Road (of life) Rage

Surely you have exploded at some innocent person who gets in the way of your anger. Relief is followed by remorse. Unfortunately, If you’d kept it inside, your complaint would still be rolling around in your head. Now it’s deposited. “Curb Your Dog?” The problem is retribution. Powerless inept creatures at the bottom of the food chain are the stuff of psychotic assassination. Have you ever given the finger to a driver honking at you to speed up your crossing of an intersection? He can’t do anything. He’s not going to leave his car. Wrong! He’s had a few and feels like one of Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe.” Even if he employs his MMA on you in word only, it still hurts.

read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Zukunft der Erinnerung

Zukunft der Erinnerung, "future of remembrance" is the title of a recent book reviewed in the TLS. The compound word Vergangenheitsbewaltigung,"the burden of the past" actually sounds like road directions, “Ausfahrt” or “exit “ a word you are likely to see on highways in Germany or Austria is onomatopoeic. Contrary to Merleau-Ponty words themselves which, by definition, lack the consciousness of their own being, are reeking with intention. Memory and the past are loaded issues anywhere but their significance is underscored by the rise of Germany’s Alternative fur Democracy (AfD), the movement embraced by JD Vance. As in the old Western Union Telegrams STOP! “Say no more, nudge, nudge “ to quote Monty Python.

Second Coming

 

The Last Judgement by Michelangelo

Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church because of his last novel Resurrection—essentially the final letter to the world from an author who walked out of his estate and died alone in the Arapovo station. Fitzgerald prophetically said there were no third acts in American life but reincarnation is one of the first things children learn about in Sunday school. Second Coming or just the old male refractory period? The urban legend is that the angel comes down and taps the little indentation below the nose and above the upper lip, to make you forget who you were. But no supernal force can lock or unlock the future. though; the writing is simply Living in the wreckage of one’s future is a slogan that’s often invoked about the pitfalls of projection. Then there’s the phoenix.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Ghostbusters

Have you ever felt there was unfinished business and wished you could cross eternity and get that one last word in with the dead? There's something unfair in being cut off by the end of someone else's life. It's like being stopped in mid-sentence. Late developers face this predicament. Say you had a successful parent. Once they're dead you may start to succeed, but it's too late. Isn't there supposed to be a party line with the afterlife? Isn't that what seances purport to do? You call up the apparition or shadow spirit of whomever at the seance, but instead of asking them how their afterlife is going, you go on about yourself. You've got a captive audience. They're not going anywhere, like that that editor or agent who told you they were on the way to meeting, even as they open the rest room door.  Poltergeists ("Geist" in German is "spirit") are harmless is one of the first things Ghostbusters learn.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Tristan

Passion in German is Leidenschaft or "love in death." Romanticism thrives on invisibility. That which doesn’t exist holds the upper hand to the extent that it has yet to be. Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet all partake of a love predicated on and amplified by impossibility. Gold is a reality, but paper which is prone  to inflation is the poetic currency. “The eternal feminine lures to perfection” says Goethe (Faust). Or to a stereophonic reality? The present is not the lingua franca of aspiration. Only when love has yet to be (or faces erasure through death) does it achieve its agony in ecstasies.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Bull in MN

There are relatively peaceful animals, one would suppose, but every living thing including minnows, which are preyed on by larger fish needs to eat--and not every living thing is content to live on grass. Which brings to mind the old joke about the bull. A guy dies and get reincarnated. He’s telling a friend about his great new life. He get up he eats he shits, he fucks. What he omits mentioning, significantly, is consciousness. The friend is incredulous and jealous until his old buddy informs him he’s come back as a bull in Minnesota. Which would you rather be, a nervous Manhattan health freak or contented stud? Mastication is also a desire peculiar to mammalian species. In any case, the bull is going to end up on top in all categories. It's not something that requires much thought.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Naphta

Davos

Democracy is, when you think about it, a rather esoteric concept. Majority rules and every vote counts are easy enough ideas to swallow—unless of course you are a believer in the divine right of kings or dictatorship of the proletariat. The American system of government emanates from Roman law. But "checks and balances," for instance, are plainly not working. Jurisprudence can defy the will of populace. But what will the future hold? The Catholic Church and the Communist party have something in common according Naphta, one of Thomas Mann’s characters in The Magic Mountain. The enlightenment view of it individual freedom leads to greed and chaos. But what happens when a religious or even secular state establishes a set of dictums. Plato’s Republic is probably the earliest example of this. Then there is Samuel Butler's Erewhon, an emordnilap which almost reads “nowhere.” In the absence of a Second Coming or Hegelian dialectic, one is left with a recipe created by Locke, Hume and Hobbes, an alternating toxic and intoxicating cocktail.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska

How many times are required to remove the terror of riding the cyclone? You can tolerate a certain amount of fear with practice! But the pulse is always going to quicken as your opponent approaches you in a boxing ring. That is one of the reasons for the jab. The jab is also what you need to set up an attack. In rhetoric, prolepsis, the anticipation of a question before it’s asked, is an accommodation to the fear created by uncertainty, particularly when you’re facing a canny opponent like the late Gore Vidal. William F. Buckley, the author of God and Man at Yale might have profited from a little defensive work before his famous showdown with his famously erudite opponent. Playing harpsichord, as Buckley did, undoubtedly helped shore up the blows. BTW, no one mentions Wanda Landowska anymore. Getting back to Coney Island and other places that make you feel your stomach coming up on you, remember the Steeplechase? Everybody has one in their lives. More likely it's a person who takes you on a ride.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Income Inequality and Racism

The current big beautiful bill will increase income inequality which is the subject of Thomas Piketty’s Income in the 21st Century. Racism is economic. You need a underclass of service workers. What better insurance than to permanently demote whole sectors of society as is the case with The Untouchables in India. Make no mistake, the latest Trump windfall will bankrupt the poor and disenfranchised even more than they already are. Which is great if you’re a trillionaire and need to hire the “help.” Zohran Mamdani’s political program which offers free transportation and protection from rent increases, threatens to disenfranchise poverty—a political goal which is necessary, unless you wish to maintain the status quo and have a not so smoothly running society of haves and have-nots.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Free Love

The emotional equation is simple. Quantum entanglement is not a position in The Kama Sutra since human beings are not sub atomic particles. Thus whether you’re talking of emotional or even just physical intimacy you give to Peter to take from Paul. Stretching oneself thin never results in good performance in work and the same applies to love. But what about freedom? Your philosophy Horatio reeks of destructive Victorian morality. It’s true! One would think that love would be tantamount to freedom since it involves choice. The paradox is that it’s not.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Is There Interest on Borrowed Time?

Is there an interest charge on borrowed time? And what about reparations for sufferers and fines for perpetrators? If you look at the political world as Wild Kingdom, predator and prey are simply just a step down on the food chain from governance. In fact many viewers find entertainment value in the sight of a hyena dining in the innards of peaceful baby giraffe as the defeated animals legs flail in an involuntary last attempt to escape. The gladiatorial battles of Rome, bull and matador and finally MMA are just one degree separation, with the purse rewarded to a killer. What then is the shock in seeing pure animal behavior in The White House where the notion of an emoluments clause is laughed at and lying is de rigueur? Spencer, social Darwinism, the weak caving to the strong in the unending survival of the fittest—these describe the constitution of our new “body.”

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Gitanes

 

Have you ever thought, I want to go to a tanning salon and smoke Gitanes before I die? Notably smoking was the subject of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. The protagonist who is the first analysand in literature is trying to stop smoking. He’s also an anti-hero whose comedic aspirations are reminiscent of Don Quixote. Anyone who has ever attempted to rid themselves of addictive behavior will recognize the Sisyphean nature of the task. The question which then comes up is this: will Zeno fall off the wagon? Say he goes on to live a preternaturally long life, will he simply say, one day, towards the end, say to himself, why not? Perhaps he concludes he really enjoyed the life of the reprobate. His heros are Bukowski, Henry Miller, Rimbaud and literally anyone who steps over the line. Timothy Leary had a point. Yes it’s nice to be “there” for others who need you in lieu of running after “ecstasy.” But are you really happy? Do you want to have a heart attack in the middle of an AA meeting or smoking and sipping espresso in the back row of The Thalia watching  the revival of Godard’s Les Carabiniers, c 1963?

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Facesitting

All across the country, people are sitting on each other's faces. No matter Democrat or Republican, the phenomenon is as American as cherry pie. In order to insure that more people will sit on each other's faces, Facesitting has become as mandatory as some vaccines used to be. Medicaid coverage will be revoked for couples and threesomes who refuse to comply (Lysol wipes are recommended for facesitters, though not for baby sitters by the CDC--ed.) Are facesetting and its country cousin, rimming, what fellatio used to be before it became so common, it was not even regarded as sex by some adherents? People with differing political points of views frequently point out they would like to sit on their opponent's face, in order to smother their words. The fact of the opposition having their face sat on might be a source of pleasure seems not to bother them.  After all, you can always say whatever you have to say after getting "queened," which is one of the words used for the practice in urban legend. Discussing this subject can be like opening up a can of worms, but worms themselves will not be the result.

read "The Wasteland" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn