Eichmann

Eichmann (1961)

Hannah Arendt of course coined the term "banality of evil." Is Trump an Eichmann? In Errol Morris' American Dharma Steve Bannon invokes Milton's "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n." Then there's Star Wars. Does Darth Vader equal Trump? One is hard put to see Trump as a man in a glass cage who's a product of some bureaucracy of death. You undoubtedly hate Trump and have dreamt of blowing him up with one of the tactical nuclear weapons Putin likes to threaten Ukraine with. But the implacable tyrant with all his similarly dressed minions brings back the Elizabethan theater which painted many outsized tyrants. Fanny Willis is on the back burner and both the documents and January 6th case will probably be delayed respectively by a Trump appointed judge and Trump leaning Supreme Court. Imagine Trump saying he was just taking orders--as Eichmann did. No way! Trump gets an A for evil.

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

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

Joseph Welch

Joseph Welch being questioned by Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Welch, the lawyer for the Army, finally brought down Joseph McCarthy. Et tu, Brut? Trump famously claimed he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody. Maybe Fifth Avenue in Moscow (yes there is a Moscow, Idaho!). You keep waiting for the ultimate act of hubris that will be the water that makes this wicked witch melt. What would Trump be called in the world of Oz? He acts like The Wizard with all his puffery, but he's really The Tin, or, to invoke Eliot, Hollow Man. Trump and Biden have agreed to two debates. The first is scheduled for June 27 on CNN. The second will be hosted on ABC. 80 million viewers watched Chris Wallace preside back in 2020. No "Access Hollywood" style tape or episode in a Bergdorf dressing room will do the trick. Putin has been threatening tactical nuclear weapons.Trump is so popular he probably could get away with using one against the liberal news media, the DOJ, Jack Smith and Judge Juan Marchan's daughter. He's so popular he could easily employ his Goebbels, Steve Bannon, to wage a propaganda war against anyone who talked back to him. He could put reporters like Jim Acosta in concentration camps (linens courtesy My Pillow's Mike Lindell). Trump is so popular he could build huge ovens in which he could cook the Democratic party's goose, but someday he has got to slip. It might be only over a banana peel, but he's going to fall hard, right on his red MAGA capped head.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and listen to "It's the Same Old Song" by The Four Tops

Gluttony

Have you ever met someone with an almost gluttonous desire to live? Someone who steamrolls and is not afraid of who is getting runover along the way? Malignity is not the right word since it is not as if there were some sort of ad hoc attack at work. Parsimony and unadultered selfishness might explain the motive along with a kind of aggressive hoarding and entitlement. The Beale sisters in Albert and David Maysles Grey Gardens (1975)  are looked at as curiosities, as are the aristocrats in La Grand Bouffe (1970) and the figure who is force fed, like a goose who's liver will some day be fois gras, in David Fincher's Seven (1995). However, these are not exceptions. You may have read the articles about the aging parents whose medical and living expenses bankrupt their children. Appetite is an equal opportunity employer and those who are hungry will devour with the biblical force of Jonah's whale.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and listen to "Shake Me, Wake Me When It's Over" by the Four Tops

Malebolge

illustration of Dante's 18th Canto by Stradanus

Virgil lead Dante but now of course he's dead so you have to look for someone else if you need a cicerone. But what are the rules pertaining to the afterlife? Can travelers earn rewards points and move from say the eighth circle Malebolge or even the ninth, Treachery to the first Limbo. That, of course, would be a stretch. Also what about predestination? Do the precepts io The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism pertain in hell? Perhaps that's, in fact, what makes the Inferno different from Pugatory or Paradise. Once you cross the Acheron you ain't going anywhere. Remember The Friends of Distinction, "You Got Me Going in Circles/ Round and Around I go." Supposedly the song was about love, but the truth was it was hell. Google Maps comes into play. If you have the right app, it'll save your life.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and listen to "You've Got Me Going in Circles" by The Friends of Distinction

Coup de chance

Ever try the slots in Las Vegas. Everyone thinks they’re getting close and that’s the scam. Woody Allen’s Coup de chance is a face-off between those who accept the odds and are still willing to play and those who believe that reality should be taken by the scuff of its neck. Only one in 14 million sperm reach the fallopian tube. So life itself is a coup de chance or “stroke of luck.” In Allen’s 50^th film, an unhappy marriage between Fanny a woman, who works for an auction house (Lou de Laage) and Jean (Melvil Poupaud) an investment banker, whose mandate is to make the wealthy wealthier, sets the scene. Add to this a chance encounter on a Paris street and a forest--one doing and the other undoing “fate.” If you’re looking for New Yorkers or the familiar types that create the identification and comfort of an Annie Hall or Deconstructing Harry, they’re nowhere to be found here. In Coup de chance the director demonstrates his mastery of story, plot and suspense. The movie's linearity can make the characters paper thin. This is George Simenon territory However, despite the notion of fate the film is predicated on, Coup de chance, ironically, has an inexorable quality. Everything is the way it's supposed to be or it would be different goes the old saw. 

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

and listen to "Missing You" by John Waite

No User Name or Password?

This page documents an English Wikipedia policy. It describes a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.

Shortcuts WP:U WP:UN WP:UPOL WP:USERNAME

This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. The username should represent one person; do not use your organisation's name.

To report blatant violations of the username policy, visit Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention(WP:UAA).

Imagine being in some far off space/time coordinate, so quantumly entangled, that you lose your galactic user name and password. At first every thing is hunky dory. You enter your old password then a new one that you're asked to confirm. Back on earth that was simple, but now you're being rejected as you travel towards the Big Dipper. If only these services had someone you could speak to. The problem is, the area code is hard to find when you're traveling around some Kepler star 1200 light years from earth and these hotlines keep you waiting for eternity. Our team is very eager to answer your call. Please stay on the line, a representative will be with you  shortly. What does shortly mean?  Depends whether your traveling slower or faster than the speed of light. As you know time goes slower the faster you travel. In fact if you go fast enough you'll find yourself back in a time where there will be no use for a user name and the natives don't even know how to create fire. Is that what you want? Obviously you'd better find that old user name otherwise you'll end up in shit creek.

and listen to "Please Don't Fuck Me In the Ass Tonight" by Karen McCoy

Democracy

 

Pol Pot

Under Pol Pot there was an attempt to eradicate the educated middle class elite by murder or exile (to rural areas where they would under go re-education and redeployment). It was similar to what went on in China during the Cultural Revolution. Being opposed to democracy is becoming a creditable political platform in many countries today (Brazil, Hungry) as well as the US. It's actually populism versus democracy, the rule of the crowd over principles like "inalienable rights" and "due process, which are attributed to Washington elites aka "the deep state." Constitutionalism is under attack by MAGA originalists in patriotic garb. In the current culture of  "gaslighting," anything can be turned on its head. Real Americans are those who do away with freedom and rights and also refuse to spend time and money on foreign affairs that are not their business. Democracy is not a simple concept that's easy to understand and it's not necessarily tantamount to rule by the majority--though that's an important ingredient. It's a set of precepts about governance involving bicameralism, executive power and the role of the judiciary. These provide "checks and balances" against the abuse of authority and against the kind chaos that looms on the horizon today. Will Donald Trump exact retribution by exiling the so-called elites to the countryside?

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

and listen to "Young Americans" by David Bowie

Evil Does Not Exist

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, currently playing at Film Forum, is an Enemy of the People—with the whole town rising up against a project that pollutes their water. If you remember Drive My Car, the director’s previous film, is about multilingual producrton of Uncle Vanya (amongst many things). Evil Does Not Exist is far simpler. A glamping company, Playmode, is developing a site in which the septic tank is only partially adequate to protect an otherwise pristine landscape. But Hamaguchi continues the theatrical metaphor. Playmode is actually an entertainment company and its representatives are PR types rather than experts on environment.There are three elements of style that are prominent right away, every scene with a car is shot through the rear window (like the pollution affecting groundwater). There are extremely long takes which run throughout the film (like the first in which the camera pans through trees). Almost all these perserveratiing scenes are interrupted in medias res, as if someone were being interrupted in the middle of a sentence. There's a masterful moment in the last scene which is shot from the point of view of Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), the local jack of all physical and spiritual trades which at first hides its truth in an abstract landscape. It's painting of terror come to life. Drive My Car was epic both in length and complexity. Here there is far less information. Nature rather than culture is the dominant theme, but the title of the movie is puzzling. Plainly evil does exist.

listen to "Fortnight" by Taylor Swift

and watch "Terminal Bar" by Stefan Nadelman

A(wake)

If you've ever viewed an embalmed body at a wake you've undoubtedly noticed how life-like a cadaver can be. It's almost as if you were turning back the hands of time to converse with the dead--and have the last word so to speak. Which brings up the question of seances and ghosts (isn't it ironic that "ghosting" means cutting off communication when the very word exists to invoke a specter like the ghost of Hamlet's father). These supernatural devices which have little scientific credibility express hope in the face of impossibility. An apparition may be unreal but a pill which is even harder to swallow is the idea that you cannot somehow get through, that you cannot renegotiate  your contract or relationship. Most people feel sadness when a parent dies, but for some it's a time of rebirth. Through no fault of their own, the parent may have held back the child. Subliminal signals by their very nature are hard to fathom. Wouldn't it be fun to be able to tell mom and dad that you finally made it. Making It was the title of Norman Podhiretz's autobiography. Who knows if it was a letter to the immortals--just one final message or addenda to uncloud those muddy waters and finally say, as The Impressions crooned, "It's all right, have a good time."

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

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

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick in 60s

It's Impossible to see through another person's eyes. France became Vichy and Dresden was fire bombed. You hear he or she died or the partner of someone no longer recognizes their other half. Whether you're a "virtue signaler" or truly an altruist willing to risk your life to save the Strangers Drowning a la Larissa MacFarquar, you can never know the suffering of the other. The United States is a bit like the good-natured person who's pained when they see an accident where others slow down to enjoy the circus-like atmosphere of ambulances and police cars. Ukraine and Taiwan are faraway. Philip K. Dick wrote Man in the High Castle, but how probable is it that Axis powers or their equivalent now (N. Korean, Russia, China, MAGA) could irreparably change the landscape. Finland and Sweden rushed to join NATO in fear of Russian imperialism, but the US has always been in a peculiar position of never having been invaded--simply because the enemy is too far away (unless you consider Cuba a threat). Your dying friend is Taiwan and you're like the US or Canada--pondering whether to join forces in a war that sometimes feels like it really isn't yours.

listen to "Fortnight" by Taylor Swift

and watch "Terminal Bar" by Stefan Nadelman

R.A. Lafferty

 

R.A. Lafferty (1998)

R.A.  Lafferty writes linguistic sci fi, fantasy worlds made out of words. In his "Narrowing Valley," (The New Yorker, October 24, 2022), a homage to a Lafferty story entitled "Narrow Valley," Jonathan Lethem comments, "The past is huge, and real, but you are small. To reenter the valley of the past is, properly, to grow tiny, and to vanish." The "vanishing past" is the kind of idea Lafferty perpetrates. "In Our Block," a character named Art Slick says, "Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer load of material out of a space that wouldn't hold a ten of it?" "Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn't take up space, like if he made it before that." Relativity showed how gravity was the warping of space and time. For Lafferty space takes on a life of its own, remanding the reader to a verbal blackhole. In "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," Lafferty writes, "Along about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the road from Nowhere to Eom an Avatar fell dead with a slippery elm dart in his heart." And in the eponymous "Narrow Valley," Willy McNilly asks his friend Clarence "what did one flat-lander say to the other?" "Dimension of us never got around," Clarence replies. Lafferty takes you not to a different, star or planet and or even coordinate in the space/time continuum. His is a universe of twisted sentences that like a carnival house of mirrors, turns perception upside down.

read Jonathan Lethem's "Narrowing Valley" by Francis Levy in

The Screaming Pope

and listen to "Short People" by Randy Newman

Mind-boggling

"The Phrenologist" by A.S. Hartwick (1895)

 
Imagine if life were all Mind--including dead souls. Trump who seems so real would be that headache above your consciousness's left eye that never seems to go away. Isn't that a benign way to look at this extended reality show? Unfulfilled pleasure and hope would manifest as a free-floating hunger, the rushing water of an impressionistic Debussy piece, filling the ether of one's pre-frontal cortex. This condition might provide fodder for eugenicists, enamored as they are by phrenological speculation. It may sound like a stretch, but just consider the whole world and even the galaxy in which it resides, the Milky Way as part of the brain. That would not only explain dark energy and matter, but the delusive everlastingness one experiences, up until "The Age of Finitude."  When someone said they were depressed and you responded casually "it's in your own head," you would be right.

read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department

and listen to "Putting the Damage On" by Tori Amos

Silence

John Cage's famed piece is just that 4'33 (of silence). "The rest is silence" says Hamlet. "Whereof one cannot speak, there of one must be silent." Take God. Here the inability to speak doesn't  imply andence. Silence is hyperbole in fact. The fact that that you can't speak about something means there's too much to be said. It's like talking with your mouth full. There are two situations in which silence is a particularly effective tool. Thd first is in a potential argument. By not weighing in, you are able to hear the other (a powerful weapon in itself) and most importantly one's as yet unexpressed thoughts. The second is less passive. Silent is an advocate. Most people don't like being moved from their inertial state but silence has the power of negative energy, which magnetically draws its object in.

and listen to "The Tortured Poets Department" by Taylor Swift

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

Publix

Purgatory is Florida. Or is it hell? Striptease by Carl Hiaasen and Harry Crews's Karate is a Thing of the Spirit  both take place in Florida. Publix is Limbo, the First Circle. Hot August day crossing Acheron, Christmas trinket concession on Military decaying high-rises and pensioners on Collins Avenue, Miami. The stink of spoiled meat left on the counter of retiree who unsuccessfully dashed across the median to get a potato,  solitary stripper on stage at club in back of Palm Beach International airport, shaded by lone Palm. Florida is a holding cell. Prete a porter...or prone. You can't have hell or purgatory without Paradise. Imagine a world without pleasure or temptation! Desire is but the beginning of suffering. You'll know you've achieved Buddha mind, when there's nothing left to relax about.

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

and listen to "Putting the Damage On" by Tori Amos

The Writer As Pastry

photo of profiterole: Tamorian

The writer who proliferates at a level that becomes profligate becomes a pastry--in particular a profiterole, which makes your mouth water when you spot it in a pastry shop window. There have been lots of brazenly profligate writers from Rimbaud, to Henry Miller, Mailer, Roth (taken to task by his former wife Claire Bloom) and V.S. Naipaul whose mistress was disfigured by his beatings. Doris Lessing left her husband and two children to pursue her career. Patricia Highsmith was predatory, sexually. Joyce Carol Oates is a furiously prolific novelist. She also writes mysteries under a pseudonym and also book reviews. However, of prolific writers Stephen King, particularly due to his breadth of vision. The Shining is only surpassed by Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge--as an essay on alcoholism. If it were a choice between Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, you'd probably ending up picking SK out of the pastry shop window. Too bad Napoleon wasn't a writer.

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

and listen to "Nothing's Too Good For My Baby" by Stevie Wonder

Let's Say You Were Tolstoy?

Tolstoy in l908

Even Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would likely feel deflated by each other's company in the unlikely event they were at the same party. The only things that can happen when you reach the top of Mount Olympus is to either become one of the gods or fall off. Every kid dreams of growing up to become Zeus though the likely realization, about even their own hero, is that he is only a god amongst gods. Monotheism was created to deal precisely with this "constitutional" problem. God is not bidden to play by any rules since he lords it over all of us and is the ultimate maker. 

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to "Everybody is a Star" by Sly and the Family Stone

Finality

How to absorb the notion that someone is completely out of existence? That you can't add something you forgot to say or  explain. Everyone wants to have the last word. Life is an extended argument, comparable to Dickens' Jaryrdyce v Jaryrdyce in Bleak House, until of course there are no more plaintiffs, defendants or case! "Get off of my case" is an expression that's used by those who don't like to be nagged. They will unfortunately get their wish when either the accuser or respondent is no more. It's, of course, true that there are those who carry on the conversation talking to the dead, still insisting on their wishes. It's indeed very human to court such impossibilities.

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to Wagner's Liebestod played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim

Oneiric

statue of Hermione. comes to life

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. But when you think about it, everything is. Life is a dream is the title of a play by the 17th century playwright Calderon. In The Winter's Tale the statue Hermione comes to life. The unconscious is supposed to be the repository for the clandestine knowledge one might even be hiding from oneself. Yet isn't life itself the last stop on the line. "Everything comes out in the laundry" and even the most repressed wish finds itself sewn into the tapestry of existence. It's really just a matter of time. You might also look at dreams as sayings in Chinese fortune cookies. It seems random when a waiter places the dish on the table. Then there's the aleatory movement which determines which one is finally yours.

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols

The Crack-Up

You know the novels and films about people who lose everything. There were numerous defenestrations after the crash of 29. Alumnae of money make appearances in the novels of Fitzgerald, O'Hara and the now forgotten John Marquand. The Crack-Up Is the title of Fitzgerald's controversial volume of essays. And the one in which he famously wrote, "there are no second acts in American lives." Does fortune then mask the reality that your "run," good or bad, will be cut short by mortality. Pleasure is the radioactive fallout following a major blast. And it's also a black hole. You stand at the event horizon and implode like a super nova. Imagine a biopic about Courbet gingerly walking the line between eros and art. Narcissus drowned in his own image. And what are the viewers to do--as they gaze, mesmerized and disarmed, by the wantonly splayed legs of the artist's model in "L' Origine du monde?"

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and watch the trailer for animation of Erotomania

The Go-Between

The past actually is a closed book. It's tantamount to Yom Kippur where the Book of Life is sealed, on a yearly basis. It's not that one can't remember specifics. Rather the feeling is similar to examining an antiquity --say the Ming Dynasty princess on the porcelain base of an old lamp you've grown up with. Remember the case of the Florida man who fell into a sinkhole while he was lying in bed? You may be caught unawares by the pasf. Bergson called it "involuntary memory" lest one "forget" the Proustian "madeleine." Bergman's Wild Strawberries is  a journey. Supposedly the professor is being honored. In fact, he's swept back into another sometimes unwelcome world of recollection--that's both hauntingly vivid and reeking of impossibility--filled, as it is, with chances missed snd turns not taken. Which past do you prefer-- the chronological timeline or the  sometimes haunting nightmare in which one struggles to remain afloat? FromThe Go-Between: "the past is a foreign country."

read Mark Segal on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

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

Eat or Be Eaten

You hear much more talk about people choking than eating each other. It used to be a quid pro quo and part of the food chain: eat or be eaten. In this sense The Kama Sutra is a mixture of Roto Rooter and Micheline both the tire and food guide. Way back when "gay" meant "happy," choking was what you had to watch out for when there were bones. Every time you ate say cod, you're wife (who is now probably on the way to becoming a man) would say, "honey, watch out for the bones" just as you were about to dig in. Now when my "wife" who remember now is almost a man (and qualified for a bar mitzvah at that) says "eat me" when I ask "what's for dinna, meat loaf?" I reply "sure I'll go down on you." If you are one of those people who likes meat loaf, but still gets off on asphyxiation (a la the recent front page Op Times piece, "The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex"), you're going to have to sacrifice certain pleasures.Make no bones about it. 

listen to "Lick It Before You Stick It" by Denise LaSalle

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

A Wooden Ruler

photo: Alexei Nicolsky

Rulers are figures of historical importance who perpetuate dynasties. For instance Czar Nicholas II presided over the death of the Romanovs--who today are remembered for Faberge eggs. Frederick the Second a benevolent despot fared better. When one talks about a royal's rule, one is referring to a measure of time. Thus you have the rule of ruler or a rulers length rule divided up into ever smaller demarcations. After all the much maligned plastic or wooden ruler was designed precisely for the purpose of noting the small points between one end to the other if the ruler in much the way a clock marks time. Even a broken clock is right twice a day goes the old saw. It would have been really cool if Henry Eighth had possessed a ruler. Maybe it would have enabled him to moderate his appetites. A ruler might have helped Shakespeare's fey Richard II to enjoy his garden. Think of     famed pre-Raphaelite Millais's "Death of Ophelia." One could judge the equanimity of a ruler by their ability to  use a ruler to measure the fine points.Tempus fugit.

listen to "Do the Funky Chicken" by Rufus Thomas

and read Mark Segal on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

Broadway Boogie Woogie

"Broadlway Boogie Woogie" by Piet Mondian (1942)

Fly by night theories of perception are a dime a dozen . Everyone has their paternoster. You may be afraid to utter what's on your mind as your proclivity to hope invalidates the potential equanimity of your world view. Is Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" some reality covered over by a scrim of what analyst's call "screen memory?" How do you judge if what you're seeing is what you're seeing? Must solipsism be discountenanced as a form of infidelity--the discovered phone messages that reveal, the indiscretions the loved one has committed behind one's back? Reality is what appears before the mind's eye, but what happens when that all encompassing subject, the compassionate Buddha mind, is drunk?

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

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

A Nous La Liberte

Proliferation is not a pastry. That's profiterole. Birth rates are declining in industrialized countries. Still new cars are rolling off the GM and Ford assembly lines. How to differentiate one shiny new 4x4 from another after you've accounted for the standard red, white and black models? Is individuation a matter of luck? One if the most potent symbols of anonymity and indifference might have been the prospect of retrieving a stolen bicycle in post war Rome--dramatically portrayed in De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1947). Everything easily fits the bill and there's always someone who's going to find themselves at the wrong end of the stick. That's what makes for haves and have nots. The Industrial Revolution was the water shed. Malthusian prognostications notwithstanding, division of labor and economy of scale were the igniter of this "fusion" reaction. Production bred an exploding population of consumers one inexorably egging the other on to modernity--and also oblivion.

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

and listen to "The Lakes" by Taylor Swift

The Delta Alliance

Carolyn Drake for The New York Times

"Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend..." "Why We Need to Talk About Teen Sex" was the cover story of yesterday "Sunday Opinion" section of The Times. This on the day that Iran launched its armada of drones and missiles against Israel. Can we say that concerns about trends in teenaged sex, notwithstanding, The Times was plainly caught with its pants down. Never has a story in that section elicited such a prominent graphic. Wouldn't a blowup of a Shahed-149 have been more apropos? But perhaps there's a subliminal tie-in between asphyxiation and the Middle East? What unites the Israel/Iran conflict and the mores of affluent American college students is The Death Instinct--an enigmatic institution that causes great misery but sometimes mysteriously leads to life in the form of things like Marshall plans for rebuilding. What if for example, an Israeli counterattack brought about regime change in Iran? Imagine the radical shift on the world stage if one of Russia's major proxies now became a member of The Delta Alliance.

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

and listen to "Born Under a Bad Sign" by Albert King.

Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer was the proponent of Social Darwinism. The crux is that it's a dog eat dog world. Fine points like Stephen J Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" are not part of this "doctrinal evolution" in which eugenics, for instance, would ultimately be distilled out, at the price of science. The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and the imminent beer hall putsch of the MAGA GOP are the petrie dish. Jerry Butler famously sang "Only the Strong Survive." Imagine King Kong with no social safety net and no entitlements against a background of Inquisition and plague a la The Seventh Seal. A real Hobbesian Leviathan, if there ever was one.

and listen to "Only the Strong Survive"  by Jerry Butler

and read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

Dentisty Terminable and Interminable

From an actuarial point of view, dentistry is a profession that provides a steady return on investment. There's a constant stream of sufferers with everything from toothaches to root canals which have become infected requiring apicoectomies. Then there are more advanced forms of remediation, those tantamount to taking a case to an appeals court in legal terms. Freud famously wrote "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937). For some patients dental bills will continue to arrive even after their demise. "Dental calculus" is calcified dental plaque, but it also refers to the calculations that incurred by the estates of patients whose cure has outlived them. When you first sat down in a dentist's office with those piles of old People magazines around the reproduction farmhouse vistas, you probably didn't realize that the cavity being filled was not just the one in your mouth.

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

"Bird on a Wire" by the Neville Brothers

The Double

Is there a duplicity inherent in all human behavior? Does everyone possess or produce a doppleganger or shadow that is and is not the self to which they're wed? Dostoevsky famously wrote "The Double," a story that was later appropriated by Borges. The crux is that a titular counselor, Golyadkin, encounters himself on the streets of St. Petersburg. They start out as friends but then become rivals and bitter enemies since Golyadkin II is able to handle himself in the very social situations where his "other" fails. Is Dostoevsky merely prosecuting a clever conceit or is this story a jeremiad?            You have undoubtedly heard about wolves in sheeps' clothing of the family type guys who were so good at it that they decided to plant their seed elsewhere. Who to believe? Appearances can be deceptive. The dog who barks doesn't bite, but do dogs that bite succeed precisely because they don't bark?

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

and listen to "The Tears of the Clown" by Smokey Robinson

The Catcher in the Noslagie de la Boue

You only find tarts who pick up their skirts for a few bucks in Catcher In the Rye. And by the way the elevator man in Holden's hotel, responsible for his guests assignations, is really an old-fashioned "starter" since he gets things going, not only in the elevator bank but also bedrooms. Today with the kind of money Holden had in his pocket, he'd probably hole up in a Courtyard Marriott where automation makes for a far less colorful story. Ostensibly with internet porn most boarding school kids are more advanced than Salinger's famed alter ego. Still, the fact is, the great amount of information they possess is vicarious. They 're more precocious in data than reality. A John alone in a hotel room with the kind of sassy streetwalker an author might have described in 1951 is a thing of the past.

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

and listen to "You'll Never Walk Alone" by Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells.