Sportsocost

   Tadej Pogacar

Are you getting tired of sports? If the American team were so great and highly-low-minded (which all lionized competitive athletes need to me), why didn't they boycott the FIFA mafia? Trump makes a call to the don and voila. Do you also have a headache pursuant to Knicks fever and a feeling of disgust at the Bryant Park watch party where Seattle fans were pummeled by inebriated crowds of toughs. What is this? Who cares about the Yanks or the Giants? Then there's hockey. Yes, the athletes are in great shape like their counterparts on the Tour de France, but these are basically savages on ice. To come back to biking. That's OK, right. Climbing is the metaphor and at a certain point the act transcends the competitive angle and becomes a spiritual act. You have the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, Icarus and Daedalus or perhaps sad old Sisyphus. The Tour and the Giro before it are the stuff of dreams.

Reciprocity

"spotted Hyena" (photo: Eli M Swanson)

Can aggression and reciprocity co-exist? Is there, for example, aggression in a romantic embrace? No one regards love as selfless, but is it similar to eating? Is passion an appetite little different from wolfing down a steak and potato? Take language. You can harangue or treat talk as form of listening. The average person having little consciousness of the other, equates speaking with relieving themselves and most interchanges with others as "dumping" (aka one's problems on a defenseless fellow traveler). The supposed therapeutic bond treasured by practitioners of talk therapy is merely an exchange of bodily fluids, in this case saliva, between the patient and the doctor who, if they are lucky, will be able to dart away before they're hit smack in the face by a glob of angry spit.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Truth

tracking of engraving of Sosibious Vase by Keats

A Million Little Pieces was not so much a succes de scandal as a simple scandal, due to the fact that James Frey's journey of recovery was at least partially fictionalized. In this era of gaslighting where the titular leader of the country makes things up at will, it’s almost refreshing that anyone cares about the facts. The other side of the argument is that all autobiography is art and all art, autobiography. Deconstructionism has added to the problem since it views statements to be culture bound. In addition, there's the problem that the fuzzy waves in the air you may see on a hot day are the presences of parallel universes bursting at waist.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Is the Universe a Gated Community?

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

Closed universes are tantamount to gated communities, albeit on a phenomenological scale. They are a philosophical version of the Great Chain of Being. Essentially human existence is a level playing field. Attempts to frame it, as Einstein or Freud did, are always subject the new kid on the block syndrome, whether it's quanta or the latest neuroscientific discussion of serotonin, axons dendrites or whether memory is procedural or episodic in rats.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Flesh

David Szalay's Flesh received a Booker before the judges could say "boo." The subject is Istvan, a Hungarian version of Kosinski's Chance in Being Time, (played by Peter Sellers in the Ray Ashby movie. Szalay's main has what might be called "out-of-body, body experiences." In other words, lots of sex for which he is "here because he is not all there," to coin a phrase used by 12 steppers. He is seduced by a neighbor at the beginning. At first, he isn't attracted, but the sex is an awakening particularly to her anatomy which includes an alluring bit of hair that runs up from her vagina to her belly button. He is rebuffed in his first love experiences and ends up in juvenile detention after accidentally or not so accidentally killing the woman's husband, by pushing him down a flight of stairs. This question of intention is of course essential in determining culpability, but it's a metaphor for Istvan's condition, which vacillates between the conscious and unconscious. You may recognize this personality type from an adolescent reading of The Stranger, It may even register more intimately, but that is also the problem. The book is sexy and hard to put down, but is it original? Does it expand the readers horizons? Or does it leave them trapped like a rat on the behavioral  or even psychoanalytic treadmill? (to be continued).

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Digital Insertiveness

Young men are taught to assertive though not necessarily digitally insertive, vaginally speaking. Speaking of which Trump Tower is going to standard issue federal architecture say like the ubiquitous red brick of NYC public schools. If Pete Hegseth has his way all warriors will sport their leaders yellow duck bill hair style. Which brings up a non sequitur. Economic inequality is growing and what is one of its causes? 

Answer: racism. What better way to create a servant class whose wages are so comparatively low that they’re essentially slaves.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

The Pathetic Fallacy

John Ruskin

The pathetic fallacy, a term coined by the English art critic, John Ruskin, often lives up to Its name. It takes work to leap to the conclusion that thunder and lightening signify anything other the presence of an electrical storm. Lake effect snow is nothing more than beauteous meteorology. A tsunami is often the result of Vulcanology. Sorrowfully humankind are wanderers whose connection to the storm is that they may require an umbrella.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star