Speak, Memory

This from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory “His was the kind of colorful neurosis that should have been accompanied by genius but in his case was not, hence the search for a traveling shadow.” One could identify the subject of the observation. However it’s actually more fun to take it out of context to the extent it reveals more about the writer than one of the many specimens in the butterfly collection that he began when he was six. The memoir famously begins: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." And this on his mother's quest for mushrooms. "Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules. Thus, no agarics were taken; all she picked were edible specimens of the genus Boletus (tawny edulis, brown scaber, red aurantiacus and a few close allies), called 'tube mushrooms' by some and coldly defined by mycologists as 'terrestrial, fleshy, putrescent, center stipitate fungi.'" 

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Degeneracy

Orwell’s "newspeak" is now teleportation. Do you dare ask for ICE or ask for scotch “on the rocks” or even for a few cubes? Don’t be surprised if ICE CUBE the legendary rapper changes their brand. Those who reassure you things will pass forget the depredations of the #Me Too era when the then editor of TNYRB was dismissed for allowing a #MeToo’d Canadian journalist to write a mea culpa. The Degeneracy aka Degenerintocracy is following the Gerontocracy, the Theocracy, the Plutocracy, the recent Kleptocracy of Trump-dumb and the generalized movement of cellular organisms to autocratic rule. Do you feel like Winston Smith seeking a sanctum sanctorum amidst the crushing juggernaut of deafening crypto-current noise pollution (Mar-A-Lago raining bitcoins)?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Temptation to Exist

 

Emil Cioran

I and Thou (Ich und du, Either/Or)—what about a philosophical tome Same Different? One wants everything to be the same, to get up, go to work, come home to find the world intact. On the other hand, boredom and the unchanging mess of life are a problem for Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s character even resulted in the coining of a word, Bovarysm. The romantic agony is predicated on the desire for transcendence.  Yet the waves continue to come. There is a hypnotic and reassuring peace in their infinity. They precede and are left for posterity,  without the need for a subjective observer. You read about lives populated with events, the heartthrob with all the lovers. Thrilling existences have an allure, but the free soloist is deprived of serenity. Adrenalin ironically is the antidote for priapism. Anxiety and lovemaking are estranged bedfellows.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Fantasy

 

What is your dirty fantasy? Pornography is a "daydream" according to Robert J. Stoller author of Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred. No matter how much of an exhibitionist, no matter how liberated you are there are certain kinks (do they qualify as "desires?") you won't reveal anyone. Shame is in fact what fuels the arousal. Liberation on other hand is lame. You do the deed, but there is no after party, nothing to butt ones head against. When you transgress, you cross a line. It’s like having a record or rap sheet. Once a pickle no longer a cucumber. Samizdat made poetry precious and desirable.  Caveat emptor. So what is your forbidden thought? What do you try to push down and repress—for fear of being labeled and ostracized? There is a delicious adrenaline rush at the prospect of being caught—but, in your case, doing what?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Math

Srinivasa Ramnujan

It’s becoming increasingly hard to find a way out of the disheartening political situation which may have invaded your inner life, like roundworms in a dog's intestine. AI is like living in one of those Iron curtain countries during the Cold War. Remember the ads for Radio Free Europe, the large radio towers which beamed out waves of truth to women in shawls huddled around hidden receivers. How to escape the polluted discourse? One way is through tautology. Gertrude Stein famously declaimed “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Try entering that in Chat GPT or for that matter 2+2=4. Of course math itself can be the promised land. Remember Poincare’s “recurrence theorem?” Immersion in the Ramanujan prime and theta function is a new found land free of gaslighting. Drop what you are doing and enroll in an adult education course at NYU’s Courant Institute! Ay Ay AI, but...

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Airplane!

Trump’s idea of deregulation is epitomized by the diminution in the number of air traffic controllers. Ultimately it will be the wild west at airports with pilots crazily riding their craft like Slim Pickens at the End of Strangelove. Imagine the latest Airplane sequel. Leslie Nielsen and Karim Abdul-Jabbar are in the cockpit. There are hundreds of planes colliding in the air. The tower is dark. Everyone is doing what they want. Remember "drill baby drill." Added to the free-for-all, the airport is full of ISIS terrorists who easily evade detection--since all TSA agents are furloughed.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Derrida-Like Clone

Jacques Derrida (photo: Philosophie)

Trump is a deconstructionist. MAGA gaslighting. Is it Derrida at work? The US President should be invited to lecture at the Ecole Normale. Paradigm shift was the expression coined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (62). For Retrumplicans paradigm shifting is the Hokey Pokey; it’s a dance they do with every piece of reality they confront. The net result: no moral center, no right and wrong. Of course Trump literally deconstructed the East Wing. Truth was the loser on that side of The White House.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"