling teats attractive beyond weaning, this was classified as regressive. The Gay Shame cover, recollected, is reminiscent of the advanced homo sapiens body paint in The Quest for Fire, a pastiche allegory of a film, one which no longer impresses me, though it was one of the few times Jerry and I discussed rape as victimology over a way of life. Let us be lenient on the cinematic quality. It is a visually engaging narrative.
Queer theory is an intractable problem, intractable in terms of progressives with "untrammeled" glee (George Will's adjective) salivating over homoerotic subversion in literature and theater when it doesn't reflect real world consequences, and my willingness to make notable exceptions adds to the difficulty of getting out from under; it is an objection based on more than personal trauma, though insecure body image weighs into it, and failed associations cemented the deal. The thesis extrapolated from this is that homosexual culture being given *equal* legal and social status is unsustainable, which is not to plea for elimination, as that would be impossible. This does not mean there aren't gradations, evolutionary values in play, and more than a few of my old associates are on the extreme end of that scale. Jodie Foster is not, but there is more to it than the fact that she is not aggressive about lesbian identity. Sexual choices should not be an identity; sexual preferences as a classification is problematic, and I fail to see why celebrity status necessitates lack of privacy in personal affairs. Why can't we reformulate these membranes? Why do we need to know Ms Foster's personal intimacies, or see Montgomery Clift's war films as code for a faggot outcast who is made expendable? But The Young Lions, From Here To Eternity, these have to be read that way, even if we chuckle at the stigma of Ulysses as the dirty book, the forbidden book, annihilating formulaic stricture to reduce us to mucous. What a mucous, what a damn machine we are, humanity.
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