Flesh

David Szalay's Flesh received a Booker before the judges could say "boo." The subject is Istvan, a Hungarian version of Kosinski's Chance in Being Time, (played by Peter Sellers in the Ray Ashby movie. Szalay's main has what might be called "out-of-body, body experiences." In other words, lots of sex for which he is "here because he is not all there," to coin a phrase used by 12 steppers. He is seduced by a neighbor at the beginning. At first, he isn't attracted, but the sex is an awakening particularly to her anatomy which includes an alluring bit of hair that runs up from her vagina to her belly button. He is rebuffed in his first love experiences and ends up in juvenile detention after accidentally or not so accidentally killing the woman's husband, by pushing him down a flight of stairs. This question of intention is of course essential in determining culpability, but it's a metaphor for Istvan's condition, which vacillates between the conscious and unconscious. You may recognize this personality type from an adolescent reading of The Stranger, It may even register more intimately, but that is also the problem. The book is sexy and hard to put down, but is it original? Does it expand the readers horizons? Or does it leave them trapped like a rat on the behavioral  or even psychoanalytic treadmill? (to be continued).

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Digital Insertiveness

Young men are taught to assertive though not necessarily digitally insertive, vaginally speaking. Speaking of which Trump Tower is going to standard issue federal architecture say like the ubiquitous red brick of NYC public schools. If Pete Hegseth has his way all warriors will sport their leaders yellow duck bill hair style. Which brings up a non sequitur. Economic inequality is growing and what is one of its causes? 

Answer: racism. What better way to create a servant class whose wages are so comparatively low that they’re essentially slaves.

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The Pathetic Fallacy

John Ruskin

The pathetic fallacy, a term coined by the English art critic, John Ruskin, often lives up to Its name. It takes work to leap to the conclusion that thunder and lightening signify anything other the presence of an electrical storm. Lake effect snow is nothing more than beauteous meteorology. A tsunami is often the result of Vulcanology. Sorrowfully humankind are wanderers whose connection to the storm is that they may require an umbrella.

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Diarrhea and Dysphoria

Big Brother (Bob Flag)

Surely you have made mistakes? Perhaps one of them is blurting out an inanity. If you're a writer, you have scribbled one that falls  deafeningly on deaf ears. Perhaps you have even gone so far as to make matters even worse, by digging yourself even more deeply into a hole. Perhaps this kind of behavior has emerged in the middle of one of those high-minded gatherings filled with like-minded folks which tend to make you, as a great man or woman of historical importance, uneasy. You don't want to be a member of a lynch mob, even a well-intentioned one, you argue. You're opposed to collectivities of any sort, unless, of course, the collectivity is the face of your own dysphoria. You could go on but you won't.

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Nostalgie

 

"Nostalgie de la boue" is longing for shit--en Francais. But the expression is also "loaded." Nostalgie connotes something more than mere nostalgia. It is also aspirational in its romantic agony. You wish for something sad and dour and difficult, but ostensibly this Inferno, or to expropriate the Huysman's titled A Rebours or going back, which in English translates as Against Nature, is a form of replenishment, a Fleurs du Mal a la Baudelaire. The notion of diving deep into Hades is part of ancient mythology. Orpheus in Hell, Offenbach's comic opera. It is only Sade's 120 Days of Sodom and the Pasolini movie it inspired, Salo, that preclude the illusion of faith or belief.

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Trainspotting

filming Trainspotting toilet scene

Remember the iconic scene in Trainspotting (1995) when the drugs disappear down the toilet. The moment sets off a hallucination as iconic as the horrified nurse in the Odessa Steps sequence of Einstein's Potemkin. Cataclysmic discombobulation that sets one's life in a tailspin is something you know if you've ever fallen asleep at the wheel, waking up suddenly to screams at the terror of the incipient path of destruction that you've wreaked. Have you hit or even killed someone? "Down the tubes." That's where you're headed is something you've undoubtedly felt. One door closes and another opens is dispelled by the reality that when one door closes another likely closes too. In fact, if you are like the bag of junk in the Danny Boyle film, you are just another domino  falling.

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Silent Retreat

 

Mont St. Michel

Most creatives seek an audience. Writers and poets want be to read. Playwrights want their work performed, but in the age of AI, the role of the artist is recusal. Remember Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Now in 2026 it is hard to find authenticity. Inadvertent plagiarism was a problem long before the advent of AI. Without meaning to, many writers found themselves bombarded with memes and tropes whose provenance was hard to recognize. Now, ThinkSpeak has taken over. SSRIs are tantamount to Soma, the excising of personality being the price one has to pay for quieting depression and anxiety. In "The Double," Dostoevsky's alter-ego appropriates the life of its foundational self. Art in the 21st Century will be practiced by monastic orders which protect expression, by limiting its diffusion. You probably have already heard about people who go off to silent cell phone free retreats where electronic devices are not permitted.

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Free Expression

Samuel Beckett's "Not I" (The Guardian)

This is the Age of Expression and it’s not all for the good. There's something to be said for inhibition. Things pop so naturally out of the mouth of the President that he is smitten with belief prior to investigation. It’s all part “The Weave” aka gaslighting, whereby fiats and realities are fungible. A notion becomes reality simply because it's uttered and that is part of the problem. A pronunciamento or piece of rhetoric is soon an urban legend with little regard for the source. Influencers with millions of followers are the product of this Brave New World.

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JCPOA

satellite image of Natanz nuclear facility

Is there a limit to the deterioration? Sinkholes have been discovered on one of the two runways at LaGuardia, but they're literally more than depressions. You can either be a depressed personality or someone who lives in a psychotic state. What do you do in the face of a wizard whose worldview is a product of what he says? Yes utterance is at the heart of empiricism, but it usually posits the notion of so-called "real" objects on which the gaze is set. In current circumstances you have a person who constantly tells lies which he posits as truth. Occasionally statements are the result of ignorance, but "gaslighting" has now become public policy.  Such is the case with the JCPOA. Trump derisively refers to the former president name highlighting the Hussein part to imply the presence of a foreign agent, a quisling at the helm before going on to state the total success of an agreement which actually accounts for none of the key things that an unnecessary war was supposed to have brought about--the chief of which being, halting nuclear proliferation. But then again the pot is calling the kettle black. Is the current executive branch, with its abrogation of rights and its search for unquestioned power any less volatile than your once and a future Ayatollah?

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Knicks

The Atlantic.com

Common experience is almost a garish concept. Americans pride themselves on individuality and also their degree of alienation. MAGA politics is rightly regarded as stupidity but it's also a response to disenfranchisement. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton coined the term "deaths of despair" to. describe the high rate of suicide amongst white working class males. The working class which built the country for the Robber Barons is being marginalized. Mining is a tough business, but travel to Appalachia and you will discover a pride of belonging. The advent of the first trillionaire epitomizes the concept of income inequality that is the subject of Piketty's Capital in the 21st  Century (ironically a bestseller the author obviously profited from). It is hard to think of Trump as a figure of World Historical Significance,  as was Napoleon for Hegel. Trump voices a dissatisfaction with elites. The lumpenproletariat which is another word for the MAGA demographic actually is a rather sophisticated response to obsolescence. With AI the anger will only increase. Actually Trump for all his money and street smarts will be an excellent example of Great Replacement Theory when he is finally either impeached, or forced out of The White House--when he refuses to leave at the end of his term.

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Recolonization

East India House (Thomas Malton, 1800)

Is the master/slave relationship just a reflection of the Great Chain of Being, with God at the top and human then animal life below. Or a device of the imagination? Post hoc does not mean propter hoc. The fact of inequality does not define it as a necessity. The advent of the first trillionaire with the assets to colonize the whole planet, as pointed out in a recent NYT Op-Ed piece "Elon Musk is Colonizing Earth" (6/12/26), brings the issue to light. Now income inequality is so great that the wealthy few, a biblical whale seems poised to devour everything. Trafficking in countries is nothing new BTW. During the age of the British East India Company, the continent of India was itself on the chopping block and countries who now make up NATO were busily gobbling up the developing world ie Africa, Mexico and South America. Remember The Belgian Congo? Trump going after Greenland, Mexico and Canada has precedent in the Colonial Age. During the past century, decolonization has become the byword, as the British Empire was reduced to England. No one dreamt the master/slave relationship would return, as a governing social force on both a collective and individual level. Trump rhymes with thump. How do you relate to a trillionaire who creates a literal and metaphorical sinkhole when they buy the land beneath your feet?

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Martial Arts

Clifford Odets

A trainer once said to an overly enthusiastic young boxer, "You've got the martial part. Now you need the art!" The same can apply to art itself. Marshall McLuhan famously said "the medium is the message." Yes there are pressing. issues,  but what is worse, providing audiences with a hyperbolic universe of delusion or the absence of any message at all? Melodrama is "unearned emotion." An overly promiscuous practitioner becomes a slut, who can use the same lovemaking technique with different lovers. A chorus of misery is a potent tool, but place it in the hands Great Replacement theory advocates and you can become a tearful advocate for segregation. Awake and Sing (1935) is the title of a famed Depression era Clifford Odets play. Sing for what, is the question?

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Emoluments

Scott Bessent showcasing Trump $250 bill

  
What is the relationship facts or data and emotion? Or is there any?  Gaslighting is the term used for the way politicians turn meanings upside down. Trump's self-described rhetorical device is "the weave." Today, deontology is not the lingua franca of discourse, even in institutions as august as the Supreme Court. Many of the justices regularly hand down decisions that are ideologically rather than legally or even ethically driven. Neither Alito nor Thomas seems to have shaken the yoke of MAGA politics--and it's a troubling form of behavior for which there is no precedent, ditto the White House's defiance of the emoluments clause of the constitution. Cryptocurrency is a perfect way to veil self-dealing, though many recent behaviors, such as the attempt to create a $250 bill with Trump's image on it, seem be taken as acts of defiance in and of themselves.

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NC-65

Tokyo Story (1953)

You must be 65 or older to read this post, have you ever seen an old woman with a shopping cart approaching you on a sunny morning in June where youth is displaying its beauty and realized in a major insult to your being that you are in all probability older than her? And that your only recompense is to write about it, after the fact? You may remember Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) about the older couple who feel they're no longer useful or wanted and even a burden. That's not you, you can be reassured. How to describe your state? Try superannuated.

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Plinth

plinth from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Do you ever feel you’re about to be crushed by an all encompassing plinth out of Kubrick's 2001. Reality is both impenetrable and entrapping. Kafka envisioned the ideational form of such inelasticity in Before the Law. It is the absence of philosophical traction that epitomizes this Sisyphean state. The Sickness Unto Death, Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety are Kierkegaard's philosophical riptide. Binx Bolling the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer calls his struggle against despair, "The Search." You are knocking your head up against a brick wall or facing the loneliness of the white canvas with its incipient mark or the empty page on which the first character has yet to be typed. 

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Access Hollywood

 

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep.” DJT once said he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot people. That was back in the halycon days of Access Hollywood. Today the only way he could get down Fifth Avenue would be in an Abrams tank. Destruction has become the lingua Franca of conversation. Have you ever looked at someone with IPods, thinking at first than they’re one of those mad psychotics who were prematurely released from mental institutions? The product of MAHA politics is a race of people reliving personal attacks and the ripostes  they might have given to their opponents—who are like the title of the Phillip K Dick novel Ubik or everywhere.

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Charon

Charon Forcing Sinner Into His Boat in The Divine Comedy (Gustave Dore)

One day when you're holding back, you realize it's almost over and there's soon going to be nothing that you have to protect yourself from anymore. It can be because either you or they have caught the famous ferry for which there are no roundtrip tickets. You also may find yourself in the predicament of wishing you had told the departed the thing you wanted to say or, having departed yourself, wishing you could tell someone still left back on the river's edge the self-same message Neither Western Union, nor Verizon, nor Google services that area.

July 20, 1944

Graf von Stauffenberg

Hitler's Wehrmacht officers failed in their plot and ended up being hung. However, one wonders it it would have made a difference, if history were fated to be otherwise--and the suitcase with the bomb hadn't been inadvertently moved away from the Fuhrer at the last moment. The July 20, 1944 assassination attempt by Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia was thwarted, but the attempt to put an end to the Nazi plan (which bears some similarity to Project 2025) went as far back as 1938. One dreams of this or that action changing the course of events, but Hitler couldn't have maintained his power, if he hadn't had the support of the populace, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen pointed out in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

Routine

typewriter scene from The Shining

Routine is the great leveler. Sure you’ve met people who lead seemingly unstructured existences in which they’re buffeted by the winds of chance and fashion. You’ve undoubtedly been told to let go by someone who's critical of your determination. However maturation inevitably creates the need to perform and survive  For instance most jobs go from 9-5. A more precarious freelance existence ultimately requires work. Creativity, goes the old saw, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration The insouciant type who was the monkey on your back may hide it under a devil-may-care veneer, but most people secretly end up living leading lives of quiet or not so quiet desperation--locked in the prison of what they are.

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Sexuality

The subject comes up every few seconds. Have you ever pondered how many people are having sex at any part of the city, at any particular time of the day? And what kind? How many people are taking their clothes off in front of each other first the first time? Oh it’s just the human body? Really? Nudity is downplayed by those who decry objectification? But the fact is instincts are mediated by consciousness. Love is the way consciousness negotiates the shoals of desire. Still the attempt to disinfect sex, to make it antiseptic is Sisyphean with the avalanche of emotion that accompanies the visual and tactile nature of coitus or even just a kiss. Then there’s thought and its police.

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CNN

The recent firing of Scott Pelli and several other well-known staff connected to Sixty Minutes is chilling. Paramount under David Ellison is playing up to Trump to secure the Warner Brothers merger. Add to that the demise of Colbert. The network cited earnings but that was a sorry excuse--the kind that's made when you don't care or simply want to destroy something that's in the way. The creation of a hugely wealthy class of American oligarchs with unregulated power, parallels the rise of Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison founded Oracle. There were robber barons at the end of the l9th Century. Their power was enormous, but the current cabal simply has exponentially more. Will CNN fire Wolf Spitzer or Christiane Amanpour? Will CNN go dark during a strike of employees? Or will there always be someone willing to pass the buck or take the baton. Power comes in all forms. People tell themselves all kinds of things. Undoubtedly there are members of congress who shook hands with the devil under the theory, better them than someone worse. Secretly they would rise up against Satan. The current Big Brother is more nefarious than Orwell's. He can be bought.

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Shadow Play

Solipsism is the notion that all of reality is subjective. To Bishop Berkeley,  who said esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived" nothing would exist without God--keeping the world in his mind's eye. The Matrix was based on the notion of the world as an inner state. Freud envisioned the mind as ego, superego and id, but these were names placed on functions that exist in some reality. In the absence of God, the solipsist finds himself blessedly freed from the notion of consequence. However, can one stand to live with the idea of nothingness? In a famous episode of the Twilight Zone, a condemned man, Dennis Weaver, pleads for his life. If he is executed, he argues, the world will disappear. This episode, "Shadow Play," season #2, episode 26, 1961 is arguably one of the greatest in the history of television. 

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Rush Hour

If you’ve ever journeyed back to the past you’ve noted the “Do Not Disturb” signs. The idea is to leave everything as it was so that the future will fulfill its promise or more specifically exactly the world you, the time traveller, occupied before you left. Is there a divine or supernal touch in this iteration or is it consistent with the philosophy of cosmologists like stephen Hawking whose A Brief History of Time is the Baedeker for those challenging the l86,000 mile per hour speed limit—at which spacetime curves? Everything is as it’s supposed to be or it would be different is a calming spiritual saw that makes it sound like everything is part of god's plan and thus set in a divine kind of stone or marble. However, with the once unthinkable becoming  ever more possible—in a quantum universe--a whole new set of parking regulations and speed limits is needed to accommodate the imminent cosmological traffic jam.

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The Maids at St. Ann's Warehouse

Kip Williams' adaptation of Genet's The Maids is extraordinary for both good and not so good reasons. What's not so good is its dazzling display of pyro-techniques. It a dog and pony show with flashing lights on a big screen in which Madam(Yerin Ha) is an influencer with millions of followers. You might criticize the production for being one big selfie, using an iPhone. The other side of the equation is that Genet's work is fundamentally a selfie, waiting to happen, as its primary stock is about identity and domination. The faces of the two maids Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) are explosive and the technology only amplifies the extraordinary feats of acting, in particular, the massive outcry of words, tumbling out of, at times, garishly painted mouths. One is reminded of Billie Whitelaw's famous mouth in Beckett's Not I.  The ending is also a question mark. Genet is a so-called absurdist playwright and the director pays homage to that by reinterpreting the finale as the end of the world. It's one of those Mad Max movies in which the characters negotiate a desecrated landscape, leaving all their frenetic attempts to be on top, as empty, hopeless attempts to fill the void.

Tintern Abbey

"Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour" is the long title of the Wordsworth poem, "Tintern Abbey," dating from July 13, 1798. The poem comprises a definition of the romantic notion of beauty, a feeling of transcendence, by which the poet describes the sublime. The cover of the Penguin edition of a novel like Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, also set in rural England conveys a similar feeling. Today the sublime is disappearing. Its last remnant may have been the drive-in theater found on Route One or at the end of an Interstate like 95 as it runs past Co-Op City into Bruckner Boulevard. If you journey up to Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, a town famous for its psychoanalytic stable, you'll find a well-preserved relic of the past, the Wellfleet Drive-in Theatre, where another kind of romanticism once burgeoned (and perhaps still does) in the backseat of a sedan.

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Holstein, the Younger

 

Have you ever confused Holstein, a breed of cow, with Holbein, the Younger (1497-1543), the Northern German painter? Samstag Nachmittag, to introduce a non-sequitur, sounds like title of a British kitchen sink film, dubbed into German. Saturday Afternoon say like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), the Karel Reisz film from the Alan Sillitoe novel starring Albert Finney, as the factory worker, Arthur Seaton. But back to Holsteins. Imagine a Holstein, the Younger, whose life is cut short in an abattoir.

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Differentials

Which one is Newton?

What is the difference between a differential in calculus and one in life? Is there a calculus of life? "Calculus" is derived from the Latin for pebble. A differential is thus a small change, but it can also be employed to describe any method of reasoning or figuring things out for example in the citation of an "ethical calculus" or "political calculus."  "Algebra" by the way, derives from the Arabic al-jabr, "the reunion of broken parts." One of the simplest examples of a differential is finding the area of a square when one of its side lengths increases by a small amount. In lay terms it's tipping the boat. You are living together happily, but one of you gets a new job which involves travel. It's a no brainer, If A represents an unchanging relationship with the same amount of distance on each side. Then. A squared represents the space. Sometimes people need space, but instead of having to run just go, dA=2x.dx. Why spend money on a therapist when it's a D.I.Y situation, best handled on the abacus at home? Of course, differentiation is what makes for horse races. If you can't differentiate between what's important and minor then join 'em!

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The Dreamdrive

Weike Wang's "The Dreamdrive" in the May 25th New Yorker is extraordinary because it's about broken consciousness. You may have never read anything like it. Unreliable narrator is an understatement. Is the character dreaming? Is he driving? Is his existence a pathological condition? Is he falling asleep at the wheel both literally and metaphorically? Dreamdriving? Part of the experience of reading the story is feeling like unnamed subject--that you don't know what is happening, but it's a controlled confusion and not one that is the result of the author generating confusion, due to unearned ambiguity. One interesting bit is the confuting of phenomenology. Intention is the question. Objects don't possess subjectivity. "Another doctor focused on the sofa waves. Which, more specifically, were gravitational waves All objects emit gravitational waves, the doctor explained, and should those waves interact unfavorably with those of the self, through the calibrated physics of destructive interference, destruction ensues." Wang is the author of the novels Chemistry and Rental House. Her universe here is a literary form of Joseph Schumpeter's economic notion of "creative destruction." Freud, who is cited in the piece, also described free association as looking at reality through a train window-- which is, indeed, another form of driving. There is a theory going around town, that dreaming is the reality and reality the dream. It's perpetrated by the same person who believes that abstract expressionism is a branch of photorealism, but that's another "story." 

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Welcome!

 

Effect refers to result, affect a cause. You affect and effect  But affect is a crucial part of human sensibility. How one is greeted in an environment affects how you feel about one or another milieu. Say you walk into a restaurant and all the staff welcome you with open arms, asking where you've been and how you are. Likely you walk away feeling it's a great meal. On the other hand, there's always the maitre d' who sizes you up with a malign eye, looking, you think, for the least visible table, say by the restroom with their polished male and female profiles. You always thought it was a lousy place, don't know what you were thinking and certainly have no intention of going back there again. 

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Hamlet's Father's Ghost

"Hamlet and His Father's Ghost" by William Blake (1806)

Remember the old horror movies in which the angry ghost comes back to life. Stephan Daedalus theorizes Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather. Then there is just the classic misty gravesite with the pallid white hand whose fingers one by one inter the whole body. On a more quotidian level everyone is simply haunted by memories that at times seem so real, they themselves are on the verge of coming back to life. You may recently have experienced an untimely death, either by virtue of illness or accident. There are moments when you are likely to be caught off guard. You have something to tell the person who's left. For a second you have the impulse to call them up when all at once you realize, they're no longer around. Consciousness has yet to catch up with reality.  Sometimes your desire creates a break in which you suddenly think you can talk to the dead. It's a bit like flying. You may have experienced the feeling as a child that you could jump out your bedroom window (that's why bars are mandatory) and find an airwave that will let you fly like a bird. Free soloists may be those who never get over the childhood delusion they can jump of the window. 

A Psycho

Gaslighting is the primary mode of political discourse employed by the Trump administration, but there is a fine line between employing a figure of speech as as an ideology and outright mass psychosis. MAGA Republicans are a cult.Trump is Jim Jones. His followers, who constitute a considerable portion of ghe population, will do anything he says. Thus the famous statement about walking down Fifth Avenue shooting. Actually it’s not hyperbole. That is what he is doing. It is unclear whether Trump or Netanyahu is to the proxy. The result has been and will be carnage. 

The Last House on the Left

 

One of the most ubiquitous comments one hears is, "you couldn't have dreamt this up." Meaning "a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "Motiveless malignity" what Coleridge wrote in the margin about Iago? Doesn't fit and btw is there ever a method to madness? No the plot needs something. Real Housewives of Ice? You may have to go back to Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1606) to unleash the venom the president is looking for. However, there is always Wes Craven's The Last House on Left (1972) whose narrative is enough to make any Jacobean wince.

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Civil War!

The United States is in its second Civil War. Hopefully the casualties won’t be as great. Instead of relenting in the face of an inflationary economy and an unwanted and unauthorized war, MAGA remains strong. Yesterday Trump defeated Thomas Massie and right wing Americans said it was OK for Trump to produce a 1.9 billion slush fund which will ostensibly go to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and all those who were prosecuted for attacking the police defending the capital on January 6. But Trump is even scorning his own faithful,
in the radical endorsement of the notoriously corrupt Ken Paxton in the Texas primary. Whether this helps James Talarico the centrist democrat who defeated Jasmine Crockett remains to be seen. In terms of polarization, the Squad and Bernie Sanders are drawing the crowds while the more moderate Maine governor Janet Mills, who famously went nose to nude with Trump in a shouting match, has caved to Graham Platner. So it’s the radical right and what Trump
likes to call "the radical left" are facing off, with a number of prominent exceptions such as the Texas race which pits a moderate against an extremist. Actually Trump calls anyone who opposes his will "a radical left lunatic." You don’t have to be AOC to apply. Will the two sides take up arms? Political violence is the new lingua Franca and that form of social capital is not fungible.

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Freedom 250

Most of the speakers, Trump, Vance, Hegseth, addressed the Christian nation rally by way of video. Is it MAGA or MACA, make America Christian again. The most important political figure to appear in person was Mike Johnson . UFC Freedom 250 will occur on the South Lawn of the White House, July 14. The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is scheduled from August 22-23. The route turns down Ninth Street onto Constitution Avenue, crosses the National Mall on Seventh Street, and loops back via Independence Avenue and Maryland Avenue to Third Street. Drivers include such well known names as Christian Rasmussen and Josef Newgarden who will speed past crowds almost 200 mph. The question is do you have to be Christian to attend?

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Childhood

Childhood is a long slog. Holden Canfield says:  "If you really want to hear about it...and what my lousy childhood was like." You're always hungry, your feet are frozen and your fingertips sting from the cold. There's nothing to do. School days go on forever. You come home snack, study, eat dinner by yourself at 5 since you can't wait for dad  who's always in a hurry though he always comes home later with the small of whiskey on his breath. Your parents' fighting frightens you. You want everything to be alright. You hold the hope that the book report you hand in will garner an A. You are always wishing for improbable things and are surprised only in those moments when you're not looking. Good news is like a rabbit punch. You don't see it coming, but it will always be this way. Your stomach churns in the morning. You say the pledge. The teacher calls the roll. The mocking laughter dies--one of those swells that never becomes a wave-- the second your name is uttered. The linoleum in the hallways smells like vomit. You need a pass to go to push the door marked "Boys." You hope no one else is in the bathroom. You're mostly lucky. Everyone has that one experience of being bullied by the smell coming from a stall--which makes you gag. Recess and dismissal both become mimicked in your life as an adult.

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Power of the Purse

Hermès Birkin Bag

It's almost inane to point out the preposterous contrarieties of MAGAism. Trump backing flavored vapes is the latest. What about Dobbs? No matter. You would rather be a big tobacco company then a woman who chooses to use Mefipristone--which according to the right-to-lifers needs more evaluation, for women's sake. For God sake's! Continued strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, continued appeasement of Russia on Ukraine? Why not fatten up Russian coffers with the Strait of Hormuz blocked? Value-free politics, realpolitik--which ever way you put it, the buck stops here.

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Donald Trump Captured!

South Entrance Quincheng Prison in Peking

What if Xi Jinping pulled a Maduro and put Trump under arrest for criminal behavior? The equivalent of The Metropolitan House of Detention where Maduro is being held (and Jeffrey Epstein was held) is Quincheng, notorious for holding political prisoners. What crimes could Trump be accused of? Violating the emoluments clause and the War Powers Act, commencing the demolition of the East Wing without approval of the group of architects and preservationists who supervise The White House,  awarding an $18 million dollar contract for a reflecting pool at The Lincoln Memorial without going through the normal bidding process--are just a few of the many infractions that Xi Jinping might cite. The fact the President of the People's Republic of China has no jurisdiction over the President of the United States is irrelevant in world fueled by gaslighting. Everyone always knew that behind the Chinese leader's avuncular exterior was a ruthless tyrant. The recent purge of the generals is only one example. John McCain famously stayed in the Hanoi Hilton. Trump must have built up enough points for admission to the Peking version.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

2 New Yorker Poems

There are two notable poems in th 5/4 New Yorker. "Tompkins Square" by Anthony Walton includes the following lines: "content with indefinite apprehension," "sprang from the facticity of her body," "simple theater of one man and one woman," "swallowed all intentions," "Experience and Recrimination," and "uncertain scholars of the inevitable." Spoiler alert: the two would be lovers consummate  in a friend's studio. The second poem is a "A Theory on the Origin of Language" by Tishani Doshi.  Is she tipping her hat to "Pale Fire "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain," when she begins. "a lapwing piercing the still dark still." Later,  "The ancestors of lapwings--they had feathers for a million years before ever using them to fly."  From an evolutionary point of view, this last line is spot on. But the title is the poem too and it makes the reader take one step back. Is it hyperbole or supposition?

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Death Redux

"The Waters of the Lethe by the Plains of Elysium"

  
When one of you is no longer there, the other will feel rejected. Death is the ultimate rebuff. There's always the hope you can turn someone's head around, change the feelings of the client who has decided to change their loss of supply. Death won't be convinced otherwise. It's impossible to absorb death or the idea that there are no possibilities left. Why not one final word, one last chance to set things straight or even just say goodbye? Finality is itself an impossible concept to entertain. Doesn't every one gets a fortune cookie's length of reprieve, the chance to exchange an aphorism, pieties or merely just one last neither/nor. Not the tired "Neither a borrower nor lender be." That's silly advice to the dead, but just the truth, "For loan often loses both itself and friend."

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

painting by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

Visconti's Bellissima

Visconti's Bellissima (1951), currently in revival at Film Forum, is "romantic neorealism." It’s an obvious vehicle for Anna Magnani whose operatic flourishes make one cry. It’s about the depredations of cinema albeit in their most melodramatic form. At one point Magnani beautifully and simply says that acting is being someone else, but the plot centers around a contest. You’ve seen the crowd scenes and screaming mothers in other films particularly In Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Fellini’s Roma. Here the histrionics reach the level of farce since all the mothers including Magnani are promoting their 5-8-year-old daughters. Spoiler Alert: Magnani is depicted in her usual desolate state, but the little girl who has been the subject of ridicule gets the part—in fact because of her lack of beauty and ability (she can’t even blow out the candles on a cake). It's meta to the extent that the film is about the film, the casting of an Italian Shirley Temple. American films are everywhere with Magnani and her husband watching a John Wayne western on a huge screen put up on their neighborhood street and one of the would-be child stars lifting her skirt to do a Lana Turner. You may feel the film is not the Visconti at his best while appreciating the set pieces which include some wonderfully sublime portraits of Magnani's face.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Paradise Regained

The Deed is a term adolescent male personalities use to describe sexual intercourse. It's also a document that records the ownership of property. A deed can be an act. One can do a good deed, sometimes of an eleemosynary nature, though it's sometimes might too casual to qualify as charity. Let's say you help a neighbor with their packages or open a taxi door for a fellow resident, when the doorman is helping someone else. The altruistic instinct informs many benevolent actions. Larissa MacFarquar's Strangers Drowning deals with a more extreme situation. A person who is going down often panics and can take a potential rescuer with them. You probably have asked yourself if you would have the courage of the real estate broker from New Jersey who jumped onto the subway tracks to save a fellow straphanger, with a train coming. "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n," says Satan in Paradise Lost.  

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Phenomenology of the Pickle

"Once a pickle, no more a cucumber." so they say. But what's wrong with pickles? They are one of the most adaptable of condiments, delicious on hamburgers or with tuna salad. "Pickled" may describe someone who's had one too many, but neither pickled cabbage or beets hurl or pass out. No pickled vegetable ever forgot what they said. "My downfall came when I started to steal from other people's plates," begins Lost Weekend, a memoir about a food addict. The nice thing, from a phenomenological point of view, is that no food has agency. So that the journey is something no cucumber has control over, anyway, since neither pickles nor cucumbers possess volition. Farther and Wilder was the memoir Charles Jackson was writing at the time of his death in l968, but the earlier book, the original Lost Weekend, is what put Jackson the map. Consult the laws of metaphysics for a moment. Imagine a 12-step program for pickles. "I'm Howard," says Howie, who is one. Yes, he has learned to be grateful to want what he has, which is the dish he is sitting in, on the table in front of the argumentative couple, and though he's a mere pickle Howie can still imbibe a Maurice Merleau-Ponty, '45.