The Ethicist: Should I Tell Guests How Much Dinner Costs?

Dear Ethicist: I am having friends for dinner tonight. I went to the butcher and ordered a rib roast. It was only when I got to the cashier that I realized how ridiculously expensive it was. However, I was embarrassed to return it. The couple we have invited are very nice, but they’re not the kind of people who could do anything for us and I feel loathe to go overboard. Still, it's getting late and I don't have much of a choice. At the very least I feel I have to tell them how much it costs and reap some benefit for being such a generous host. Otherwise I would be throwing good money after bad. My first thought is simply to place a little note at each place informing our guests of the price of the meal. My idea is to make it like a big joke. No one advertises how much they have spent when they invite guests over, but secretly I want to make my point which is that the roast I will be serving comes to the ridiculous price of $53. My wife feels I am displaying one of the worst sides of my character. Every time I try toput the little name cards down (with $ signs), she removes them. She is in the other room now and I don’t know what to do.

 

Conspicuous Consumer

 

Dear Conspicuous Consumer: My advice to you is to serve the roast and forget about the price. It’s water under the bridge. During the cocktails part of the evening you might make a casual remark about how expensive meat has become, if that makes you feel better, but I wouldn’t risk further alienating your wife by knocking your guests over the head with how much the rib roast cost.

Read "Lamb Stewed" by Francis Levy, Dispatches From the Poetry Wars

The Bully Pulpit

“The Bully Pulpit" could well be a new show hosted by Donald Trump on Fox. Imagine Trump standing at a podium wearing his signature red hat in front of a screen in which his past performances in front of huge crowds will be synchrionized to play each time he scores one of his points, either about the non-existent coronavirus pandemic, the fact that the election had been rigged or the fact that the insurrectionists were "hugging and kissing" the capital police. With an audience of 74 Million who voted for him, “The Bully Pulpit" would be the highest-rated program on TV, even beating reruns of hot shows like “Shark Tank,” “The Apprentice” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.” Originally, the idea for the show might have been to broadcast daily rallies for the 2024 election. However, despite having an energetic performer in Mr. Trump, the logistics would prove too daunting, especially due to the fact that most states are still placing some limits on the amount of people who  congregate in public, particularly if they weren’t wearing masks. In the meanwhile, Trump is planning to make a triumphant return to  social media appparently the next few months,  "Trump is returning to social media with his own platform, spokeman says," CNN, 3/22/21 

Read "Trumpty Dumpty's Great Fall" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker

Chris McKim’s documentary Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker about the legendary artist might be subtitled “Illness Not as Metaphor.” A victim of the AIDS epidemic who died in l992, at the age of 37, Wojnarowicz used his creative talents to become one of the most outspoken leaders of the AIDS movement. For Wojnarowicz AIDS was not a figure of speech. The Trump administration’s denial of Covid was nothing compared to the AIDS plague which was essentially shoved under the carpet due to the fact that it took its toll on an unfavored nation, the gay community. "Fuck you faggot fucker” were the words Wojnarowicz found on a torn piece of paper, an objet trouve which became his mantra. “I’m not gay as in I love you,” he angrily intones in the movie. “I’m queer as in fuck off.” The movie is a battlefield which earns its rage, but to say that the artist who had had an earlier career as a street hustler (one of his heroes was Jean Genet) had a traumatized childhood is a laughable understatement. His alcoholic father beat his children and apparently served him and his two siblings their pet rabbit for dinner. Later he would go on to do battle against other monsters and father surrogates like Jesse Helms who tried to get the NEA to defund an exhibit at the Artists Space, due in part to Wojnarowicz's catalogue copy. Remember back in l999 when Guiliani tried to pull the plug on “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saachi” which featured Chris Ofili’s dung covered Virgin Mary? It wasn’t difficult for Wojnarowicz to find stand-ins towards whom he could direct his rage. Gracie Mansion, Penny Arcade, Fran Lebowitz and Nan Goldin are some of the 80s and 90s figures who opine in the film. In some ways Wojarowicz bears comparison to Pasolini who also practiced rough trade and was a poet and political activist. The iconic "death mask" of the photographer Peter Hujar who's described in the movie as the Verlaine to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud is, in fact, reminiscent of the iconic scene in Mamma Roma where Mantegna’s “Lamentation of Christ” is invoked. "3Teens Kill 4" was btw the name of the band Wojnarowicz's belonged to.

Read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

Pornosophy: All Nude XXX

"The Expulsion of Adam and Eve From the Garden of Eden" by Masaccio

What comprises the mystique of nudity? From the Adamic point of view, the urge to cover and conceal derive from a transgression, Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit. Parenthetically there’s something reminiscent of Faust in this act of seeking from the tree of knowledge. One always thinks of unveiling as the source of shame, but in representations of the bible in classical art through the ages, the fig leaf together with the emotion of shame only begin to appear in the aftermath of defiance. The worship of the Golden Calf falls in a similar category. You’ve undoubtedly had those dreams where you find yourself standing amongst a group of people in your underwear. If you have certain proclivities you might even find yourself dancing naked on a table top in front of leering eyes. Actually, the notion of the secondary sex characteristics as a hidden treasure is comforting. There are societies where people walk around in a nude or semi-nude state. If you’ve ever been on a nude beach or nudist colony, you realize how unremarkable nudity can become. The glory of nudity resides in the act of revelation. It’s a little like a fortune cookie which when cracked reveals its prophecy. The synecdochic obsession with body parts ie biceps, legs, chest or breasts is one of the tangential issues that derive from this obsession.

Read  "White Meat, Breasts" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

Journal of Medieval Scholasticism: Can You Be Psychoanalyzed Over Zoom?

photo portrait of Sigmund Freud by Max Halberstadt (1921)

Remember psychoanalysis, the form of psychotherapy where the patient lay on the couch with his doctor rarely saying anything? Remember how Viagra was accidentally discovered as a treatment for E.D. when patients who had been treated for Angina displayed erections? Psychoanalysis turned out to be a sleep inducer for patients and doctors suffering from insomnia. Patients could never be sure, but one of the ways you knew your doctor might be sleeping through a session was the sound of soft snoring, which you may have conveniently defended yourself against; conversely from the patient’s point of view, your doctor might as well have intoned “nighty night” as you prepared to lie down looking forward to the prospect of 50 minutes of sleep. Nothing like the feeling of safety that came from having someone sleeping in back of you. And this would have gone on for years (a la Freud's Analysis Terminable and Interminable from l937) if it weren’t for the pandemic  Sure your analyst might simply turn off his video function as you lie down on your sofa and drift off, but the protected feeling of having the other body looking over you would be lost. Then there are the interactions and bodily responses like skin respiration, flatulence and yes tumescence which are often the products of free associating in the moments when a patient is not sleeping? And what about the much-vaunted transference? How are you going to fall in love with anyone when one or both of you are muted?

Read "As I Lay Down" by Francis Levy, illustrated by Hallie Cohen, Noise

Journal of Medieval Scholasticism: How NOT to Become an Influencer

William of Ockham (photo: Moscarlop)

A recent Times Arts & Leisure profile paints Demi Lovato as having 100M followers on Instagram. But what does it take to be someone who succeeds in having 1 or even none? Being a plain Jane or Joe is one of those old-fashioned talents, anachronisms like cursive writing that are quickly become obsolete. Remember those guys who used to sharpen your knives? Their horse-pulled carts rumbled over cobble-stoned streets, You never required an appointment to sharpen your shiv. People who are influencers want to have lots of followers. However, there are still those who enjoy their privacy, rich people who live in exclusive gated communities, where mail boxes have numbers but no names. Is it possible to have an Instagram or even Twitter account which exists for the sake of itself and which no one looks at but you? It may sound like a hard thing to achieve, but anything, even anonymity, is possible, if you try. Yes, you can stick to yourself on Instagram.

Read "White Meat, Breasts" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review

Journal of Medieval Scholasticism: How Many Spring Breakers Can Safely Fit Into a Phone Booth?

 

“How many Spring breakers can safely fit into a phone booth?” is one of the most frequent questions CDC administrators are currently being asked. Of course, telephone booths are practically obsolete. One’s going to be hard put to locate one in Daytona, Miami or any of the other well-known Florida waterholes known for their attraction to hellions. In fact, one of the few remaining uses of phone booths is as repositories for bodies. But if you're going to get yourself stuffed into one, there's the matter of vaccines, masks and social distancing. Those who have gotten both of their vaccines can fit themselves into a phone booth containing as many vaccinated people as will fit and not have to wear a mask. If 20 or more people are fitting into a phone booth and some are vaccinated while others are not, it’s recommended that both those who are vaccinated and those who have yet to be vaccinated still wear masks and maintain at least six feet of distance from each other in the phone booth, due to the dangers of asymptomatic transmission.

read "Limbo" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review

Ettore Scola's A Special Day

On May 6, 1938, Hitler met with Mussolini in Rome. Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (1977) is set against the background of that event. Antonietta (Sophia Loren) is unhappily married to the brutish Emanuele (John Vernon). When her husband and six children join the crowds who have  poured into the streets, she's left alone with the family’s myna which promptly escapes. The lonely housewife meets her cultivated and distinguish-looking neighbor Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni) when the bird lands outside his window. The heavy-handed symbolism is mitigated by the dramatic angles that the director employs as he negotiates the deserted Mussolini era public housing, the Caso Popolari, with its arches, striated walls and steep winding staircases. The loudspeakers in the streets provide a particularly effective counterpoint to the interior conflict that begins to take place in the souls of the two major characters. Though the two can see each other through their respective apartment windows, they literally have to jump through hoops to engage, something which is exaggerated by a nosey caretaker (Francoise Berd), a fascist sympathizer, who's growingly suspicious of the housewife's obvious attraction to the neighbor who turns out to be a radio announcer, dismissed from his position, due to his homosexuality. In a moment of passion the two characters escape the entrapment of their respective lives, but it’s a passion predicated on impossibility. A Special Day is a fascist Brief Encounter; it both enjoys and suffers from the melodrama and hyperbole of the David Lean version of the Noel Coward play. While black and white documentary footage of the original event is employed, the unblinking two-tone effect also unfortunately describes the limited palette with which the director paints his characters' emotional lives. A Special Day is a classic star vehicle, noteworthy primarily for the conjunction of two mythic figures of the Italian cinema.

Read "MAGA and the Coronavirus" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Gatekeepers

Most human beings are failed supplicants. They knock on doors which shut in their faces and then console themselves with the notion that good will come of it. “One door closes and another closes,” is the wry attack leveled on Panglossian optimism by Hallie Cohen, a long-time friend of the SP. But imagine yourself on the other side of the fence, shutting doors in the faces of those attempting to hawk their wares. What if you were the Wizard to whom the Cowardly Lion were applying for courage? Let’s say you were an arbiter of taste employed by a tony entertainment outlet to vet the varying broadsides and screeds delivered by hopefuls. Everyone is trying to beat the other out in terms of originality. Everyone wants to turn heads. Everyone's wringing their hands at the heavens. How bout a satire about people who watch television during a pandemic? Nice try you might respond, but needs more specifics. Lo, here’s one about a president who claims "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." You'd have to toss that one out as tasteless, juvenile and over the top.

Read "As I Lay Down" by Francis Levy (illustration by Hallie Cohen), Noise

Quiddity

John Duns Scotus

"Quiddity" like "quisling" is a word you might not employ as often as you do narcissism, metaphor or poignant. “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures,” says Hamlet referring to the arguing over small points that makes up the human condition.  Quiddity is derived from the Latin quidditas referring to essence, what Kant might have called the noumena or Plato the ideal form of an object. You may remember the allegory, where the perception of reality experienced by humankind is equated to a shadow on the wall of a cave. There are phenomena or appearances but what is the Kantian Ding an sich, what is the “thing in and of itself?” Apparently, the word initially came into use by medieval scholastics who trafficked in these kinds of questions. Today in the world of assembly lines, how is it possible to talk about being? Do all of the Chevys running down the line of a conveyor belt possess an equivalent quiddity or is there one ideal form of the Chevy, a prototype produced by an engineer, that constitutes an ultimate iteration of the object—or is that ultimate form of anything merely an idea which is never really attainable by material things? Tom Stoppard wrote a play entitled The Real Thing, which addressed some of these questions, but when you actually look around quiddity  is something that's addressed in almost every conversation when there are speculations about what's what.

Read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

Accident

 

Unless you believe in an anthropomorphized God, a celestial telephone operator who answers prayers and plans out the schedules of his children, you’re faced with the quandary of free will. How can everything be the result of human choices when something or someone exists, say like a child, and it feels impossible to imagine the world without them? It might be argued that this feeling, which is almost like déjà vu, might hone to the expression, “hindsight is 20/20,” where afterthoughts provide the illusion of a certain clarity and even prescience. In this paradigm the mind is simply a celestial framing device which creates an order that has nothing to do with the random reality which populates the ether into which phenomena or even noumena swim. Accidents are not only the event that occurs when a subjective entity loses control of its will. They become a description of the cosmos from the inexplicable bursts of light characterizing supernovae to the oblivion into which matter descends when it crosses the event horizon of a black hole. It's very hard to accept loss. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help to look at the edifice of life as the random conjunction of bodies in space.

Read A-Z Quotes by Francis Levy

Spellbound

image for Spellbound (1945) painted by Salvador Dali

What if all the horrors that’ve occurred in the past year were just happening to you? In an alternate universe Trump was bad, but not a murderer who was responsible for the insurgency at the capital where people were screaming for the blood of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, where Mitt Romney barely missed being set upon by a rabid mob and Mike Pence came near to being lynched. John Carpenter couldn’t have dreamt up this scenario. What if  these ghastly and once improbable events are solipsism, mere projections of horror by your lone mind. When you add a plague that starts to mutate you begin to wonder if you can escape the hellish chink in time into which you’ve fallen. You’ve seen those science fiction thrillers where the body suddenly disappears from the gallows just as the execution is about to occur. Hopefully, you’ll be spared before it's too late to escape a purge where it's no longer The Apprentice, but The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a paranormal series in which spoons bend and heads literally fly. If you remember Dali did the dream sequences for Hitchcock’s Spellbound. One of Jeff Koons’s gold rabbits might be the perfect mascot for your private nightmare.

Read "Why Big German Words Like Vergangenbangenheit Carry Weight" by Francis Levy, Huff Post

Krzystof Kieslowski's Camera Buff

Krzystof Kieslowki’s Camera Buff (1979) begins as a parody. However, the development of the silly and the trivial into significant elements in the creation of an artwork (in this case of a documentary kind) is one of the most profound revelations of this complex film. Initailly Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr) who works in purchasing at a factory buys a camera to record the birth of his daughter. Soon he becomes interested in more than domestic matters, which includes living with a colicky baby. Recognizing that he’s in the presence of a  camera buff, Filip’s boss hires him to make a film of factory life that goes on to win third place in a festival at Lodz. "Don't win," are his wife Irka's (Malgorzata Zabkowska) fateful words before he climbs on train to leave their little backwater of Wielice. Later Filip meets the famous Polish director Krzystof Zanussi, though it’s clear the great filmmaker regards his starry-eyed admirer as a rank amateur and rube who has little understanding either of his infatuation with art or its limits. When he’s not in possession of his camera, Filip walks around framing shots with his fingers. In a dramatic scene where his wife, fed up with his growing ambition, leaves, she catches him in flagrante, framing the shot of her departure. By treating everything as gris for his cinematic mill, he's able to distance himself from the pain and joy of life itself. Camera Buff works on two planes:  one of satire and the other broader artistic sensibility. Clearly the greatest irony is that the Kieslowski himself is exploiting his own character, demeaning his ambition in order to create his own movie (a process that’s brilliantly caught in the last scene where Kieslowlski's anti-hero points the lens at himself like a gun). In the process of getting what he wants Filip is gradually losing everything he holds dear. It starts with homelife but ends in a fateful scene (reminiscent of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People) where his growing talent to find the truth in reality ends up causing a beloved manager, who’d become one of his most ardent admirers, to lose his job. Filip becomes a celebrity within the confines of his little town. Even the local dwarf is moved by the way his deformity is melodramatized. However, all along the artist is leaving a path of destruction in his wake. This downward path culminates in a final scene where he intentionally unreels one of his films, letting the celluloid become over-exposed as it rolls into oblivion on a street. “When you edit the long shot and the close up, the person has to be on the same axis,” Filip ominously warns his assistant.

Read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

"Locked in a Dark Calm" by Tameca Cole

"Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration" which is currently on exhibit at P.S. 1, deals with “carceral esthetics,” a term coined by Nichole R. Fleetwood a professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers who curated the show. "Carceral esthetics" refers to “relational and artistic experiment that challenges the inside/outside logistics of imprisonment.” The current exhibit segues powerfully with Garrett Bradley's documentary film Time, which records a woman fighting for her husband's release from a 60-year prison sentence. “Marking Time” is a document of survival as well as ingenuity on the part of prisoners who produced complex works with limited materials, during long sentences, some of which included solitary confinement. The exhibit includes feats of artistic legerdemain like Dean Gillispie’s "Spiz's Dinette," an airstream trailer constructed with cigarette foil and the backs of notebooks. Gilberto Rivera's "Institutional Nightmare" uses federal prison uniform, commissary papers, floor wax, prison report, newspaper and acrylic paint on canvas. One of the most affecting pieces in the show is Tameca Cole’s, “Locked in a Dark Calm.” The artist produced this collage while serving time at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama. The faceless head out of which only eyes and lips appear underscores the destruction of identity. The prisoner sees but is not seen. Aimee Wissman’s “Prisoner Postcard: You Appeal is Denied" delivers its message with an image that's both comic and grotesque. While the existential condition of many of the artists, ie imprisonment, defines the content of the work, it doesn't limit the ambition of the works which Fleetwood has curated and which is, by any standard, remarkable. "Marking Time" also includes pieces by nonincarcerated artists whose work deals with issues of "state repression, erasure and imprisonment." Grab your mask and see this show.

Call My Agent

If you ask most people how they are, they’re likely to tell you what season of The Crown they’re in. Just a short while back it was Babylon Berlin, Fauda and The Queens Gambit. The Flight Attendant might actually describe a mental state as does Bridgerton whose heartthrob star Rege Jean-Page has become not only it but ID. Of course, shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm were wildly popular but they didn’t become tantamount to affective states of mind--and surrogates for social life. For some  these new series have been like crossing the event horizon of a black hole. There’s no turning back. Before long they’ve been sucked into an oblivion in which the personality is totally extinguished and replaced with Netflix generated avatars. Know that fin de siècle building where Call My Agent takes place. There are undoubtedly Francophiles who've begun to believe they live there. In fact, there are some severe cases in which the program has become a cult which requires them to be deprogrammed from the programming. Call My Agent is a particularly pernicious example since the script is so good that you feel that Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Adjani and Monica Bellucci, three of the actresses who make cameo appearances have taken the words right out of your mouth. Cable news networks like CNN have also jumped into the fray.You may not have had anyone over to the house for a year but who needs them when you have Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Anderson Cooper as regular dinner guests.

Read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

Autumn Rhythm

 

"Autumn Rhythm,"  (Number 30), Jackson Pollock

When you think about it, representations of reality have little to do with the essence of the world. Plato famously termed human conceptions as shadows, elusive ideal forms—what Kant would later term noumena. Heidegger referred to the recondite phenomenological essence of existence as dasein or Being There, also the title of the Hal Ashby movie adapted from the Jerzy Kosinski book in which Peter Sellers played the main character, Chauncey Gardner or Chance. The narratives that patients construct for themselves in therapeutic sessions have all the attributes of fiction and employ similar figures of speech, with hyperbole often dominating. Andre Malraux call his autobiographies Anti-Memoirs. There's a kind of stranger anxiety that forces consciousness to encapsulate and name in order to remove the terror of objects. But there are instances where art acts to unravel and restore the unfiltered complexity of the universe. The challenge of a great work of art like say The Grand Inquisitor poem in The Brothers Karamazov lies in restoring the complexity lost by suppression. A Jackson Pollock painting like “Autumn Rhythm” (1950) is ultimately blinding to the extent that it unpacks more than the mind is able to handle. That’s the pleasure and the weight that such abstraction bears. When you think of it, Malevich’s “White on White,” (1918) a classic essay in so-called Suprematism, could be considered an instance of photographic realism.

Read "Lamb Stewed" by Francis Levy, Dispatches From the Poetry Wars

The Golden Calf

sculptor Tommy Zegan polishes Trump statue at CPAC (John Raoux, AP)

One way you know Covid-19 vaccines are working is the reaction they create. Whether it’s fever or lethargy, you're reassured the shot is effective if you have an adverse reaction to it. From an epistemic point of view this underscores a significant point about many things of a benign and even lifesaving nature. For instance, the body rejects organ transplants. Those lucky enough to find donors must take anti-rejection medications. In the mental health arena one of the problems with patients who take neuroleptics is that their refusing the regimen. You know something is working when it produces an effect in the body whether in the form of antibodies or neurotransmitters. The same applies in the realm of psychotherapy for example where an insight can produce what analysts call an "abreaction," which is defined as “the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it.” One of the most salient examples of such behavior often occurs when a prosecution witness is being cross-examined. You find this kind of scenario in many of Earl Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels. Sufferers from the Stockholm Syndrome may experience this on the way to being deprogrammed. A Retrumplican might scream like hell when they’re faced with the fact that the election was not stolen and rigged. In fact, they might even try to invade the capitol. Some will continue screaming for the rest of their lives instead of facing the fact that they've been worshipping the golden calf.

Read "MAGA and the Coronavirus" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Fairest of Them All

Have you gone through periods when you wanted to be a man or woman or non-binary of the people? The present times may have chastened you and disabused you from chasing these windmills, but remember back to some value-free era of your life when you as an Upper West Side intellectual who worshipped the altar of Susan Sontag saw Fight Club, shaved your head and started to have fantasies about what your life would have been like if you’d joined  the Marines? What if you as daughter of one of the Daughters of the Revolution saw movies like Woodstock and started to sport tie dyed tee shirts and smoke pot? Wasn’t it fun, if only for a short time, to be  a he man patriot or headband wearing polyamorous chick who rolled naked in mud? Now, of course, the lines have been drawn and such playfulness is no longer possible. After seeing a former president urge a mob of hoodlums onto insurrection, you might not be interested in dressing up in the super patriot outfit. On the other even those filled with self-righteous indignation at injustice run the danger of abusing their single-mindedness of purpose. It’s can be fun to be reunited with your likenesses, but any group of like-minded individuals runs the danger of being a mob. The Times columnist Nicholas Kristof warned about the dangers of such sanctimony in a recent piece, "How to Reach People Who Are Wrong,"(NYT, 3/3/21). One of the perils in life is being proven right," he said. "The risk is excessive admiration for one’s own brilliance, preening at one’s own righteousness, and inordinate scorn for the jerks on the other side.” Kristof's piece is essential reading. What would you rather be, fairest or fairest of them all?

Read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

 

Down to Earth Syndrome

Image from Perseverance rover (NASA)

How to accommodate acceptance and ambition? At 43, Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady has 7 Super Bowl victories and is primed to go for 8. You’ve seen them, the achievers who are never satiated. Once you’ve climbed Everest the only thing you can do is to Free Solo or sign up for Virgin Galactica. Naturally outer space has limitless possibilities for the striver. In l969 Neil Armstrong famously stepped on the moon. Now it's not out of the realm of possibility that a human being could land on Mars and simply put his keys in his car aka rover. Only mortality constrains the aspirational mind. Can you be a person who's happy with what you have and still desire more? It’s a basically oxymoronic idea. You can’t appreciate when you're consumed by the gnawing ache at having somehow having missed out or failed. One of the axioms of the romantic sensibility is that what doesn’t exist or has yet to be always lords it over that which is plainly visible to the eyes. Romantics may be great lovers, but they don’t possess the stuff of normalcy. Routinized everyday relationships, lacking in the thrill of conquest, are paradoxically the mountain they have to climb. It takes a certain investor discipline to sell GameStop when it's crowd sourcing to ever greater prices. On the other hand, if you become content and overly complacent, you run the risk of becoming so small-minded and miserly that you end up losing everything. You may have noticed that the majority of so-called “down to earth” people are not rocket scientists.

Biden Time: The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Peter Vandyke)

Coleridge famously coined the expression, “suspension of disbelief.” During the Trump presidency, each day’s new pronunciamento made it increasingly impossible to "suspend disbelief" since his executive orders disbanding the Paris environment accords, the Iran nuclear treaty and DACA were so incredible. Only a few weeks into the Biden presidency, it’s like reading a page turner, in specific a romance novel, in which the knight in shining armor (in this case an Irish one) arrives to free his people from the tyranny of an autocrat. Watching the news you may find yourself so willingly able to "suspend disbelief" that at times it’s boring. The news is suddenly so palpable and reasonable, it’s hard to get used to. Anthony Fauci, who seemed harassed all through the Trump years, appears more relaxed and confident now that he no longer needs to parry random attacks from The White House. During the Trump years, you may have secretly gotten a thrill from turning to CNN or MSNBC since it was like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island. Watching Trump siding with Putin over his own intelligence experts at a news conference was a truly paranormal event. These days, you don’t even need to "suspend disbelief," since Biden’s behavior in response to Covid and other matters is so happily believable from the start.

Read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

The Situation Room

You may have reached the stage where cable news anchors are your social life. At first it was disconcerting. Watching cable news not only filled the vacuum but turned out to be better than the life that was taken away by the pandemic. In a lockdown you get to hate the sound of your own voice and everyone else in your pod, but enter Larry McDonnell, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Erin Burnett. Turns out they're more interesting than most people you know, who don't pay attention anyway. If you’re going to have to listen to someone talk it might as well be a personality rather than the old friend who babbles on obsessively about their problems and doesn’t even respond when you try to get a word in edgewise. Talk about new variants and dangerous new stages of the pandemic, this kind of recusal has its pitfalls, particularly when you start to entertain the delusion that these colorful news personages are talking to YOU, with YOU finding yourself indulging a prolepsis whereby you answer questions, as if you were an interview subject, before they’re even asked. On a serious note, whether you know it or not, you’re undoubtedly in a state of shock following the pandemic, the George Floyd murder and finally the living nightmare of the Insurrection. The question is how will you adjust as a trauma survivor once a semblance of the life you once knew comes back (if it ever does)? You may have gotten so used to living in a bubble, with the images of your dinner guests piped in over a flat screen or computer monitor, you’ve lost the desire or ability to interact with flesh and blood human beings.

Read A-Z Quotes by Francis Levy

Truth or Consequences

At the CPAC convention in Orlando, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem received loud cheers when she contradicted Anthony’s Fauci. Fauci had said the state had l0,000 hospitalizations on the "worst day." She claimed on the state's "worst day" they had a little over 600. This falls in line with the QAnon supported allegation that the coronavirus was a conspiracy and the Trump allegation in the face of all evidence to the contrary that the election was rigged and stolen. Of course, the closest thing to this kind of bald-faced repudiation of truth derives from Holocaust deniers like the British “historian” David Irving. In l996 Irving’s suit against the historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel was overturned by a British court. Sounds a little like Trump who has tried unsuccessfully to use to the courts as his proxy in the denial of the election—a tact which failed even after he had loaded the Supreme Court with 3 appointees. Having one’s reality denied is a form of human rights abuse in and of itself. To tell a coronavirus sufferer that the ailment is a conspiracy qualifies as a form of torture. The latest form of denial has come from Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson who claimed at the hearing on the Insurrection the rioters who tore through the halls of congress were left wing Antifa members posing as Trump supporters. What about the detained members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who claimed they were following the direction of the President? Rather than denial, many Americans may actually find themselves unable to willingly suspend disbelief in the face of realities, which increasingly, have all the attributes of fiction.

Read "As I Lay Down" by Francis Levy, Noise

What Matters Now

There were these periods when you could flirt with what had been hitherto unspeakable ideologies. In the later 70s, with the resignation of Nixon, even a red-blooded and hardened antiwar demonstrator could afford to find themselves disillusioned with the left. "Participatory democracy" was not so participatory. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" turned to be more about dictatorship than the proletariat. Writers like George Orwell who may have fought in the Spanish Civil War began to heft the banner of relativism. Power is conservative was a phrase reinforced by concepts like the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto’s circulation of elite.” Daniel Bell wrote The End of Ideology and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. It was fun to trash the liberal pieties found in publications like The Nation and to admire the wit and urbanity of conservative intellectuals like William Buckley. How could you not admire someone who played the harpsichord and even owned more than one? You no longer had to place your copy of God and Man at Yale in the kind brown bag usually reserved for Penthouse or Hustler. You gained points at tony Upper West Side parties by quoting obscure parliamentarians like Michael Oakeschott. You liked to remind people that Adam Smith not only wrote The Wealth of Nations but The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oh for those halcyon days of the boulevardier and flaneur when being an intellectual was a stone’s throw from Edwardian dandyism and you voted for the party of Oscar Wilde and Huysmans whose A rebours became a form of liberation ideology for those previously enchained by moral righteousness. Value-free politics has, of course, become a dubious luxury in the age of Retrumplicanism. You may find yourself brown bagging or even chucking your copies  of The New Criterion and The National Review that you once used to epater the liberal bourgeoisie.

Read "Trumpty Dumpty's Great Fall" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star