Garbage

Last night Lawrence O'Donnell gaslighted Trumpty Dumpty when he threw the former  president's appellation right back in "The Dumpster's" face. Trump brought political discourse to a new low when he called Kamala Harris "garbage" (this after responding to president Biden's heartfelt and memorable speech by calling him the worst president in US history). "Garbage" was how O'Donnell described Trump's behavior. O'Donnell is a journalist known for his keen-eyed preening of facts and calling Trump "garbage" is simply a matter of record. Everyone knows Trump aka "The Dumpster" is a repository for garbage. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Jim Jordan, JD Vance, Mike Johnson etc are all the unrecycled "garbage"--that Trump doesn't have the courtesy to bring to the dump. Oh and yeah Trump himself is the kind of garbage that earns a fine when it's left the middle of Fifth Avenue (where the former president will be found exercising his immunity when he starts shooting people). O'Donnell was never so irate nor so brilliant as he was last night in reporting on the nation wide "garbage" crisis.

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

and listen to "Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler

Bannon

photo: Gage Skidmore

Eloquence and erudition can be hypnotic. Words cast a spell. They're like a disingenuous seduction.You're won over only to become a scorned lover who's nothing more than a notch on some Lothario's belt. Netanyahu and Trump are great speakers. Biden not so much. In the past Kennedy outshone Nixon and Obama, McCain. Bernie sanders is perfervid. AOC adds beauty to the mix. Majorie Taylor Greene is "grunge" and Matt Gaetz with his ghoulish pompadour is the Boris Karloff of the house. A number of factors can tip the scales. William Jennings Bryan famously came up short against Clarence Darrow on the evolution issue. Hearing someone like Bannon quoting Milton's "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" in  American Dharma, you may have to wake yourself up when your conscience is caught off guard by that and his wicked repartee.

read "Fav Lines From Francis Levy's Seven Days in Rio" Two Dollar Radio

and listen to "There's a Moon Out Tonight" by The Capris

Picasso

When you took algebra you learned about equations with two unknowns and about plotting lines with coordinates representing X and Y values. Would that the universe followed such neat laws. The kinds of mathematical relationships are reflected in math, but have little if nothing to do with life. The amount of unknowns is generally incalculable. Imagine trying to plot a graph of one's life, even as you got closer to the point where you were closer to the end. Calculus is designed to deal with variation, but it's a little like "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio." Math like art is a form of beauty that distills and at the same time excludes the complexity of the life force as it paints its truth. "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth" is the famous Picasso quote.

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

and listen to "Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler

Raskolnikov

There are unrepentant criminals and sociopaths who only know a "crime" is something you can't get away with? Are crimes those acts which societies regard as offenses against norms? For instance, inTexas, even a woman in danger of death is guilty if she terminates a pregnancy. Most New Yorkers would encourage her and the inmates of Sachsenhausen to break the law.Those opposed to a carceral state tell inmates to escape no matter what. Raskolnikov had no problem seeing the murder of the old pawnbroker as a crime. If anything Dostoevsky's character has an over active conscience. The novel, after the murder, is about wrestling with their own evil--amongst other things. Kamala Harris was the attorney general of California before she became vice president. She knows how to try a case. Her opponent has publically stated he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot people (btw what happens if another gunslinger shoots him back, do they partake of presidential immunity?) and that major celebrities can grab women by the crotch. How will she prosecute her felonious opponent?

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

and listen to "Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler

Alfred Döblin

'Alfred Doblin (1878-1957

Hive mind is a meme which places an entomological spin on human behavior. Actually in a beehive, the queen dominates and there's little room for alienation.You don't find bees behaving like characters in Berlin Alexanderplatz, the Alfred Doblin novel made into a TV series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Better yet there are no Holden Caulfield bees or bees that jump off bridges after reading the Sufferings of Young Werther. As Lionel Trilling once pointed out non-conformity can be a form of conformity. It's called trying too hard. You've seen those characters with the Count of Monte Cristo fixations entering the gathering wearing green cowboy boots and red scarfs around their necks. You don't find too many bees (except for the queen) dressed to kill. Conversely the comforts of the hive where identity is set are often lost on the average girl or guy. Prescribed behavior may be the order of the day in the military, therapeutic communities or cults like the Branch Davidians. But for your average lifer every day is an exercise in self-invention. You get up feeling a little like Meursault inThe Stranger then it's SOS (shave, shit and shower) and off to another thankless day drowning in a sea of workstations.

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

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

Todestrieb

Freud's couch (Robert Huffstutter)

Freud's concept of the death instinct" orTodestrieb in German is like flesh eating bacteria. First an arm, then a leg. That's whats happening to the Democratic Party. The only difference is that it's embarrassing, like a kid having a tantrum, the dirty tear-stained face followed by enuresis. Another form of this tantrum actually is paralysis. The mob famously fitted their enemies with cement shoes but this kind of defeat is one of those routs in football. The game is over. There's no way of catching up. Yet you have to run out the clock.

Lucy

Lucy (Australopithecus)

You will never foresee the future nor unravel the past. If you have a child, they are the carriers of yorr genetic footprint, your DNA. The chromosomal structure of a fossil can be analyzed. However, you can't walk with Lucy while she forages. Survival itself transforms and evolves. Homo sapiens, if it survives, will not only look but exercise the ability intrinsic to its name ina unique way concomitant with the conditions of its time. Homo sapiens are by definition epistemologists. What does it mean, to know, to be wise, sapient? Will the brain itself atrophy and even grow smaller in size with the advent of A.I.? Will there be, for instance, a Darwinian struggle between Virtual and de facto Realitly? Will one be able skip out of the material world with Empress Travel goggles? Who is to adjudicate which is "the real thing" to quote Stoppard? Will the line become so blurry that ultimately it will be impossible to know? Will there be a danger of losing one's self on vacations spun out by imagination? Which embodiment or something else? 

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

and listen to "Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles

The Second Coming

Senator Tim Scott of South  Carolina

If you survive an assassination attempt your approval rating jumps. First is the shock then the notion you've been saved in a holy war against satan (as Senator Tim Scott proclaimed with ministerial rhetorical flourish). Then comes the notion of enlightenment. It's a little like Paul on the road to Tarsus. Now introduce into this seemingly benignant mix one of the greatest public relations gambits in modern electoral history. Suddenly the contentious, fractured. and wounded Republicans of 2020 are united under Christ (or the Anti-Christ from Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" poem) aka Trump. Add to that the notion of a miraculous biblical personality transformation. The angry Moses crashing tablets has mellowed. There are no more soubriquets like "lying Hillary" or "crooked Joe." Trump has finally listened to his advisors or better God and become presidential overnight, 2024 AB or "after Butler." Add to the mix a young brash new vice presidential hopeful, with his rags to sharkskin story and beautiful wife, Usha, Yale Law School educated wife (and child of immigrants). The Democrats should simply surrender. That's not giving up by a long shot. Rather it signifies a spiritual conversion in which they will cross the aisle and make America great again by banning abortion and allowing women with troubled pregnancies to die during childbirth while an ICE dragnet purges the country of illegal immigrants and Elon Musk increases his market share of the country at large.

read The Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Esther Webman

and listen to Freda Payne's "Band of Gold"

The Berenstain Bears Access Hollywood

If Trump is re-elected will he paint The White House red like his ties? After all red states are Republican. The White House is an example of metonymy, a figure of speech in which the part symbolizes the whole. Eh voila you can just hear Wolf Blitzer talking about CNN's Red House correspondence. The White House has always been a nice tradition and surely some other Pennsylvania Avenue residents would not be happy about the color. School kids get all fuzzy when they acquire their replica Constitutions in the congressional souvenir shop. However, if Steve Miller has his way that's another "tradition" that's going to fall by the wayside. Oh and remember all the fuss about Access Hollywood--where Trump claimed one of perks of success was being able indiscriminately grab women's crotches? If there is one thing Donald Trump has taught everyone is, history is not what happened. It's what you want it to be. When the MAGA Republicans recapture The Red House, Access Hollywood will be renamed, "The Berenstain Bears Access Hollywood."

read The Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Esther Webman

and listen to Freda Payne's "Band of Gold"

The Riviera

Hotel du Cap--Eden Roc

The French Riviera is both the embodiment of glamour and squalor at the same time. Huge temples of leisure, white edifices like The Carlton face the narrow  beaches where a lone topless sun worshipper slowly achieves their dream of turning leather skin. Despite the annual film festival Cannes can be as seedy as Graham Greene's Brighton Rock where Pinkys lurk in the shadows of narrow backstreets, not to mention the lone lifeboats of excrement that floats ashore courtesy of cruise liners anchored off shore. Tina Turner lived in Villefranche one of the most lush and verdant spots on earth but one troubled by crime. Speaking of crime or war crime The Hotel du Cap in Antibes is filled with Russian gangsters and their molls, legs spread in homage to Courbet's L'Origine du monde, on poolside settees. Saint Tropez is where you go if you want to expose yourself. There you'll find a beach even popular with amputees. Sometime back terrorists made headlines stabbing parishioners at a Nice church, not far from the Promenade, facing Le Negesco--where Aschenbach auditions take place on a daily basis.

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

and listen to "Private Dancer" by Tina Turner

Thespianism

Porn has become more minimalist or shall we say, to the point, than it's ever been. However, it still has its stars. Remember La Ciciolina, the wife of Jeff Koons and one-time Italian poltician, and such great as John Holmes and Harry Reems? Today there are unnamed stars of fetish loops. For instance Any Porn features, the incredibly popular "Two Hotties Take Turns Sitting on Guy's Face." In another world they would have made it to Colbert. Now they are only on they are only on To Night and not the one hosted by Jimmy Fallon. These are two henna haired Russian beauties whose happily tied up "victim" gets sprayed with whipped cream in a denouement reminiscent of one of the early classics of silent cinema L'arroseur arose (1895). It's an updated form of pie in the face slapstick affectionately known by its practitioners as "queening." Every paraphilia has its star and there is one particularly self-effacing master of the genre who is not a Clint Eastwood or Cary Grant,  but who recalls great heart throbs of the past, particularly in his ubiquity. Basically he plays the same role in all his movies--that of the husband of an oversexed wife who coerces her hubby into believing that the marriage will only be improved if he fellates her boyfriend while then watching the two of them fuck. This anonymous and unheralded star of underground cinema would doubtless have merited a story in Arthur Knight's legendary "Sex in the Cinema" column, if Playboy had continued to exist. Linda Lovelace would later claim she'd been exploited during the making of Deep Throat, but remember Pornhub which gets tens of millions of hits per day bills itself as a "community" which is only a hop, skip and a jump from cults like MAGA . Many of today's stars look at their acting stints as pro bono work, whose only benefit finally derives from the tax deduction performers receive for the time devoted to their thespianism.

watch "Sit on My Face Song" by Monty Python

Icon Maker

"Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Larry Rivers (1953)

Trump is, if nothing else, an icon maker. That is his brilliance. The first thing he does is to create an image which in his case involves raising the flag at Iwo Jima. George Washington was an Icon maker. "Washington Crossing the Delaware" inspired the painting by Emmanuel Leutze, appropriated by Larry Rivers. There are the icons of the Greek Orthodox Church, Christ's Manger, Moses smashing the Ten Commandments and Pompeii. Hearing a train whistle far away is another of icon. Thomas Matthew Crooks joins John Hinckley Jr in the parade of attempted assassins. Then there are Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman. Crooks, 20 years old and two years out of high school was a registered Republican who would have voted for the first time in his life.

A Fan's Notes

 

From A Fan's Notes: “Like James Joyce, who tried to bend and subjugate the ironmongery of the cosmos with words (wasn’t it The Word Joyce was after?), Mr. Blue tried to undo the empyrean mysteries with Seedy and his red carpet, with his elevated alligator shoes, with the ardent push-ups he seemed so sure would make him outlast time’s ravages, with his touching search for some golden pussy that would yell to his lips the elixir of eternal life. And like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, like Quixote, Mr Blue had become the perennial mock-epic hero of his country, the salesman, the boomer who believed that at the end of the American sojourn of demeaning doorbell-ringing, of faking and fawning, he would come to the Ultimate Sale, conquer, and soar….And though Mr. Blue’s way of death was fitting…anxious about his impotence in this land of sexual gargantuan, he could have sent to a degenerate mail-order house for a faradic device which attached to the genitals helps stimulate with electrical charges a more rapturous equal act, only to have the device miscue and electrocute him, frying off his balls in the process...I had a hardcover edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. To gauge the dictionary’s breadth when buying it, I had looked up thurible, an Oriental looking container in which one burns incense, and gorp, a freakishly obese person who eats constantly because he achieves a kind of erotic splendor when sitting on the throne. The former was listed, the latter not, and and because the latter never is listed, because I don’t to this day know where I ever heard the word..." 

and listen to James Brown and Wilson Pickett together "In a Cold Sweat" et al.

The Banquet Years

Inanition is a capacious antonym of ignition. Meanings and the derivations of words are archeological and usage can defy evolution. Remember when "gay" meant happy. Today if you say a democrat is "gay," you're definitely not referring to their political condition. Matisse and Derain were Fauves. The name means wild animals ostensibly due to the way these artists shocked even the liberal-minded salon d'automne of l903. You might mistakenly think Rousseau was a Fauve because he painted sublime scenes of savage innocence delineated in Roger Shattuck's, The Banquet Years--an exploration of another side of the French avant-garde including theater personages like Alfred Jarry whose last words were "give me a toothpick." Today there are sentences that "wake" (aka "woke") to find themselves Swiss cheese. Language can create strange bedfellows as evidenced in the unholy alliance between fundamentalists and feminists over porn. Interestingly Porn Hub bills itself as a community. But don't count on finding any rent stabilized housing on their site.

read Evan Harris's review of The Kafka Studies Department, 

The East Hampton Star

and listen to "In the Bush" by Musique

Lear

Is Biden Lear on the heath, the blind man led by a fool? Who is Cordelia? Who Goneril and Regan? Who Hotspur? Who Falstaff? Who Prospero or Caliban! Who Brutus (Jerry Nadler) or for that matter Satan or Bannon? Who Hamlet and Oedipus? Who plays Claudius? Who has played his chips? Who still has pieces on the board? Or is it an endgame, "a tale told by an idiot" (The Sound and the Fury in fact). At least Biden has a running mate which is more than his felonious assailant can claim.

listen to Francis Levy's playlist for The Kafka Studies Department,

Large Hearted Boy

Revelations

One of the last sections of George Eliot's last book, Daniel Deronda is "Revelations" and one of the last chapters begins with this quote from Keats: "My spirit is too weak: mortality/Weights heavily on me like unwilling sleep,/And each imagined pinnacle and steep/Of godlike hardship tell me I must die/Like a sick eagle looking at the sky." You will also recall that The Seventh Seal which comes towards the end of The Book of Revelation, the final book of The New Testament, also hearkens the Second Coming. And from this Bergman drew the title of The Seventh Seal in which Max von Sydow plays chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot ). George Eliot was a more profound thinker than Freud. Buy Middlemarch on Amazon for the twenty bucks it will cost you and you'll save on 20 years of hefty psychoanalytic bills. Deronda, as you may remember, saves the destitute Mirah Cohen, an aspiring opera singer, from death. The scene recalls Virginia Woolf's suicide except that Eliot's character is spared from drowning. Here is Eliot describing Mordecai, a Cabbalist, who is Mirah's long lost brother: "this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering himself to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching any more consequences to them than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ringing above their market-places--had the chief elements of greatness: a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies... ."

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to 'Hello Stranger" by Barbara Lewis

Norman Mailer's Gesamtkunstwerk

Jeff Zimbalist's How to Come Alive colorfully documents a career in work and love that included six wives (and nine children) one of whom, Adele Morales, Mailer comes near murdering the night before the announcement of his unsuccessful campaign for mayor. He makes himself the central figure in Armies of the Night thereby, with a wave of his staff, creating New Journalism. He directs three films including Maidstone where his character Norman T. Kingsley, "the American Bunuel" and its creator (Mailer) are hit in the head and almost killed by the actor Rip Torn. The creator of classics of nonfiction like The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore, he advocates for convicted murderer Jack Abbott who infamously goes on to kill after his release. Author of The Naked and the Dead, boxer and fighting public intellectual, author of 11 bestsellers, the recipient of 2 Pulitzer prizes, he famously debates Gore Vidal on Dick Cavett and feminism in an iconic Town Hall debate where he appears in the role of Satan, going into the ring with the likes of Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer and Cynthia Ozick. Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n. As a newspaper publisher (Citizen Mailer btw also debates Orson Welles), he's a founder of the The Village Voice. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy might have been Mailer's mantra. Free speech and expression are too limiting as categories to describe his project, but he's an early opponent of political correctness which places ideology over idea and which he regards as a harbinger of fascism. Is Mailer a figure of world historical importance a la Hegel? Definitely not. Did he wish to be? He is short like Pushkin and Napoleon. He rolls with titans as varied as Mohammed Ali and Marilyn Monroe (to whom he devotes a book). Juggling wives and lovers, drinking and fighting. Was it a deficit of conscience that allowed him to thrive or is Mailer defined by his conflicts (a rebellion against morality and bracingly moral nature) that ultimately make him an exemplar of the 60s zeitgeist? Mailer's Gesamtkunstwerk was his life.

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

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

Death

The question is without stooping to the inanities of the paranormal, is there communication after death? Can you get a last word in? On a practical basis let's say you have an a date with a famous writer who has been an idyl (not idol) forever and as is wont to happen as time goes by he or she dies. If he's someone like Stephen King (who has gotten a special dispensation to "report back" which will allow him to write one novel tentatively titled Death--following his New Yorker short story, "A Death") you may have a chance to get a word in edgewise before they step off the High Dive. However in most cases that final conversation is going to end  up in the equivalent of the dead letter box. But there are ways and there are ways. Icarus learned about flying the hard way but if you could engage with the birds who begin their mad chatter  before dawn, you'd likely find out a little something about it. Have you ever met a mortician who was mortified? The answer is probably no. They've seen it all.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne

The Bees

photograph: Hallie Cohen

Remember Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Not to make light of terror by degrading it to a ditty but there's also The Bees which recently completed filming on location in The Hamptons.The  filmmakers have even created a neologism to honor their "beepocalypse." Beekeepers fearlessly lure the queen and the whole hive follows. Queens are very powerful and their solders will die for them. Then there are drones which have nothing in common with the ones you find attacking Russian tanks in Ukraine. Bees sting, but so do insults.

read "Limbo" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C

Stranger

If Things have gotten more strange, they are. It's not only that there really is global warming or cooling depending on how you want to look at the fact the earth is not what it once was. Never mind Trump and his Waffen SS commanded by Sturmbannfuhrer Bannon (remember that Hitler and many members of his beer hall putsch were convicted felons) and never mind the pandemic which changed life in impalpable, but permanent ways. If you are a certain age you may find your self a Stranger Drowning to cite Larissa MacFarquhar or for lack of referents reaching for intellectual life buoys like the Unheilichkeit, Heidegger and Freud allude to. Everything--language, love, geography are caught in a barely visible but nonetheless frightening riptide that threatens to waft you away, not even to blissfully foreign shores.

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

and listen to "Hello Stranger" by Barbara Lewis

Wake Up to the Hotel Mar-A-Lago

Trump Golf Course at Bedminster

In the light of Trump's overwhelming victory in the debate, world leaders have unanimously agreed to turn the planet into the former president's largest golf course and country club. Huge populations of impoverished asylum seekers will be given jobs as caddies. Owning a set of golf clubs will be looked at as an entitlement like health care or takeout food. Under the next Trump Presidency no one will have to wait to tee off since traffic at golf clubs will be managed by the FAA. Imagine arriving for your typical country club dinner. You'll enter a dining room as large as the eye can see whose management has been subcontracted to Mattress Firm whose showrooms are so ubiquitous there are several orbiting near the international space station. Golf once looked at as an elite sport will now be played by everyone. It will also be a requirement, comparable to paying your income tax or showing up for the draft during a time of war.

and listen to Freda Payne's "Band of Gold"

and listen to Wilson Pickett's "Funky Broadway"

Pearl Harbor

view of Pearl Harbor from Japanese Plane

Pearl Harbor led to the destruction of the Axis Powers. It's a perfect illustration of Hegelian dialectics. Even though Philip K Dick's Man in the High Castle posits an alternate universe in which the US comes into fascist orbit, the country was always in a unique position as a result of geography--a reason why isolationism has always been a dubious but viable foreign policy alternative. Not so in our current highly interconnected world. Today social media and rogue leaders like Kim Jong-un, who are threatening to use their ICBMs to bring about Armageddon, are a lethal combination. Fundamentalist sects like Hamas and the government of Iran, which like MAGA hold to an irrational belief in all powerful leaders, make it impossible to pretend there is safety in numbers or distance. The Trump/Biden"debate" was Pearl Harbor. Restitution will, hopefully, unleash a comparable result in destroying the dangerous movement towards autocracy in modern nation states.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne

Debate Highlights

Remember  the famous Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which the cruise passenger jumps overboard thinking the person who he had been talking to will see him vanish before her eyes. It's not suicide that was being contemplated but money from a ship's lottery, a gamble on the boat's nautical position. The episode based on a Roald Dahl story has a clever denouement where the woman tells her companion that she was talking with a charming gentleman who mysteriously disappeared. O'Henry or one should say Roald Dahlesque shorts rarely furnish much in terms of back story. In fact their effectiveness derives from their simplicity, from the minimal set of components that create the suspense. The aura of reality or believability derives from a certain expeditiousness which moves the plot. What if The Mousetrap had the thickness of overdetermined reality? it would never have had the West End run that went on forever. Would that life were artifice rather than "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?"

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

and listen to "Mother In Law" by Ernie K. Doe

The Debate

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan at Scopes Trial

Paramecia and amoebae like their human cohorts start facing-off at birth. The most primary level of being, instantiation of a living organism, creates an evolutionary debate. Not necessarily about the primacy of one agent over the other but in terms of natural selection. What genes will prevail? In the case of the current debate it boils down to Irish vs. German ancestries. But the science of epigenetics has shown that environment can result in gene modification. The advent of The Ice Age caused the extinction of dinosaurs,but the possibility of singularities must be accounted for in any viable biological model--as the Access Hollywood tape demonstrates. If you look at the CNN debate stage as a prototypic veldt in which two creatures will be set out to graze, you may be able to get an idea of the stakes involved in the current project.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Cool Jerk"by The Capitols

Washington Square

Howard Hughes famously dropped out of sight, living reclusively in his Las Vegas penthouse. He purportedly didn't even cut his nails. It was when Clifford Irving produced an "as told to" autobiography that Hughes emerged out of hiding to declare the supposed chronicler of his life a fraud. It demonstrates if nothing else how tenaciously people protect their narratives. For one narrative influences self-conception. After all isn't a narrative what patients are presumably constructing in therapy? All through life one encounters intransigent folk who push back against the story often motivated by their own selfish and competitive desires. There's always someone who looks askance at your dreams, bristling at your attempts to define yourself in what they consider to be an overly inflated manner. This is the theme of Henry James' Washington Square, where a father's supposed desire to protect his daughter hides his subliminal drive to destroy her.

read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and listen to "Walk on By" by Dionne Warwick

Solaris

Boeing is having a big month. First there are the senate hearings on the spectacular "non-death defying" failures of the Boeing 737 Max replete with the reveal about the 32.8M compensation for its CEO David Calhoon's handiwork. But the failure of the Starliner, due to problems with its thrusters and helium leakage has unleashed some even more pressing issues. There is space in the Space Station for all the astronauts, but there are are a host of other logistics problems that are reminiscent of movies like Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). You have a lot of people packed together in a small space. Would that it were a biosphere for which Alice Waters had devised a sustainable Chez Panisse style menu. However, what if the astronauts get a craving for Chinese? Does Elon Musk's Space X handle Uber Eats orders? Mattress Firm which seems to be everywhere surely has some stores in outer space. So additional bedding isn't the problem. Boeing's real mountain to climb is getting the crew to have enough confidence in their temperamental vehicle to relinquish the safety of Sith Meditation Sphere II.

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

and listen to "Every Little Bit Hurts" by Brenda Holloway

Here Comes the Judge

Listen to "Here Comes the Judge" by Pigmeat Markham

Do judge Aileen Cannon's blatant attempts to subvert proceedings in the documents case augur the kind of attacks on the judicial system that will result from a Trump victory in November? Is her intentional delaying, for instance by allowing literally any scholar to submit an amicus brief, indicative of what's to come? Will retribution literally  be exacted on the likes of Juan Marchand, Alvin Briggs, Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI director James Wray? Will Trump exact his pound of flesh? It seems almost incomprehensible that the US justice system could face a Stalin-like purge, if only for the numbers involved. Say you fire the whole justice department and its subsidiaries on a state and local level, who will issue drivers licenses and fishing permits? Not that one should take a laissez faire attitude, but it's simply a matter of how pervasive the residue of democratic institutions would be in the Nazi state MAGA Republicans envision? The old system of checks and balances is entrenched which is one advantage Democrats may have even if they lose.

also listen to "The Trial" by Pigmeat Markham

Modern Times

The basic crux of Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is that humor is veiled aggression. For Henri Bergson it's inelasticity. Comical people and those who impersonate them don't roll with the punches. But humor cuts a wider swathe. One the great French intellectual magazines, the forum for the likes of Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir, Les Tempes Modernes was named after a Charlie Chaplin movie, Modern Times as was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore. However the posture of the humorist is often akin to the person who gets annoyed at a tasteless joke. Whether it's Chaplin's tramp or one of Moliere's duped characters (who have the wool pulled over their eyes by a religious imposter or flirt) the comedy is ultimately sad, rather than funny. Alceste like Rath inThe Blue Angel is a cuckold. Dr Strangelove is a harrowing prognostication of Armageddon though you laugh at Peter Sellers.There's a famous scene in Preston Sturges Sullivan's Travels in which a group of convicts are laughing at Disney cartoons. The cartoons themselves are sadistic and provide a comic (rather than tragic) catharsis to the extent that they lower the bar and demonstrate everyone is alike in their misery.

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

and listen to "Modern Love" by David Bowie

Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in l965 (Elsa Dorfman)

Fantasy provides the illusion of both travel and progress. Coney Island of the Mind, the  title of the famous Ferlinghetti poem, says it all. Ferlinghetti's Coney Island takes you on a ride neither the Steeple Chase nor Cyclone can compete with. James Thurber's Walter Mitty is another adventurer who has scaled imaginative peaks that defy the limitations of reality. You might say about Mitty that his feet are planted firmly in the air. You won't find him in Hershey Park or Six Flags. That which doesn't exist "trumps" (a word one is loathe to use) existence itself. Thus there are romantics and vessels in which they're transported on--to the ether of infinite possibility.

and listen to Freda Payne's "Band of Gold"

and listen to Wilson Pickett's "Funky Broadway"

To His Coy Mistress

Andrew Marvell

There are all the classic metaphors of rebirth and most famously the phoenix. Frazer's Golden Bough is rife with them. But unless you believe in the afterlife or reincarnation, there's going to come a time when, there's no time left. Have there ever been any death bed novels? If you're an athlete or a politician you're going to have your "last hurrah." Pitchers have a notoriously short half-life. The saddest is the individual who had devoted his life to a solitary device, reaching artifacts from the Titanic in a submersible, for jnstance, only to find there to be faults. "Had we but world enough and time... sings the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell in his classic "To His Coy Mistress." Alas one may have neither of these two elements, world or time, left. At a certain point in a marathon runners hit a wall. Running on empty is a feat that defies the Gods.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "I'm Your Puppet" by James and Bobby Purify

Radical Chic

photo: MoSchle

Talk about appropriation. There's a huge amount of suffering in the world. Armies are ravaging Uighur and Rohingya populations. Why not borrow their traumas? Affluent members of ruling classes freely plagiarize their narratives of childhood neglect serviced  by a whole industry of trauma specialists who DJ the party with Ecstasy. In defense of the privileged the one thing that a human being can inarguably claim about their unhappiness is the fact that it's their own. Radical chic was the name Tom Wolfe gave when Leonard Bernstein entertained the Black Panthers. Sure guilt can motive charitable actions. Is human suffering in the public domain? Can anybody take  another persons misery and call it their own?

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Cool Jerk" by Marvin Gaye

Culture and 'Anarchy

Matthew Arnold

The mind is a bit like a supernova, in the course of its natural or precocious disintegration, it throws off a blinding white light. Supernovae, of course, turn into black holes in which all manner of being is sucked into oblivion. In terms of the physiology of death and dying, it's like the way someone wakes up out of the rattle and suddenly shoots forth with questions about where they are and what day it is. In microcosm you may find Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" something you studied in Lionel Trilling's course on Matthew Arnold popping up out of the blue with its magnificent dichotomy between the the Hebraic ("strictness of obedience") and the Hellenic (spontaneity of conciousness) comprising the vocabulary of a cherished lost language. If you never heard of The Liberal Imagination then pick up Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Culture During The Cold War. There you will also read about the frought relationship between Trilling and his brilliant student Allen Ginsberg. What did Ginsberg take from Rimbaud not art but experience for art's sake? You'll also learn that Lionel and his wife the critic Diana found Alfred Kazin of A Walker InThe City fame frumpy while Kazin thought Trilling, the son of a tailor, was striking a pose. You'll also learn that these giants of mid-century culture ultimately liked each other. Menand's book is pleasant time traveling back to a world before the jargonists of deconstruction had yet to be-- when literary criticism meant something and constituted a way of seeing the world.

read "A-Z Quotes" by Francis Levy

and listen to Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department

Is There a Conspiracy Against QAnon?

photo: Anthony Crider

Conspiracy Theory was a movie starring Mel Gibson. Besides  earned paranoia a la "you don't have to be paranoid to believe someone is following you," Gibson's character (Jerry Fletcher) demonstrates his OCD behavior in his obsession with Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield. Pizzagate was a famous conspiracy that either emerged from or cross-pollinated with QAnon--which one does not hear so much about these days. Is there a "planned obsolescence" to conspiracy that makes it conveniently disappear? When you think about it, conspiracies provide a necessary function--akin to God. Would you rather have nothing coming after you? Would you rather face the cosmic indifference of the universe? Or be filled with the sense of purpose that comes from being a fighter for a just cause? What is more maddening, to be pursued or to have no one on your tail?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and listen to Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

Alien

Waiters are also servers, but both words can be double entendres. A waiter is someone who literally stares at the clock waiting for something to happen; a server is an internet platform. Both words are also interactive to the extent that a waiter waits for orders and servers may become the means by which on line orders are effected. It's disconcerting for a waiter when business is slow, as tips provide the large part of their income. If you're an emergency room doctor it doesn't matter whether there are lot of admissions or few, you get the same salary. If a server breaks down, there will be a lot of unhappy customers as well as platforms who will buy be able to reach out to their audience. "I will be your server tonight" is a locution uttered by waiters in high end restaurants which lean towards both PC-ness and #MeTooism. People like to be served promptly; they don't like to wait. "To Serve Man" is the title of a Twilight Zone about an "alienated" cookbook.

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

and listen to "God" by Tori Amos