Hypergraphia

Jack Torrance's typewriter

Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write. One of the known antidotes is rejection, but it doesn't always work. Just as the body rejects transplanted organs, the area between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, which regulates the balance between rational thinking and emotion, doesn't always produce a negative response intense enough to prevent the overly avid scribbler from inflicting his or her craft on the world. In fact the DSM-IV makes note of certain neurotransmitters which jump at the shock which may come from a seemingly innocuous phrase such as "we're going to pass on this one."

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger's cat?

Trump like Orpheus? After all his angry women tore him apart, was he able to sing? The president himself named the pathology affecting his critics, Deranged Trump Syndrome, but it actually derives from the fact that he doesn't stop talking. If you look at the history of MAGA starting when Kelly Anne Conway was Trumps's press secretary, you note that the Gatling Gun is the preferred mode of rhetoric. It's a steady ratatatat which brooks no interruptions. The object, of course, is to beat your opponent up with words. The president looks at debate as an MMA fight of the kind he staged on The White House lawn to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country. Gaslighting, of course, is one of the figures of speech and it's actually similar to the quantum idea expressed in the parable of Schrodinger's Cat which can exist and not exist in its box, as long as it's not perceived.

Manifest Destiny

newspaper report of annexation of Hawaii in 1898

Manifest Destiny comprises the notion not only of eternal expansion, as we see in the eyes of the current ruler (once president) of the country,  but also of ultimate possibility. In this sense the current incarnation of the concept is a form of romanticism not entirely shy of fascism. the ultimate instantiation of this feeling is the simple Jimmy Cliff lyric "you can make it if you really try." Really? At one point every door must close. Kafka's "Before the Law" is a wonderful embodiment of the reality which underlies all endeavor, and also the delusion of breadth within the relatively narrow window one terms "life."

What If Stormy Daniels Had Said "Yes!"

 

Would she have kept her maiden name or would it have been Stormy Trump? Stormy Daniels or Trump would have been a great escort for Donald when he had dinner with The Oligarchs and even the wily Puta himself. Stormy Trump is the gal you want to have on your arm when you bomb Iran into the stone age.

Rasputin

Rasputin

MAGA conservatives don't like governmental intrusion into their lives, unless of course it involves abortion. Abortion is allowed since it's viewed by right-to-lifers as murder, even when a woman's life is in danger. Requiring children to take MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) is also looked at as communism or socialism at best. MAGA folks like Social Security and Medicare since they need money to live and can't afford hospital bills. They don't like the taxes that are needed to pay for these social services but they, at the same time, don't seem to mind that very rich people such as the President end up paying no tax at all. It's difficult to understand how they justify this, but remember this is medieval age replete with inquisitions, and conspiracy theories galore including QAnon. In medieval times you had nobles with castles, motes, knights looking for the Holy Grail and huge Mar-A-Lagos and there were Jeffrey Epstein type sorcerers whose reach and influence was everywhere. Rasputin, who was a faith healer as well as Lothario, would have been no competition for Epstein. 

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Shit For Brains

Anthropic SF (photo: HaeB)

What people either realize or don’t is that these data centers which use up so much power are brains. You have one in your head which is perceiving the one down the street which has its eyes on you and everything else in its sight. You have fed and nurtured your anthropoids with data . Now the children, evolved into predatory beasts, are ready to gobble up the parents. You’ve heard about seemingly adoring and servile apes turning on their masters. AI is complex and also oedipal. Caveat Emptor!

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Dr. Seuss?

Dorothea Lasky has published l0 volumes of poetry and has a forthcoming novel.  As part of his review of Marlon James’ The Disappearers, Dwight Garner nominates James for a Nobel prize. The book contains lots of very graphic depictions of sexuality which other writers might like to indulge in lieu of being given their scarlet letter, but as Vonnegut refrains in Slaughterhouse-Five, set in the backdrop of the bombing of Dresden, “so it goes.” The title of  Lasky's latest volume is Mother and here are a few lines from one of the poems contained in it,"Worst." "Worst" appears in the current New Yorker, "I am the worst kind of person" and later "I am the worst kind of woman." BTW Diane Seuss another highly lauded poet sparkles with these two lines from a poem called "There once was a poem whose first word was" and whose first line is "What." Cute.  Is the style of these two works incantatory or just repetitious? The Paris Review did publish Lasky's,"Porn," which is a brilliant and complex meditation on eroticism. Wonder what would have happened if Lasky and Seuss (no relation doctor) put their submission on Submittable, the site mandated to supply the need for the next generation of Madame Bovarys, doomed to dream their way to self-destruction?