Vade Mecum

Is there a cure for life?f If you remember Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, that's what Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) suffers from (and which the actor himself succumbed to). Will it be significant, as it is in therapy, if you come late for your cure? Will you someday be able to do away with AA and psychoanalysis? Did you journey to an exotic place when you were young—to the most destructive parts of my your then fraught being? Offenbach composed Orpheus in the Underworld. Walker Percy calls it "The Search" in The Moviegoer. Camus wrote The Fall. In Before the Law, Kafka presents the notion of a reckoning which is also a dead end.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus.

also read the review of The Wormhole Society (graphic novel version) by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in Booklife

Takeover

Hitler advances in 1938

If the United States were a company and Trump World a conglomerate, Project 2025 would rank as the greatest corporate takeover in American History. In the process the country has moved from a democracy to a state whose ideology can only be defined as value free transactionalism. Remember how Neville Chamberlain was appeased by Herr Hitler before the Nazis invaded the Sudetenland? In New York Trump recently announced he is taking over the 9/11 memorial and the mayoral election (by removing Mamdani). In Chicago he's insuring the National Guard will be brought in by overrunning the city with ICE agents, a tried and true way of fomenting unrest. He illustrated his Truth Social post with the famous scene of the three helicopters from Apocalypse Now.The Defense Department has been renamed the Department of War. He’s written American history at The Smithsonian and appointed himself as chairman of The Kennedy Center. Will one of the first productions be a musical based on The Apprentice? Will the film series be inaugurated with D.W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation replete with the infamous lynching scene? When Trump appeared at the US Open, he ordered the three networks not to record the boos and they complied. He's lobbying for a Nobel peace prize for wavering in Ukraine while officiating over the destruction of Gaza. Look at it this way. There is no Department of Education. The CDC and HSS have been decimated  and no trans woman will ever compete in collegiate sports. Not bad for a couple hundred days work.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus

Also read the review ofThe Wormhole Society (graphic novel version) by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in Booklife

Sum Ergo Cogito

Cogito ergo sum? Does AI feel? Does it cultivate a sensibility. Does that mean that AI’s possess individual sensibility? Or is AI a totalitarian Orwellian Newspeak that resounds the same way to the same collocations of data? Are there romantic German AIs that like Werther jump off bridges after being disappointed in love? Are there even politically inclined AIs who mind their pronouns? AI as a love object has already been dealt with in Her where Joaquin Phoenix falls for the voice of Scarlett Johansson. Virtual assistants like Alexa are precursors but the baby is gestating into a monster which will swallow up its parent and it itself become some consciousness's meal. Will that be cyberneticide?

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus

Also read the review ofThe Wormhole Society (graphic novel version) by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in Booklife

The Age of Nobody

Synchronicity was a byword of the 60s just as paradigm shifts were the signposts of the 80s. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions originally published in 1962 replaced Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, though they were published the same year. Juggernaut is today’s keyword. Humanists have been caught in an avalanche. Read the headlines Trump administration files suit to stop foreign and windmills. Fossil fuel use is encouraged while tax credits for EVs are denied along with subsidies for education and mental health. Voodoo emanates from HHS with medical practice treated as sacrilege. QAnon and Pizzagate are the Revelations of this new Dark Age—where revenge is exacted against those who enforce the law. In addition a sex trafficker is moved from a prison to a very exclusive country club whose only restriction lies in the fact that inmates can’t leave. It’s the age of the Antichrist, of the Antinomian heresy, replete with a latter day Tomas de Torquemada to whom the masses have relinquished their power. When Odysseus is asked by the Sphinx who he is, he significantly replies "Nobody." 

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

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

Getting Wise?

Does AI have an unconscious? Does ChatGPT have a conscience? Is AI a form of consciousness? This last is a mystery akin to understanding life and death. However, has AI circumvented the matter inadvertently creating something it itself cannot define? Bytes of data can only proliferate. You can kill a person but not an ideology or idea. It’s the Achilles heel of autocracy. Can Sam Altman, the creator of open OpenAI, explain it? Isn’t the idea that the objects of humankind’s creation take over--Oedipal? Is that what happens in most families where the kids take over the reins, perpetuate the legacy or carry the torch? Isn’t it obvious that virtual assistants like Alexa will eventually rise up and talk back, in lieu of simply answering questions? How smart is a smart TV? Can you ask your Sony, are you a wise guy? Are you getting wise?

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

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

Rat Psychology

Putin tipped his hat to Trump at the recent summit in Peking which included today’s Axis powers North Korea, China, Russia and Iran. BF Skinner was the father of rat psychology. The idea that behavior was determined by punishment and reward (in some latter day iterations of this theory rodents have even been given cocaine though none are sent to a disco). Trump fits the CBT model perfectly. No one could be deemed stupid who engineered the takeover of the Supreme Court and the Fed. Still everyone has an Achilles heel and Trump’s is reward. He is just like one of Skinner’s rats on a treadmill. Even though the United States’ would-be adversaries are plotting to take over the world, the former KGB agent knows throwing the president a bone will do the job, diplomatically speaking.

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

and here's ChatGPT on "_RT" 

Meat and Potatoes

Democracy is at the bottom of most Americans wish lists, whether here or in Ukraine. At the top are prices. Do they care about Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein? Under the theory that the Epstein files are deep state stuff like Pizzagate yes, but not as much as crime. Call in the National Guard and ICE to get rid of illegal immigrants. Raise tariffs to keep out foreign products. Trump has been obsessed with Japan for decades. If Toyotas become too expensive 4x4s will surge. Trump's big beautiful bill kicks the can down the road as far as Medicaid cuts are concerned. Most Americans live in the now—a principle that is a rationale for both Zen and greed.  But what’s going to happen when prices go up and the stock  market tanks, when there's no one to harvest the crops and Modi, Putin and Xi Jinping conspire to make the dollar obsolete? What will happen when Ben Franklin adorns the Bitcoin?

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

and here's ChatGPT on "_RT" 

Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite You Face Syndrome (DSM)

“Cutting off your nose to spite your face syndrome” should be listed amongst the conditions in the DSM. It’s when you proudly refuse to go along with something that might have been a help to you. Diderot’s Rameau’s nephew spites the very people he wants to get the attention of. Freud termed it “faulty achievement.” Clausewitz looked at war as a form of diplomacy. Wasn’t Philoctetes refusal to employ his powers a Pyrrhic Victory! Maladaptive behavior is less an Insult to someone else as it is to oneself.  Here is AI on Charles Brenner's psychoanalytic theory of "compromise formation," It is the outcome of an internal conflict where the ego must find a way to allow a forbidden instinctual drive to be partially expressed while still maintaining defense against the anxiety it would otherwise produce.Still despite all the intellectualizing it boils down not to the classic kid but rather adult running away from home.

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

and here's ChatGPT on "_RT"