Inscriptions

As the world shatters into oblivion, old inscriptions have a new urgency and profundity. Here is one found in a second hand copy Library of America Nabokov Novel and Memoirs 1941-1951,purchased on Amazon (which includes the unspeakably beautiful Speak, Memory):

"When as if he believed in God, V.N. said, 'I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.' Thanks for being a good student and friend. All the best (signature not parsable)." 

Guess, the student/friend needed to deaccession a book.

read "Current Affairs" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Political Violence

Can you be against political violence and still wish that certain politicians were dead? Or the very un Christian question of people in general? If you turn the other cheek, is it likely to get slapped? In the old days people got tarred and feathered or put in stocks. In The Scarlet Letter Heather Prynne is forced to wear an A on her dress. Certain people won't die no matter how many times you kill them. The trope of the vengeful monster returning drives many horror films. There are people who believe their thoughts and wishes come true. They desperately try not to wish that a certain figure will burn in hell. Usually they don't have to worry.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Royal Flush

How many fortunes have been lost in the course of trying to stanch a loss? A pile of chips is an ineradicable memory. You are flush with money (albeit in surrogate form)! Dramatic shifts often occur effortlessly while batting an eyelash. Hi tech hubris, in fact is measured in bytes of data. Overnight you may find yourself under water and in debt to the house. In Democracy in America De Tocqueville talks about the lability of a society where one generation can be rich and the next poor. The impoverished aristocrat is not an anomaly—though the American aristocrat is really one of Disney's Aristocats. Bastille Day occurs, in theory, every four years. Loss aversion is the psychological concept explored by the Nobel prize winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, but it’s a fear and tempering mechanism that is too often lost in the heat of battle or battle--or lust.

Ineptitude

Andrew Marvell

Does everyone have the opposite of halcyon days, perhaps days of ineptitude? You may have been a gawky kid who wasn’t good at anything. Then all of a sudden you find yourself. You discover a previously hidden talent for boxing (perhaps as a result of early frustrations). You become a crack student (at least of human behavior) and the repository of some "gull," yes gull's romantic wishes. Someone else will use you to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Then by the time you arrive, you will be told it’s time to go. You are certainly not in your prime. When you get in the literal and metaphoric ring, you find your strength is already beginning to fade. In fact you walk right into someone’s metaphorical stiff jab. You forget everything. You would console yourself with the notion of starting all over again "if there were world enough and time"--to quote Andrew Marvell. 

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Sirat

Oliver Laxe's Sirat, which has been taken seriously by Manola Darghis, Robert Ebert and virtually every other major critic is simplistic, pretentious and sententious. A father, Luis (Sergi Lopez) is looking for his lost daughter. The post-apocalyptic landscape with its unnamed repressive military recalls the Mad Max films. Tribalism and cultish behavior return in the form of raves.  Molly (MDMA) is usually the drug of.choice at these events though LSD and pot are what are evidenced in the film. The rave is particularly haunting in wake of the October 7 Hamas attack. Watching half dead characters die or dissolve a  is the arc of the plot. What's disturbing is seeing a host of critics as brainwashed as the characters they're writing about. Almodovar is listed as a producer. He should have known better. One day Sirat will be history.

Hegseth or Goring?

The difference between Hermann Goring and Pete Hegseth is that the former was a connoisseur of art, who, in fact, sought to steal the great masterpieces of Italy for a Fuhrermuseum in Linz. The same aspirations cannot be said for Pete Hegseth who great claim to fame before being appointed Secretary of Defense was being the co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend. Incidentally, he's a Christian Nationalist who invited Pastor Douglas Wilson, opposed to both homosexuality and women's right to vote, to speak at the Pentagon. Hegseth not only exemplifies "the banality of evil," he epitomizes the banality of banality. Who would you rather have pointing the barrel of a gun at you? A fundamentalist with an axe to grind or an art historically orientated racist anti-semite art lover and looter whose great creation was the Gestapo?

The Magus

Is it easier to end something in fiction than in life? For that matter what’s the difference? Is arranged marriage tempting fate? Your ancestors write no tale, yet your descendants are in the manufacturing business. It's axiomatic that you can’t rewrite the past but you can refuse to fixate on the ruins of the future. He lived to tell the tale is a strange locution when you think of it. What accounts for the emergence of an esthetic? Is one creating art or it simply a part of life?

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star