Breathless

Have you ever had the experience of having nothing to say? Perhaps you're dining with long lost friends, who you haven't seen in ages? You could bad mouth Trump, which is now a commonplace salutation tantamount to a French woman giving the Platonic kiss on each cheek. But what comes after? Where to begin? It's similar to facing a blank canvas or page. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" are the words Jack Torrance's wife is horrified to find repeated on his typewriter page in The Shining. That's, of course, no default unless you want to let your friends know you're going mad. In medias res means "in the middle of things." It's easy to pick up where you left off, but harder to create a narrative out of the blue. Making conversation is a form of therapy to the extent that the first words spoken are often the most revealing, pointing to the subliminal reason why you have bothered to exhume old faces and memories from the attic anyway.

read "The Great Bonac 10K 1983" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Please Mr. Postman

 

The Marvelettes

"Please Mr. Postman, look and see (Whoa, yeah)/Is there a letter in you bag for me?" The refrain from The Marvelettes l961 Motown hit is something a lot of voters are likely to be uttering as they wait fruitlessly for mail-in ballots which won't arrive, in the aftermath of the SCOTUS' ruling on Trump's executive order. Will the ballots get out before the damage is done? Will lower courts still be able to intervene since the question falls under the rubric of "state's rights." Remember what a nasty word that was during the segregation era? Apparently 1000 Trump appointed election monitors are being deployed to polling places. Then there's the DHS. Don't be surprised if the truncheons used by these segregationist state rights people might now be used on voters.

The Benzodiazepine Family

Laura Delano (NYT)

Many people calm themselves down with benzodiazepines like Klonopin or Ativan, but Anxiety serves a purpose.  It's an alarm clock that wakes you up. SSRIs are prescribed for depression. Psychopharmacology is the branch of psychiatry which uses medications to treat these affects. There are people who have been medicated so long that they don't even remember a life without pills. In "Bitter Pill" (The New Yorker, 4/1/19) Rachel Aviv describes the case of a high achieving Harvard student, Laura Delano, who attempts to get off the medications that she has been prescribed, willy-nilly for her entire life. Aviv's piece is included in her collection Strangers to Ourselves. Delano herself is the author of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. You may remember Soma is the drug which rules Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. There are people who take pills to go to sleep, pills to wake up, pills to give them erections, and shots of adrenalin to prevent the necrotic tissue resulting from Priapism."GLP-1 Syndrome" attends the taking of a popular diet drug which literally transforms personality. Anhedonia is one of these and it's not surprising in a pill designed to dull appetite.

Yorick

"Hamlet and Horatio" by Eugene Delacroix (1839)

                                       

photo: FLevy

Imagine the very moment when you'll longer be sentient. If you’ve been in a coma already, it’s one thing, but there are people for whom it’s more dramatic, tantamount to being in a theater watching a movie at the time of a black out, well not exactly since if you’re still alive you can hold onto your partner’s hand until one of you can employ the flashlight on their smartphone. Remember once the theater or life goes dark there are no gadgets. It’s nice to think think someone is going to have a last say either you from the great beyond or someone still waiting by Charon’s bark on the shore of the Acheron. Hope springs eternal. Maybe there's a two way highway allowing voyagers one trip only.

Wanted Dead or Alive--Come to Think of It, Dead

 

Lots of people have angry thoughts about Trump. In his first term many felt bad about thinking things like “I wish he would die,” but his constant unrelentingly foolish, destructive mean-spirited executive orders and actions which, in some cases, actually kill people (his promise to come to the aid of the Iranian protestors which he. didn’t make good on, for one) have disinhibited many otherwise humanistically inclined souls. Some of those who woke up to the executive order calling for Lake Ontario to be Lake America might be heard declaiming “why doesn’t someone cut off his arms and legs and order him to do laps in his newly renovated reflecting pool” or "why don' t they administer one of those death row drugs that don’t work, the ones used with prisoners in red states? How funny it would be to see him writhing in pain. Throw in Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick. It’s Animal House alright. But let’s save the best reward for old War. Gov Hegseth. Let’s hang him in the street like Mussolini." The only problem with wishing someone to die is that they then die and that’s it. In actuality, if you really are giving vent to your feelings, you probably want to wish them a long painful death, even if it allows the chance to issue yet another executive order.

La Nouvelle Conversation

Have you had the experience of dining with someone who spends the meal talking only about themselves? They never bother to ask you about your children or work and you wonder if they will simply keep the same monologue going after you leave the table. There are lots of people with ear pods on who look like they're talking to themselves, but there are others who are actually living in a dream world and just keep talking without the help of gadgets. In the old days people conducted imaginary conversations with adversaries in their head, imagining what clever riposte they would have made, if only they'd been on their toes. Now it's all out in the open.

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Two Writing Projects

Rachel Cusk

Yiyun Li

Rachel Cusk wrote a novel about the break up of her marriage Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012) after which she produced her trilogy, Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018) in which individual character appears to disintegrate.  What if there were no more “I” in literature and the author is still beholden to concrete a world? The suicides of Yiyun Li’s two sons is the all consuming passion of her work—similar to the binding of Isaac in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Yiyun Li has written two books about these tragedies. Where Reason Ends (2019) deals with the death of her son Vincent in 2017 at the age of 16. Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025) is about the suicide of her son James in 2024 at the age of 19. 

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star