Wednesday, May 31, 2023

On What Matters

You may not have read Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time. Certainly if you’re bipolar you’re likely to take such a title as a reprimand. What does it really mean to be happy? And OK but “all the time?” Come on! Colwin died young ironically but there’s been a rekindling of interest in her work which included cookbooks. Happiness has always been a question for philosophers despite the fact that Camus famously stated the only philosophical question that matters is suicide. The late Derek Parfit an Oxford consequentialist and author of books with titles like Reasons and Persons and On What Matters undoubtedly had something to say about "happiness" as would have utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham John stuart Mill and most recently Peter Singer who has dealt with this question from the utilitarian perspective. Singer is proactive in suggesting that people give up their material possessions for the good of others. That and not eating meat might be seen as his yellow brick road.

read "What is Happiness?" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

Yo Yo Yo, listen to "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang


Tuesday, May 30, 2023

On Being Waitlisted


Are you one of those people who’s annoyed being waitlisted at all the good cemeteries, where you get the kind of crowd you'd want to spend eternity with? Of course during the Pandemic when funeral homes were flooded and in violation of those red  "Maximum Occupancy Not to Exceed.." signs, it was understandable that you’d have to line yourself up or wait for your pager to flash when your plot was ready. But the world has gone through a sea change in a relatively short period of time. In this new era of human history, demand exceeds the supply for headstones, which are harder to find locate than an apartment in Park Slope. Of course if you're the kind of person who likes to paddle against the current and is adverse to trends you’re not going to play ball. You’ll simply head down to the local crematorium when it’s your time and then have your wife or partner toss your urn off the Brooklyn Bridge. However, if you're "dead set" on a plot, you're going to have to plot. Try Sotheby’s or another of the high end brokers. They can work wonders in satisfying your requirements when it comes to crypts, mausoleums or even a simple landscaped graves. You can die in peace, knowing there's life after death.

read "Obit." by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and once again listen to "Bang Bang" by Joe Cuba

Monday, May 29, 2023

Washington Crossing the Delaware


Washington Crossing the Delaware by Larry Rivers (1953)

There are the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Now we’re in the Cenozoic epoch which started 66 million years ago. It’s almost inconceivable that the roots of civilization as it’s known began only 5000 thousand years back, in Sumerian times--a grain of sand when you consider the Big Bang at 13.2 billion years. Of course, there was a lot to accomplish after the first Boson came into existence. It’s a long road from elementary sub atomic particles to the 46 chromosomes that humans possess in each of their cells. Another interesting figure. Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which Lucy, the famous fossil, belonged, roamed the earth 3.2 million years ago. It’s not even 300 years since Washington crossed the Delaware in 1776.

read "Is Your Self-Invention a Success" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Bang Bang" by Joe Cuba



Friday, May 26, 2023

Hard Driver


Have ever noticed how hard it is to retain certain kinds of information? The mnemonic centers of the brain seem to reject these the way the body does an organ transplant. If it’s an attitude like altruism you might say consciousness is pushing back simply because people are endemically selfish and self-serving. However, there are other kinds of data for which the forgetting is harder to understand. In traditional Japanese karate, Kata are the choreographed moves against an imagined opponent. These represent a mixture of beauty and aggression and can range from 16 movements up to 54 (Koryugojushiho) and beyond. If you don’t constantly practice Koryugojushiho, you will forget it. Language itself can similarly resist retention if not always used. Undoubtedly, you've met those who spoke perfect French after their junior year abroad but then complained they'd forgot everything by the time they returned to France as adults. Looking through your retrospectroscope, you may conclude this “momentary” form of memory is the purest and most spiritual, since it reinforces the notion of living in the now.

read "Is Your Self-Invention a Success? by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "What's Love Got To Do With It" by Tina Turner




Thursday, May 25, 2023

Hamlet by Joe Schmo


 

Hamlet is by Shakespeare, but it can be by anyone. The name isn’t copyrighted nor are the emotions. Gonsharov’s Oblamov is Hamlet as is obviously Heinrich Muller’s Hamletmachine. BTW Tolstoy once told Chekhov he was almost as bad as Shakespeare. To Be or Not To Be by Ernst Lubitsch (1942) is a madcap comedy with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny about a production of Hamlet going on in Nazi occupied Warsaw. In this version Hamlet is more about the actors than the play, an interesting take since the play within the play,The Murder of Gonzago is also essentially an in your face Hamlet. It wouldn’t be surprising if Hamlet didn’t raise his mug in the For Dummies series, but what would a Hamlet kit comprise? First of all you need a guy who's traumatized by some kind of knowledge of which he’s only partially aware. In the actual play Hamlet sees a ghost, but is also the ghost since his father’s name is Hamlet too. You need a love interest, one that can be created by a pre-Raphaelite artist like Millais. And you need a Fortinbras to arrive. With only these three characters you could have a nice chamber play or on the other hand if you were Cecille B. Demille you might imagine Hamlet with a cast of thousands, where Elsinore is like Times Square and 42nd on New Year’s Eve as the ball is about to drop.

read "Hamlet of A Stop At Willoughby" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Barbara" (1960) by The Temptations

also listen to "What's Love Got to Do With It" by Tina Turner

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Is Grief Contagious?

What is the relationship of feelings of inferiority and insecurity to grief? You grieve loss but not a failure to attain something which is still in the realm of possibility. The problem is that it leads to the no man’s land of pure misery for which there's little or no catharsis. On the other hand, can grief itself lead to feelings of inferiority and insecurity? You’d think that the aggrieved individual, the mourner commands a certain degree of respect and even admiration—when they show an ability to push on in spite of everything. But death is frightening to many people who often look at solitude as a disease. You may at first commiserate with the cancer victim, but then you go through a secondary stage where, in order to protect yourself (from the fear it could happen to you), you begin to blame the sufferer. If they’d avoided diet sodas, cigarettes, booze, they might not have been hit with this or that scourge. On globally, you look at the grief stricken mourner as being infected with a highly contagious disease, known as life, from which you seek to be spared.

read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and listen to "Bernadette" by The Four Tops


Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Are Humankind and Nature Bipolar?

Iskandar and the Talking Tree

Nature can be the enemy as has been evident from the biblical flooding and drought which have accompanied global warming. There are Cassandras who believe the earth is actually off its rocker. On the other hand even confronting severe elements, you may find yourself experiencing the delusion you're one with nature. The notion of cosmic indifference is anathema if you’re in the throes of this kind of exhilaration. It’s a sweet dream that belies the fact that humankind may inhabit nature while at the same time essentially having little in common with it. Homo sapiens are characterized by will and consciousness. There have been those who believe that trees are sentient. Hope springs eternal! But not only do nature and humans seem to be in conflict much of the time, they're literally bipolar opposites.

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

and listen to "Let Me Be the One" by Expose



Monday, May 22, 2023

"Ciao" or "Chow?"

What is the difference between “ciao” and “chow?” “Ciao” is a common way to say “goodbye” in Italian. There's something romantic and almost intimate about the word though it’s even employed by strangers. You could also say “a presto” which means "soon." “Ciao” is like “a bientot” (literally “until soon”) or “a tout a l’heure” (“in a little while”). Chow, the first word, of the popular Chinese-American dish, which is also pastime, is roughly translated as "meal." It’s interesting to deconstruct these words which resemble contractions to the extent that they're abbreviations though “chow” and “ciao” are significant since they're homonyms or words that sound alike but have different spellings and meanings. You could end a letter in French by saying “a bientot” or “a tout a l’heure.” However you might say “bises” or “kisses,” which is tantamount to the formal way that French women kiss you on both cheeks when they don’t want to “baise.” As for "chow," you might order the old #1, composed of chow main, fried rice, egg roll and a choice of egg drop or wonton soup.

read "Combination Plate" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Little China Girl" by David Bowie


Friday, May 19, 2023

If God is Dead, Where is He Buried?

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (Sanskrit edition)

“God is dead,” said Nietzsche in The Gay ScienceEcce Homo, "behold the man" is the title of his last work. However when's the service or memorial? And where's the headstone? Has God retired to Mount Olympus with all the other Greek deities or to that ecumenical cemetery occupied by the souls of Vishnu and all the multifarious gods of Hinduism, Taoism and Zoroastrianism. The Buddha is the symbol of compassion. His image, with its heavy base, resembles one of those old rotary phones. He also influenced other Gods who needed to clean up their acts. Martin Luther played this role with the Catholic Church abolishing indulgences and redefining the notion of Grace. 

read "God Redux" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "A Hundred Pounds of Clay" by Gene McDaniels


Thursday, May 18, 2023

Main Street

Practically every town in America has its Main Street. Sinclair Lewis of course wrote Main Street. The book is, incidentally, not what it sounds like to the extent that it involves a character who wants to escape from everything Main Street represents. In fact, Main Street was ahead of its time in that it proposed a Bovaryesque character whose "aspirationalism" is accommodated by her spouse. Most main streets lead to the old Post Road whose form followed function i.e. to deliver the mail, sometimes by Pony Express. Main Streets declined after World II especially in larger demographics where they were known as inner cities. Others became antiquities. Commerce was pushed out of town, onto Route 1, which generally paralleled an interstate. There you find your clothing and furniture chains like Men's Warehouse and Raymour and Flannigan and naturally all the fast food outlets from Burger King to Popeyes and Dunkin’ Donuts that put humankind at the top of the food chain. 

read "Diasporic Dining: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "25 Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr



Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Art For Life's Sake

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali (1931)

A work of art, provided it’s not aleatory and doesn’t deploy surrealist devices like automatic writing, posits a universe of connectivity. The catharsis of a mystery derives from the solution. The pieces of the so-called puzzle are put together. Art, on the other hand, partakes of the Freudian and Heideggerian notion of The Uncanny. Here the experience is that of a virgin world that's strange, untouched and devoid of preconception. Still, it’s a device which would not otherwise be in the purview of an audience. Art is a curated form of reality whether it’s promoting a stoic vision or, in fact, explosive Milesian changeability. Nature is not raw. Its laws pertain both to the macrocosm (dark matter and dark energy) and the microcosm (quanta). Science may provide beauty in its unraveling of the mysteries of the universe but it doesn't create the kind of rapture that comes from Wagner's Liebestod fromTristan and Isolde. Beauty can be an element of an esthetic experience but it’s not necessary to it. Similarly order and wonder can radiate from a vision of Kepler planets, but such visions might not momentarily solve a problem--say the way Inspector Poirot can.

read "The End of Genius and the Rise of the Compassionate Artist" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

SAVE THE DATE!


Etsy card
Know those “Save the Date” reminders? They used to come in the mail. Now they’re likely to be in your e mail “In” box. They’re both optimistic and a kind of slap in the face. How are you to “save the date” when you don’t even know if you’re going to be on earth in six months? Once you reach a certain age, “save thee date” becomes a reprimand, an example of the hamartia, the tragic flaw, inherent in the human condition.  But let’s say it looks like you’re going to make it. Caveat Emptor! Beware the Jacquie Lawson e-mail invite to follow. In this age of Siri and Alexa, why bother to write your own invitation or even obit when it can be done with no hands in cyberspace? 

read "Obit." by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and watch the trailer for the animation of Erotomania




Monday, May 15, 2023

Trump Cries "Fire!"


Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Mel Brooks (who made Hitler the stuff of comedy in The Producers) and George Carlin ("7 Words You Can’t Say On TV") were all famous for their provocations. The recently deceased former mayor of Cincinnati, Jerry Springer, led to Howard Stern, the father of shock jockeys. Donald Trump, a former friend of Stern’s who appeared on his show (until Stern decided not to vote for his protege) employed the uncensored approach with great effect.The Apprentice became a staple of the reality TV that eventually characterized his presidency. "You once said using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge could not happen," Kaitlan Collins remarked at the recent CNN sponsored Republican Town Hall. "Why is it different now?" Trump received roars of laughter when he responded "Now I am not president." Bingo! To Trump politics is a big joke. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously defined the limits of free speech as "crying fire in a crowded theater." For Trump, you can get away with anything including January 6 (the current example of “crying fire”) if you know how to deliver the punch line. Those who try to grapple with Trump, who also bears comparison to Don Rickles, by using rationality, might as well be reading Robert’s Rules to Monty Python. CNN, which has now achieved the dubious honor of being the most boring and upright citizen in television news, made a gargantuan mistake in giving Trump the floor. Famously a Tai Chi grandmaster challenged an MMA champ. Who do you wager won  (and how fast)? You fight fire with fire, not brimstone. 

read "The Final Solution: Was Hitler a New York Liberal At Heart?" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

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


Friday, May 12, 2023

The Trump Clinton Correctional Facility

Clinton Correctional Facility (photo: Xamreb)

The recent convictions of Donald Trump are inadvertent naming opportunities for facilities in both the state and federal prison system. Upstate NewYork is the home of the maximum security Clinton Correctional institution. When the former president moves in the public will be able to enjoy the oxymoronic Trump Clinton. Angola is notorious in Louisiana but adding the Trump imprimatur will definitely brighten the stakes. The question of neon signs of the kind that have graced Trump casinos always comes up. All prisons need their visitors and the Trump brand will likely be a draw both to criminals and those visiting them. Manhattan is home to the luxurious Trump Tower but what would the Trump name do for the beleaguered Riker’s Island? One might want to ask the CFO of the Trump organization Allen Weisselberg who recently spent five months there and let’s not forget Trump Sing Sing which would be a howl.Trump recently stated that the groping of women by stars has been going on for a million years. A million years ago E. Jean Carroll would have changed her name to E. Jean Trump due to what happened in the Bergdorf's dressing room. After all these years, she simply gets $5 million, after being sent out to pasture. And what about Melania and a Melrumpia logo gracing say Leavenworth?

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

and listen to "Chain Gang" by Sam Cooke





Thursday, May 11, 2023

The Triple Crown

Secretariat (photo: Dell Hancock)

Have you ever gone for a trifecta like the Triple Crown ie The Kentucky Derby, The Preakness and Belmont, as far as aspiration is concerned? You’ve come up with the cockamamie idea that you increase your chances with three impossibilities rather than one—as if the roulette wheel were likely to stop right on all your numbers. Faites les jeux! In fact the probability swings against you precisely because of the magical thinking that goes into the notion of that great come and get it day. What usually, in fact, transpires when everything looks like it’s going your way? Answer: you find yourself at the event horizon of a black hole. One disappointment is bad enough but failing to get the job, the romantic partner and the sunny weather to match is likely to succeed in only one thing—taking the wind out of your sails. When it rains it pours may apply to rain but not good fortune. Go back in the itinerary of your life. You’ll probably find that nice things happen when you least expect them and sometimes without the adrenaline rush that only impossibilities can produce. 

read "Limbo" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review

and listen to "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" by Marvin Gaye


Wednesday, May 10, 2023

How to Endure a Lousy Work of Art

Enduring a lousy work of art, particularly when it’s theater, is like being cornered by someone at a party who won’t stop talking at you. It’s very hard to extricate oneself from one of these rants. It’s almost an act of aggression, say like walking out of Cats. People look at you. In the case of your conversant or interlocutor, if that is the case, its requires far more rebellion. You have to get around them no matter how rude it is to cut someone off in mid-sentence. Amateur plays which you attend for the sake of novice director or actor, you may unfortunately know, pose an even more difficult problem since your activity can be so hurtful as to make them give up theater, if that is their ambition, forever. But what are you to do? Let’s say your kid's English teacher invites you to the senior class's 8-hour production of Strange Interlude or the even more voluminous Nicholas Nickleby. Walk out and your kid is going to flunk.

read "Moose Murders" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope

and listen "Ain't That Peculiar" by Marvin Gaye




Tuesday, May 9, 2023

A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti famously wrote A Coney Island of the Mind (1958)which might have been the epigraph for Ray Ashley’s Little Fugitive (1953). The black and white movie sees the iconic amusement park from the point of view of a 7-year-old who’s run away from home. There was the Garden of Eden where Eve bit into the Forbidden Fruit and the Cyclone where the Adamic fall is relived every day in real time. The forbidding climb on the old wooden rails leads to a precipitous drop into a nothingness that’s the objective correlative for everything from a punch in the stomach to the feeling of being abandoned by a lover—and for which one is never  prepared. The Cyclone literally takes the wind out of you. Readers of the Ferlinghetti, which is one of the most popular books of poetry ever written, with over a million copies in print, will also be familiar with another classic of the same era, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. Here are a few lines from the Ferlinghetti's eulogy after which the book is named: 

she too lay down flat

                                                    and just lay there looking up
                                                                                         at nothing
                   yet fingering the old flute
                                                            which nobody played
                       and finally looking over
                                                              at him
              without any particular expression
                                                             except a certain awful look
                        of terrible depression

read "Slumming" by Francis Levy, HuffPost
and listen to "Round Midnight" by Miles Davis

Monday, May 8, 2023

Should You Think What You Say?


Mario Savio

Should you say what you think? Disinhibition is a little like the famous misquote about the reports of Mark Twain's death. It’s over-touted, to the extent that all roads lead to Access Hollywood. On the other hand how to reconcile this with the hard fought free speech cases around Lenny Bruce, Henry Miller and the Ur-instance of censorship of art, James Joyce’s Ulysses? Remember Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement? Defenders of the First Amendment correctly surmise that once you attack inalienable rights like free speech there's no turning back. Here's an issue on which conservative Federalists and lefty defenders of human imagination like Laura Kipnis can find common ground. On the other hand, Tucker Carlson may defend his right to say the election was "rigged and stolen" even when he knows it isn’t true just like someone with a drinking problem can claim their right to cocktail hour—until they kill someone while driving under the influence. 

read "Talk Dirty to Me" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Say It's All Right" by The Impressions

Friday, May 5, 2023

War

Carl von Clausewitz

An eye for an eye is like “war,” a card game that’s popular among kids. It’s very simple, you split the deck and the high card wins in each scrimmage between the two players. Turning the other cheek doesn’t bring to mind any games since there are no winners or losers where forgiveness is the currency. Recently the father of a young girl who had been shot stated to the court that he wished her assailant would die in prison, but there have been cases where even the victims of the most egregious and horrifying crimes do little more than pray (or even try to understand those who have harmed them). Penitentiaries are based on an eye for an eye. In states where there's capital punishment, killers are captured and executed. The word for penitentiary contains the root “repent” which is express sorrow for wrongs done, but a penitentiary is also a place where one is pensive and thinks. The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that were established in the wake of apartheid and repression in South Africa and Tunisia essentially are penitentiaries—albeit with a different mandate than ones like Sing Sing. Truth and memory are the lingua franca of such organizations and they represent a triumph of love and intelligence over revenge. The example of Hitler and Chamberlain is often given to justify the notion of payback or consequences. It’s CBT on a diplomatic scale, an example of Clausewitz’s famous “war is diplomacy by other means.” The only problem is that such games of war only end with winners and losers. If you have any cards left to play you’re going to use them until the tide turns. The loser will never be content until he becomes a winner again.

read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

and listen to "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones


Thursday, May 4, 2023

A.Comparison Between Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein




What do Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein have in common? To begin with they’re both from Queens and both like to grope women. Both have been in show business. At present one is a politician running to be elected to his former position. The other is a convict who has received a sentence literally and metaphorically while the other recently remained speechless when his case was brought to trial. On the basis of their past actions, both could give their avocation as rapist, though Trump apparently still enjoys golf.

read "Support the Harvey Weinstein Legal Defense Fund!" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Super Freak" by Rick James

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Chatbot and Surrealism

Andre Breton
Many surrealist techniques of writing require suspension of conscious control. “Automatic writing,” for instance, is a bit like stream of consciousness. But what if Chatbot, the use of AI in generating content, were employed by a latter-day Andre Breton, the creator of both automatic writing and the Manifesto of Surrealism. How is artificial intelligence going to predict the aleatory? There has been much concern amongst educators about students using Chatbot to ghost write their papers. But what if the assignment is to write down whatever comes into your head? How will a computer-generated consciousness accommodate? Have you ever talked to Alexa or Simi? They’re great when you ask them to play an oldy like “I’m the One Who Love Forgot” which begins “Nobody loves me Nobody cares…” But let’s say you want Alexa do call up Cage’s “4’33,” which famously deals with “the absence of intended sounds.” In order to prevent cheating on exams, high school and college teachers should simply assign students to extemporize. Say you’re on Julius Caesar, who died on March 15, 44 B.C. “Caesar salad, one month to go before taxes, horny I am. What happens if someone cries May Day on May 1?…” No Chatbot is going to come anywhere near recreating something the author doesn't know themselves.

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

and listen to "Tell It Like It It Is" by Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville and Greg Allmann

 

 

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas



Ursula K. Le  Guin (photo: Marian Wood Kolisch)
“The trouble is we have a bad habit encouraged by pedants and sophisticates of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the reason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and terrible boredom of pain.” No this is not a quote from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem where the philosopher and one- time “bedfellow” of Heidegger coined what would become an infamous term. It’s comes from a dystopian short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s a jarring repointing of the moral compass in a piece that has the same kind of grotesque denouement as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” The author is, in fact, arguing against herself since the story which deals with the darkest elements of human nature, in a particularly disturbing way, gives no hint of the attitude which is, at the same time, prescribed. But if you take it at face value, it does present a rather telling paradox. Laurie Colwin wrote Happy All the Time, but she was an exception in a unverse of writers who might be said to lean towards Voltaire whose Pangloss parodies such optimism in his repeated iteations of Leibnitz’s “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds,”--in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

read "What Does It All Mean" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Beachwood 4-5789" by the Marvelettes

Monday, May 1, 2023

"Hebrew, Arabic and Death"


Kafka wrote in German which was the language of the educated classes even though he was an inhabitant of Prague. During the time of Peter the Great, when Russians strived to be Europeanized, the aristocracy were Francophiles. It’s curious, in this regard, that Peter's dream of an imperial Russia is today shared by Putin who is famously xenophobic about the EU.  Language has always been a signifier of both class and ethnicity. Yiddish a combination of Hebrew and German became the lingua franca of the population of impoverished Eastern European and Russian Jews while rabbinical scholars employed the language of the Talmud, Hebrew. You might say that Yiddish was a demotic language like Czech but it's not surprising that the secular literature of writers I.B. Singer and the politics of the socialist bund were born from Yiddish. Language reflects identity as does art but in a different and more widespread way. Lots of people speak French but there are only a limited number of Monets. In the current Ukraine conflict, the indigenous language is something the invaders have tried to crush in the hope of dissipating cultural ties. NB "And everything in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and Death" writes Ruth Margalit quoting Yehuda Amichai's epigraph to Anton Shammas's Arabesques. ("Writing the Nakba in Hebrew" by Ruth Margalit,The New York Review of Books, 4/20/23)

read "God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and watch the trailer for the animation of Erotomania