Oyster

photo of oyster (David Monniaux)

Imagine Elon Musk returning from Outer Space. He’s planning a layover on one of his 4500 plus Starlink satellites. He approaches the Solar System from The Milky Way. Neptune appears first. Pluto was essentially excommunicated by the IAU (International Astronomical Association) in 2006. The rings of Saturn and Mars are all signposts. Musk is now offering the equivalent of the self-driving car in rocketry. You just enter the title of that famous Alfred Bester novel The Stars My Destination and the universe is your oyster. Now coming back Musk is wistful. He still calls the earth home, yet it seems puny considering that he's now successfully monetizing black holes--which will be billed as the ultimate tourist destination for the elite business traveler.

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

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Does It Matter?

The complexity of everyday reality belies the need for transcendence. Take for instance CRISPR which challenges the adage that you get what you get in terms of the hand you’re dealt. Of course not everyone is born with a full deck, but that’s another matter. Or take the question of other life forms. Kepler planets 1200 light years from earth show the presence of carbon which is one of the basic ingredients of life. String theory accounts for dimensionality and quanta with the small world. Dark Matter explains the right stuff and Dark Energy the endless expansion which increases the distance of celestial objects from each other thusly the inevitable darkening of Outer Space. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” might be rephrased “you don’t need philosophy when you have heaven and earth."

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

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Emile

Man is a social animal. Even hermits like the Unabomber issue broadsheets. Their recusal is, in fact, the message. People find many ways to join and one of them is standing apart. Proust retired to his cork-lined room. For Emily Dickinson it was Amherst. In fact her soubriquet does little justice to the complexities of her negotiation with reality. Emile, or On Education is the title of a work by Rousseau dealing with the individual's tortured relationship with so called civilization. The  first sentence reads "Everything is good as it leaves the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man." Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents addresses the price humans must pay and what they have to forgo in order to live in society. Apparently, humanity must jump through hoops to commune with with itself. 

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Is Ronan Farrow a Ninja?

sketch by Hokusai

Ronan Farrow sticks his investigative paring knife into Elon Musk in the current New Yorker ("Elon Musk's Shadow Rule," 8/28/23). Parenthetically it’s always amusing when gladiators at this level ie a journalist who's toppled the likes of Harvey Weinstein meets his match. Actually in terms of size and strength Musk would win. The jury is out in terms of cleverness and cunning. Ronan is the kind of fight name you give a Ninja or superhero. The question is whose genes did he inherit? Is he a Sinatra? But imagine Musk setting his sights in a different direction than the 4500 plus satellites of Starlink, the self-driving and self-doubting Tesla (that only stops as an after thought)? What about the kamikaze antics with Peter Thiel? Lo what if Elon Musk lowered his sights and acquired all the Dollar Stores? What if he went after Roto-Rooter, Meineke, what Trump calls "the failing New York Times" or the bankrupt Friendly’s? Remember that scene in The Great Dictator where Charlie Chaplin bounces his world up and down like a rubber ball? 

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

and read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

Orpheus in Fulton County

Fulton Country Courthouse

Remember the explosive scene in Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus (1959) where the director brilliantly replays the original myth against the floats and garishly lewd masks and puppets of the Rio's Carnival. Orpheus frantically tries to find his love who disappears into frivolity. Fellini used a similar backdrop in 81/2, Roma, La Dolce Vita and many other movies where childhood memories of carnival interweave with the pageants themselves. Little Fugitive uses Coney Island as the nightmarish background in which a runaway finds himself. The theme in all of this is the funhouse, the hall of mirrors where the parade of life in its most distorted forms constitutes a reality all its own.The sight of MAGA luminaries including a former president and his chief of staff turning themselves in to be arrested, fingerprinted and photographed for a mugshot is a carnival scene even Fellini couldn't have devised.

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

and read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

Clockwork

Chlorpromazine or Thorazine is a powerful tranquilizer used on horses. Besides being barbaric, prisons are like nuclear reactors that like Chernobyl can melt down and poison the environment. Incarceration is also incredibly expensive. What if the Clinton Correctional Facility or Dannemora, as it’s called, were closed and all the inmates released—on one condition, they were all put on horse tranquilizer? Finland has a highly advanced criminal justice system. The word penitentiary connotes a place where one pays penance, but it can also point to a place of thinking. Rehabilitation rather than punishment is the Finnish ideal. But let’s get back to the idea of drugs a la Anthony  Burgess’s crew of Droogs in Clockwork Orange. Brainwashing? Lobotomization? But shouldn’t some criminal brains be washed? 

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

and read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl (1910)

In Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology {bracketed} items are those objects about which one maintains preconceptions. The bracketing is also known as epoche. But are there any people places or things about which an initial sighting hasn't created a tattoo? On a more practical everyday level, it’s what people complain about in relationships when they accuse the other of being intransigent. Is it they or them? Isn't is it, by definition, one's own perception that's unchanging? Another essential tenet of phenomenology (propounded by Heidegger) is that subjectivity cannot be created by inanimate objects. You see the {table} in a multiplicity of ways but a table can’t return the favor. Whoever said life was fair? Everybody is dealt a different hand but that poor table is never going to get lucky.

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Barbenheimer

Do you feel like you can almost touch the distant past while  finding it hard to remember what you did yesterday? Yes short term memory is one of the victims of age and it’s rare that one undertakes activities which leave the kind of indelible tattoo early experiences have. The mind, one could say, is like a very beautiful flower or supernova whose efflorescence is attendant upon its death. The biology of every consciousness is different but you might look at the question of impressionability as you do how empty or full one’s tank is. The person who was in a fog throughout childhood may suddenly be receptive to a windfall while his or her counterpart who’s been physically and metaphysically over-informed remains skeptically distant from anything new. You may remember the Bergman trilogy Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Lights and The Silence while Barbenheimer, remains like one of the faint and distant lights in the night sky.

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The Entertainer

When the the theater workers strike they say the Broadway stages have gone dark. Of course the locution is used in the period when they strike the set of one production with another in the metaphorical eaves. Theater can be very boring and you can’t even eat popcorn. That’s one of the reasons for the tedium; it’s a little like a religious service. At its very worst it’s funereal. You have to endure the indignant hushes of all attendees at this solemn event. More often than not, one is asked to be in a Greek theatre with its spiritual overtones rather than the raucus and aptly named Globe where the audiences fornicated in the aisles. Even though Godard famously intoned that cinema is  "truth at 24 frames per second," it's theater that's more like life. To begin with you have fresh and blood actors. Further, in fact, you have something tantamount to action painting. Followers of Stanislavsky will protest but what's on stage is not a representation of life but in effect life itself, to wit actors in a play and life which is often boring. 

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Rhino in the Closet

Life is comprised of a relatively short period of time in which people with a tendency to divorce end up marrying the same person over and over again--even complaining about the same kind of abuse as if it never happened before. Perhaps these unfortunates possess that "built-in forgetter” that allows alcoholics to proceed on with their next binge. But on a more mundane level there's a duplicative tendency that causes people to repeat the same things. About 20 years ago “at the end of the day” started to metastasize through the body politic along with its country cousin  “sounds like a plan.” The net effect of all this "newspeak" is to underscore the proliferation and redundancy of human existence. In fact the more that people protest their individuality, the more uniform and predictable they become. It’s all an absurdist drama by some forgotten playwright like Ionesco who made the point by turning all his characters into rhinos.

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Dream Catching

Attic by Willem De Kooning

Have you ever had a dream of longing about someone who doesn’t exist? Dream catching or dream chasing is what it’s been called and Freudian psychobabblers will term this  “screen memory.” But who's to say that the product of Thomas De Quincy’s opium dreams cannot be issued a license. Dreams can’t be commodified or monetized and that's supposed to determine their reality. But who's to say that some longueur conjured at night can’t become your other. BTW, the difference between a significant other and an other is tantamount to that between the alter ego and the self. The point is don't give greater valence to your waking life than your sleep. It's comparable to abstraction in art. Some people think what's abstract isn't real, but for the abstract painter, it's a reality.

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Scenes From a Marriage

The base and the rest of the country should go into marriage counseling. The level of passion exuded by what Hillary Clinton once described as “the deplorables” is so high that it can’t be discountenanced even if you think Trump is breaking all sorts of laws. Isn’t the divided country like one of those fighting couples who glare at each other in therapy, showing no sign that either side will relent? Remember that intellectuals have historically provided the ideas by which revolution is justified, but the desire to revolt, as is the case with Trump’s lumpenproletariat base, comes first. Ideation is post facto.Therefore you’re not talking to an enraged Retrumplican about their ideas. It’s their feelings that have to be addressed. What the MAGAs are doing is typical of an unhappy partner. Fani Willis claims the Trump tried to rig the election. No replies Trump on Truth Social, it’s just the reverse. What does the marriage counselor do? He or she can say “I hear you.” The idea is to always give credence since you can’t doubt “the truth” of an emotion. French deconstructionists would argue that all statements about reality are culturally bound meaning that there’s no absolute truth. It's Trump’s right to call Fani Willis “a racist” under the theory, one would suppose, that he's white amongst other things. In marriage counseling as well as politics, there's only an absolute truth, a Kantian categorical imperative—if both parties agree to it. Don't most marriages break up because a couple sees things differently?

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What to Do If Someone Sees You Naked?

What to do if someone sees you naked? In the old days people covered their so-called private parts with fig leaves. Private Parts is the title of a Howard Stern book in which “private” is a double entendre. Gonads are private but so are thoughts—which is one of the big problems in the 21st century where a person can take off all their clothes and end up revealing nothing about themselves. Stern, in fact, once had a woman on his show who wanted to undress. However, the shock jock refused to let her disrobe until she had talked about her father's suicide. Getting back to the original question, sensibility has changed. Most women walk around half undressed anyway and the question becomes not their embarrassment but yours. You may not want to look simply because you can’t get an image out of your head. Nakedness can pollute the imagination. It’s like a very prominent color. Remember how Matisse’s “Red Studio” changed the course of modern art? The onus of nudity has gone from the  performer, in the case of a strip show, to the viewer who will ultimately require a good brainwashing before proceeding on with their day.

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CWT or Creosote World Today

La Grande Bouffe (1973) starting Philippe Noiret was prescient. The movie dealt with a group of aristocrats who eat themselves to death. Actually the indulging involves sex too. If you remember there was a famous Monty Python character, Mr. Creosote, a fat restaurant patron who vomits over everyone. Satiation is the major issue of first world countries suffering from surplus. There would be no audience for La Grande Bouffe in Yemen. From a deconstructionist as well as purely humanistic point of view, the movie illustrates the fact that  first and third world societies speak two different languages. The latter relates to survival, the former to romanticism. Significantly, Trump’s lawyer recently defended his clients words as “aspirational.” It’s astonishing how provincial “The West” turns out to be. OA and SA meetings are the lingua franca. How to bridge the gap between these two, (really many many worlds)? The rich could give to the poor rather than eating themselves to death but that’s an unlikely state of affairs. 

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Infinite Jest

Does intentionality ultimately result from God? Scientists posit the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago as a first cause? But there are certain immutable laws that exist in their own eternities. For instance, infinity creates its own infinities. Are all my thoughts the result of an enormous explosion that created the boson, the first and most elementary particle of matter?And does that matter? The Kantian categorical imperative exists in its own philosophical ether as does all synthetic a priori knowledge. Time naturally defies the notion of a beginning or end to anything including divinity itself.  

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MAGA Millions

The huge Megamillions jackpot recently hitting the 1.5 billion mark attracts the attention even of the wealthy. Says one: I’m rich but with this money perhaps I will finally become generous. Maybe the thought would simply be I’ll be richer or I will use the new money to speculate in ways that I didn’t before. After all, I have nothing to lose. Venture capital, bit coin, gold and even currency—all areas usually avoided by those interested in wealth conservation would be on the table. I will live a new parallel existence with my free money traveling to casinos in Monaco in my custom fitted white Bentley. Naturally I would have beauties in revealing gowns hanging on my arms and a white telephone from 50s Italian movies plugged in next to the roulette tables. I would receive calls from my many petitioners including heads of state and Hollywood film producers humbling themselves at my feet. OR what about the unlikely other scenario. My new found wealth only makes it more apparent than ever that I should give all my money away and take a vow of poverty like Saint Francis. 

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

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Juggernaut

Van Williams as Green Hornet (1966)

A juggernaut takes over your imagination. Hard to believe that there's something coming at you with the force of a head-on. Hard to think of romantic love so violently. However, there are things that take place on a smaller level. An unreturned call or email or just waiting for that first cup of coffee at your local diner at the very moment that a bus load of kids busts through the door--can all feel like a juggernaut. The mind is totally taken over by this David if you look at consciousness as your Goliath. You can't do much about bad fortune or lost love. Trump is a juggernaut. He's the creature you wrangle with in your dreams, when your punches find only air. You don't have to be political to suffer from Trumpeopathy. He's the The Joker, the evil character that only a Superhero like The Green Hornet can destroy and Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor all rolled into one.

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

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The MoMAs and the Papas

MoMA is an example of art koshering capitalism. Set in midtown around the corner from the University Club, it lends the patina of art to the excesses of capitalist exploitation that created Gotham. Nothing new really. You have only to look to the Frick and the Morgan library. Robber barons built the city and created its culture. When you take the Viaduct around Grand Central, you face the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt. How much suffering created the Pyramids, Angkor Wat or The Taj Mahal—part of the 7 Wonders and beloved objects of beauty? So what that the endowment of MoMA was good PR for the Rockefellers. But let’s not forget that Standard Oil fueled the engines of the Industrial Revolution, that ultimately contributed to the Greenhouse Effect. NB. The Georgia O'Keefe exhibition at MoMA, "To See Takes Time," runs until August 12th.

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Will Trump Get the Chair?

Trump rallies recall Jim Jones. If you remember his followers did more than allow him to walk down Fifth Avenue and kill somebody. They performed a massive human sacrifice using their own bodies. You will never attend a gathering like that for Biden since he's only a person. But what to do with Trump when he's convicted? Allow him to attain martyrdom in the solitary confinement he would have to be put in for his own safety? A million hours of community service which would enable him to create The Sorcerers Apprentice? Have him wear Hester Prynn’s Scarlett Letter “S” around Mar-a-Lago? There are those who would like to put him in stocks—a medieval torture that is also a financial instrument?

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

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Sweden Journal: Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin (1954)

“I paint with my back to the world.” The quote from Agnes Martin uttered by a young Danish art historian in the midst of a walking tour  epitomizes the almost hypnotic power of certain truths. Martin actually produced a six painting series, "With My Back to the World." However, the remark given to a small group far from the maddening crowd, as it were, highlights not only the ethos and ars poetica of a famous abstractionist, but cuts through the air, making the world anew at least for one listener. It’s a one-line aphorism that's at once ineffable and non-existent. It’s also timeless while at the same time changing both the past and the future. Time travelers are careful not to leave a hair, but a random phrase can change one’s world forever. What is Martin trying to say, then? That the artist ultimately lives in his or her head? 

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and also read Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department

The Pig Latin Version of The Seventh Seal

Imagine a Pig Latin version of the Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. Ivo van Hove famously brought Scenes From a Marriage and Cries and Whispers to the stage, the latter to BAM. He’d be a candidate for this unique interpretation. Of course the first question is whether the Pig Latin would bd dubbed or subtitled. There’s a famous scene where the minister in Winter Light loses his cool along with faith. He screams at his wife that he's tired of hearing about your periods. In Pig Latin that would be Miay iredtay foay... and so forth. Compare that to cogito ergo sum, carpe diem Ecce Homo the title of Nietzsche tome and literally “here is the man.” Janus used to own the Bergman canon. Now it’s Criterion but imagine also Max von Sydow playing chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. Makes you ask about the Pig Latin for Ibid.

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

read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

Denmark Journal: Designmuseum Denmark

photo: FLevy

At the beginning of "The Future is Present" show at Copenhagen's Museum of Design, the environmentalist David Suzuki is quoted thusly: “The future doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened. But because we invented the idea of a future, we’re the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.“ There are plenty of “Wonder Boxes”which were the displays of ornamental objects in royal palaces, plenty of the use of repetitive patterns in fabric design and, of course, a plethora of chairs. Danish modern is proudly distinguished from international modernism but a common theme running through most of the current exhibits is globalism, with design seen as a way of thinking and state of mind. “The functionalist doctrine was in fact based on contemporary non-figurative abstract art rather than functions” is a quote attributed to Philip Johnson and the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock. It’s an eye opener if you're someone who has always discountenanced the glass and steel boxes which rise out of Gotham. 

read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

and also read Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department

Star Wars

It’s not Communism versus Capitalism, but autocracy and democracy. MAGA Republicans want to place more power in the executive branch which would give the president control over the DOJ and FBI. Biden’s low ratings reflect a misunderstanding of the enormity of the challenge he has faced. If he is successful, history will regard him in a different light. Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping and lesser dictators like Victor Orban and Kim Jong-un truly embody The Empire with The Rebel Alliance represented by the United States and the NATO powers. The prescience of Star Wars is uncanny.

read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

and also read Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department