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.

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

 

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.

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

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!

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

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. 

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

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.

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

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.

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

 

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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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.

Gaslight

Humanity is evolving right before one’s eyes. Stephan Jay Gould coined "punctuated equilibrium." What’s going on definitely could use some periods. The thing about the rant which is the mode of discourse propagated by the president is that it’s usually NAS. You may remember that acronym from freshman composition. Ranting btw is viral. All the Trumpeters sound the same. Have you ever listened to an interview with Stephen Miller? Gaslighting is the means. The weave, as Trump terms it, is the method. The result is an art served up with the loss of a moral center, hold the mayo. "Value-free politics" is the name of the game and speech. The bowdlerization of language is part of MAGA man, Homo MAGAensus, a creature who trundles through Lilliput crushing all the insects (aka insignificant creatures) that get in his way. Is it fascistic to call a fascist, fascist?

read "Current Affairs" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Condition

electron micrograph of Ebola virus

De Clerambault's or erotomania, ataxia, Wernicke's, temporal lobe epilepsy, Capgras, prosopagnosia and Tourette's are all neurological disorders. Then there are Ebola, Marburg's, spongiform bovine epilepsy,ALS and Parkinson's which are diseases that result in the actual deterioration of the brain. Are delusions, like consciousness itself, just another biological process? Certainly schizoid personality disorder has biological and sometimes genetic roots. Irredentism is the propensity for formerly balkanized countries to reconstitute themselves. Putin displays a demagogic form of the syndrome. Hemorrhaging with the loss of considerable amounts of blood is a direct result of these behaviors. 

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Raising Cain!

Accepting limitations runs contrary to the American creed. And there are "No Inhibitions Allowed" signs everywhere in the modern all/inclusive resort Homo Ludens resides in. You may not want to be a member of a club… but you probably can’t being yourself to say no to this weeks offering at Club Hedonism. Addictive personalities ultimately have to accept the notion of abstinence and even dreamers end up selling their copy of The Fountainhead to The Strand. Who would you rather be Citizen Kane or Bishop Tutu?

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Robert Wilson's Moby Dick at BAM

 

Christopher Nell, sublime boy, and Rosa Inskat, Ahab, (Krulwich NYT)

If you loved The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, Deafman Glance and even the late Robert Wilson's more recent production of The Three Penny Opera (whose majestic production by the Berliner Ensemble derived from its faithfulness to the original work), you may find the current production of Moby Dick, by Germany’s Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, disappointing. To begin with Moby Dick is its words. The greatness derives from language which is belittled and mocked, in the current outing with once grand characters turned into babbling cartoons. The other problem is that the last half is quite simply a rock opera. No doubt the songs by the British singer song writer, Anna Calvi, will make it to the hit parade say like Laurie Anderson's "O Superman!" Anderson BTW did a l999 production of Moby Dick at BAM. The audience was grooving, heads bobbing, and the production received standing ovations from the youthful crowd. Moby Dick had been turned into a rave, the kind of irritatingly percussive soundtrack that accompanied Sirat.

read "En Plein Air" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star