The Dreamdrive

Weike Wang's "The Dreamdrive" in the May 25th New Yorker is extraordinary because it's about broken consciousness. You may have never read anything like it. Unreliable narrator is an understatement. Is the character dreaming? Is he driving? Is his existence a pathological condition? Is he falling asleep at the wheel both literally and metaphorically? Dreamdriving? Part of the experience of reading the story is feeling like unnamed subject--that you don't know what is happening, but it's a controlled confusion and not one that is the result of the author generating confusion, due to unearned ambiguity. One interesting bit is the confuting of phenomenology. Intention is the question. Objects don't possess subjectivity. "Another doctor focused on the sofa waves. Which, more specifically, were gravitational waves All objects emit gravitational waves, the doctor explained, and should those waves interact unfavorably with those of the self, through the calibrated physics of destructive interference, destruction ensues." Wang is the author of the novels Chemistry and Rental House. Her universe here is a literary form of Joseph Schumpeter's economic notion of "creative destruction." Freud, who is cited in the piece, also described free association as looking at reality through a train window-- which is, indeed, another form of driving. There is a theory going around town, that dreaming is the reality and reality the dream. It's perpetrated by the same person who believes that abstract expressionism is a branch of photorealism, but that's another "story." 

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

Welcome!

 

Effect refers to result, affect a cause. You affect and effect  But affect is a crucial part of human sensibility. How one is greeted in an environment affects how you feel about one or another milieu. Say you walk into a restaurant and all the staff welcome you with open arms, asking where you've been and how you are. Likely you walk away feeling it's a great meal. On the other hand, there's always the maitre d' who sizes you up with a malign eye, looking, you think, for the least visible table, say by the restroom with their polished male and female profiles. You always thought it was a lousy place, don't know what you were thinking and certainly have no intention of going back there again. 

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

Hamlet's Father's Ghost

"Hamlet and His Father's Ghost" by William Blake (1806)

Remember the old horror movies in which the angry ghost comes back to life. Stephan Daedalus theorizes Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather. Then there is just the classic misty gravesite with the pallid white hand whose fingers one by one inter the whole body. On a more quotidian level everyone is simply haunted by memories that at times seem so real, they themselves are on the verge of coming back to life. You may recently have experienced an untimely death, either by virtue of illness or accident. There are moments when you are likely to be caught off guard. You have something to tell the person who's left. For a second you have the impulse to call them up when all at once you realize, they're no longer around. Consciousness has yet to catch up with reality.  Sometimes your desire creates a break in which you suddenly think you can talk to the dead. It's a bit like flying. You may have experienced the feeling as a child that you could jump out your bedroom window (that's why bars are mandatory) and find an airwave that will let you fly like a bird. Free soloists may be those who never get over the childhood delusion they can jump of the window. 

A Psycho

Gaslighting is the primary mode of political discourse employed by the Trump administration, but there is a fine line between employing a figure of speech as as an ideology and outright mass psychosis. MAGA Republicans are a cult.Trump is Jim Jones. His followers, who constitute a considerable portion of ghe population, will do anything he says. Thus the famous statement about walking down Fifth Avenue shooting. Actually it’s not hyperbole. That is what he is doing. It is unclear whether Trump or Netanyahu is to the proxy. The result has been and will be carnage. 

The Last House on the Left

 

One of the most ubiquitous comments one hears is, "you couldn't have dreamt this up." Meaning "a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "Motiveless malignity" what Coleridge wrote in the margin about Iago? Doesn't fit and btw is there ever a method to madness? No the plot needs something. Real Housewives of Ice? You may have to go back to Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1606) to unleash the venom the president is looking for. However, there is always Wes Craven's The Last House on Left (1972) whose narrative is enough to make any Jacobean wince.

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

Civil War!

The United States is in its second Civil War. Hopefully the casualties won’t be as great. Instead of relenting in the face of an inflationary economy and an unwanted and unauthorized war, MAGA remains strong. Yesterday Trump defeated Thomas Massie and right wing Americans said it was OK for Trump to produce a 1.9 billion slush fund which will ostensibly go to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and all those who were prosecuted for attacking the police defending the capital on January 6. But Trump is even scorning his own faithful,
in the radical endorsement of the notoriously corrupt Ken Paxton in the Texas primary. Whether this helps James Talarico the centrist democrat who defeated Jasmine Crockett remains to be seen. In terms of polarization, the Squad and Bernie Sanders are drawing the crowds while the more moderate Maine governor Janet Mills, who famously went nose to nude with Trump in a shouting match, has caved to Graham Platner. So it’s the radical right and what Trump
likes to call "the radical left" are facing off, with a number of prominent exceptions such as the Texas race which pits a moderate against an extremist. Actually Trump calls anyone who opposes his will "a radical left lunatic." You don’t have to be AOC to apply. Will the two sides take up arms? Political violence is the new lingua Franca and that form of social capital is not fungible.

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

 

Freedom 250

Most of the speakers, Trump, Vance, Hegseth, addressed the Christian nation rally by way of video. Is it MAGA or MACA, make America Christian again. The most important political figure to appear in person was Mike Johnson . UFC Freedom 250 will occur on the South Lawn of the White House, July 14. The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is scheduled from August 22-23. The route turns down Ninth Street onto Constitution Avenue, crosses the National Mall on Seventh Street, and loops back via Independence Avenue and Maryland Avenue to Third Street. Drivers include such well known names as Christian Rasmussen and Josef Newgarden who will speed past crowds almost 200 mph. The question is do you have to be Christian to attend?

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