The Wild One

Bicyclists get doored and kid gangs on their GTXs, pockets filled with crab apples, retaliate. Lucky there is Safelite and the  friendly teams of uniformed installers the country cousins of the Replacement Division of Windows by Anderson. You may have encountered the covens of drag racers dangerously zigzagging on the LIE. Have you ever been short-stopped by a  punk tailgater? There's a science to traffic that goes back to hydraulics and has to do with viscosity. If you've ever driven by one of those barges that floats its passengers luxuriously down the Marne, you understand. Critics gang  up on playwrights. Remember Moose Murders which was a legendary flop? Remember Paris in 68 from whose graffiti splattered walls, Milan Kundera snatched the title Life is Elsewhere. 

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

Carrie

Have you ever been at one of those tony events where someone's head does a 180 when you try to talk to them? If you remember that's what Sissy Spacek's head does in Carrie. Of course the difference is that King's original character was a victim too, having had to endure a degree of exclusion that led to the possession of demonic powers. Oh that you could inflict such pain on all the tormentors who have been indifferent to you, ignored you and consigned you into the bowels of cosmic indifference aka "pre-snubual bliss." These hurts never leave and you never forgive those who have not recognized your worth. In fact, such moments are tattooed on your soul. You wish that all of those who ever ignored you to burn in hell!

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Tomas Transtromer

Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015)

From "The Baltic Seas" by Nobel prize winner,  Tomas Transtromer: "So when you're with someone you don't know well: control. Some frankness is fine/as long as you don't lose sight of what's drifting there on the edges of the conversation: that darkness, that dark strain/it can drift in and destroy everything."

From To the Finland Station where Edmund Wilson is discussing Marx's early feeling that "the code of the feudal world has no relation to human justice... with the exception that among the bees, at least, it was the workers who killed the drones and not the drones that killed the workers." 

From Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals. "The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." 

read "Frankel" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Racism

The origin of racism is economic. Disenfranchising a minority leads to subserviance. In many instances the employer/ employee relationship is thinly veiled master/slave. Scrooge legendarily paying Crachit a pittance is a robber baron in microcosm--the factory owner paying his worker the smallest amount possible to guarantee ever larger profits which in turn will increase stock price. Lo, have things really changed? Has some genie magically humanized the profit motive? Racism takes on all kinds of cultural guises one of which is a nefarious invisibility aka Ellison's The Invisible Man and Percival Everett's Erasure (the book on which the film American Fiction is based). For instance, a benevolent despot like Frederick II or Tito is a pater familias providing the anodyne of liberalism to the wound. Still dominance and submission define any system in which there is an underclass who lack the same benefits rights and privileges as the manager or "boss." Even after the Russian Revolution in which there was ostensibly a "dictatorship of the proletariat," you had a relatively small but privileged Nomenklatura, de facto aristocrats who exploited their serfs.

read "Frankel" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Two State Solution For US

 

map based on last senate race as of 2024

What the United States requires is a "two state solution." Trump has said he won't accept defeat--no matter what the results. Actually the same is true of Dems. What person who has voted for Kamala Harris is going to accept project 2025 and go softly into the night? What liberal-minded American will go along with Trump's bloody mass deportations, his weaponizing the DOJ for retribution, his national abortion ban or his surrender of Ukraine, not to mention his insane tariffs and tax plans and his replacement for Obama care which is still "a concept." The fact is as Trump has always said he could go down Fifth Avenue and shoot people or for that matter create a cabinet level secretary of golf. The opposing parties in the Middle East are more intractable than ever. Israel will retaliate against Iran any day and the Iranians will attack back. The "two state" solution is a perfectly sensible compromise that extremist elements on both sides never allow to occur as October 7 demonstrates. But who is to say it won't work in the US? All the big cities New York  LA, Chicago, Atlanta would be given to the Democrats and all of rural America would remain red.

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Make American Great Again" by Pussy Riot

The Infernal Machine

Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine premiered on April 10, 1934 directed by Louis Jouvet. It's a wonderful title since it hearkens to the ineluctability of the Oedipus myth. Oedipus, as you may call, famously brought about what he feared. Sometimes  you hear about self-fulfilling prophecies, but that's not Oedipus. He doesn't say I'm going to meet daddy at the crossroads and hence undo us both. He doesn't know his interlocutor is Laius. It's a seemingly didactic point that accounts for the true tragedy at work ie the infernal nature of ignorance. Who cares? Spiro Agnew who must have been the bastard of Fred Trump once railed at effete intellectuals. His life was devoted to demonstrating that stupidity pays. The philosophical and spiritual state of being a dumbbell is the lingua Franca of history from the Greeks right down to Matt Gaetz.

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy The East Hampton Star 

and listen to "Land of a 1000" by Wilson Pickett

On the Nature of Things

When you're born you begin to die becoming Yeats' "tattered cloak, "sans everything" as Jaques says in As You Like It. Then there's the exchange between Nagg and Nell in Beckett's Fin de partie. "Do you believe in the life to come?" "Mine was always that." But what about the fly swatter or "Roach Brothel, " SNL's satire of Roach Motel. The fact is there's no God to punish or protect. A soothing and terrifying notion propounded by Lucretius in his 1700 line poem De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things. You might say that Democritus who introduced the atom to the Greeks was the country cousin or ancestor of the Roman, Lucretius. Time may be eternal but life is horrifyingly finite with the famous sign over Dante's Inferno warning "Lasciate ogni speranza all ch'entre." No mention of another Italianate expression, "the dog that barks doesn't bite." 

read "The Sale of My Parents' Apartment," Metropolitan Diary, The New York Times

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star