IJ study archive

The Blood Sister viewing — "This other attention-object is the late…"

quote

This other attention-object is the late Himself’s so-called ‘inversion’ of the corporate-politics genre, Low-Temperature Civics, an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position-jockeyings, timid adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in elegant tight-fitting dress-for-successwear who eat their paunched and muddled male counterparts for political lunch. Hal knows that L-TC wasn’t an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ’80s period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entrepreneurism, when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar’s Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada’s Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.

Context

Where Hal holds actual biography, the sub/inversion theory collapses on contact: L-TC is straight transcription of the Wild-Turkey-and-Dynasty year (plus the Lyle origin story in passing). One film decoded as confession while the film on-screen — also confession, per 132's germination note — stays opaque to him: the exegesis is only ever as good as the biographical key.

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