Yorick

"Hamlet and Horatio" by Eugene Delacroix (1839)

                                       

photo: FLevy

Imagine the very moment when you'll longer be sentient. If you’ve been in a coma already, it’s one thing, but there are people for whom it’s more dramatic, tantamount to being in a theater watching a movie at the time of a black out, well not exactly since if you’re still alive you can hold onto your partner’s hand until one of you can employ the flashlight on their smartphone. Remember once the theater or life goes dark there are no gadgets. It’s nice to think think someone is going to have a last say either you from the great beyond or someone still waiting by Charon’s bark on the shore of the Acheron. Hope springs eternal. Maybe there's a two way highway allowing voyagers one trip only.

Wanted Dead or Alive--Come to Think of It, Dead

 

Lots of people have angry thoughts about Trump. In his first term many felt bad about thinking things like “I wish he would die,” but his constant unrelentingly foolish, destructive mean-spirited executive orders and actions which, in some cases, actually kill people (his promise to come to the aid of the Iranian protestors which he. didn’t make good on, for one) have disinhibited many otherwise humanistically inclined souls. Some of those who woke up to the executive order calling for Lake Ontario to be Lake America might be heard declaiming “why doesn’t someone cut off his arms and legs and order him to do laps in his newly renovated reflecting pool” or "why don' t they administer one of those death row drugs that don’t work, the ones used with prisoners in red states? How funny it would be to see him writhing in pain. Throw in Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick. It’s Animal House alright. But let’s save the best reward for old War. Gov Hegseth. Let’s hang him in the street like Mussolini." The only problem with wishing someone to die is that they then die and that’s it. In actuality, if you really are giving vent to your feelings, you probably want to wish them a long painful death, even if it allows the chance to issue yet another executive order.

La Nouvelle Conversation

Have you had the experience of dining with someone who spends the meal talking only about themselves? They never bother to ask you about your children or work and you wonder if they will simply keep the same monologue going after you leave the table. There are lots of people with ear pods on who look like they're talking to themselves, but there are others who are actually living in a dream world and just keep talking without the help of gadgets. In the old days people conducted imaginary conversations with adversaries in their head, imagining what clever riposte they would have made, if only they'd been on their toes. Now it's all out in the open.

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

Two Writing Projects

Rachel Cusk

Yiyun Li

Rachel Cusk wrote a novel about the break up of her marriage Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012) after which she produced her trilogy, Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018) in which individual character appears to disintegrate.  What if there were no more “I” in literature and the author is still beholden to concrete a world? The suicides of Yiyun Li’s two sons is the all consuming passion of her work—similar to the binding of Isaac in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Yiyun Li has written two books about these tragedies. Where Reason Ends (2019) deals with the death of her son Vincent in 2017 at the age of 16. Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025) is about the suicide of her son James in 2024 at the age of 19. 

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

Night of the Living Dead

The fact that disaffection and even disembodiment are the lingua franca of cultural discourse is not particularly germane to this particular era. One factoid does play a role, however, and that's the extent to which the political situation has burrowed itself into even the most well-defended psyches. You may be in the middle of Swann's Way or The Four Quartets, and find the infection of spurious discourse and gaslighting spreading through the system say like worms in a dog. Just as you're about to catch your metaphysical breath, Trump, like one of the zombies from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, opens his ghoulish maw, his used car dealer hairdo and hideous unchanging semantic drawl, hammering hope in a coffin. Sometimes people go into therapy with the mistaken belief that external conditions are what is making them unhappy. The process of treatment is to disabuse them of these defenses. Trump mockingly refers to his critics as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. In fact, it's the one thing he says that's true. He is singlehandedly driving the collective unconscious of society nuts.

Helen of Nowhere

 

"Cusky" could be an adjective used to describe the muted disenchantment that afflicts a new generation of fictional characters. The style of Rachel Cusk's trilogy, Outline, Transit and Kudos has become a cultural meme, though there's a roman a clef luring in her latest Life of M ("'Life of M' Rachel Cusk's New Book Has a Protagonist With An Uncanny Resemblance to Natalie Portman," NYT, 8/23/26). Makenna Goodman's Helen of Nowhere, which has been longlisted for the Booker, is similarly reflective of fragile human connection. Here is a passage from the novel which is structured as a six act play. "I have been thinking about the day my wife left me. I had just come back from my morning walk. It was terribly cold in our house, and because of the wind from my walk, I remember I had tears on my face. I came in from my walk, cold and colder, and my wife was sitting at the table, dressed and upright, formal. She told me she was leaving me." Cuskiness is stark and knife sharp. Entropy rules and there isn't a hint of the erotic in the before or after of these failed connections.

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

Banking

 

Do you bank experience? A bad experience can pay off if it leads to the production of a poem or novel. Take James Jones' war classic From Here to Eternity.  The only problem is actuarial. The older you get, the shorter the time to repeat the reward, which justifies suffering. And of course there are experiences which break the bank. The notion that artists are exempted from the downsides others experience, because they they may profit (or even claim fame and/or notoriety) from them is a great default concept, until you find yourself drowning.

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

Eight Million Ways to Die

A cat has nine lives. Humans only have one though there is You Only Live Twice, which is why fiction is more appealing than reality. “You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face,” is the author's  haiku. BTW it's the last James Bond novel published in Ian Fleming's lifetime. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Block wrote Eight Million Ways to Die. If indeed you only lived twice you would never know it. When you’re about to be reincarnated god makes that indentation above the upper lip which makes way for the life to come.

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

Loss Aversion

Is the fear of death a form of loss aversion, similar to that, say, of losing money? Of course this refers not only to one’s own mortality, but that of others who are part of the pod. Such phobias naturally have an effect on behavior. You're unlikely to undertake certain activities until your concern has passed. When you go to the beach, you wait for the swells to become manageable or the riptide to recede. You’ll perhaps delay a return trip until the threat of “weather” is rescinded. Potential gains are also freighted with the possibility of punishment, the obvious one being that one’s newfound prosperity will be taken away. Ultimately, however, the questions is mute. Why live, if someday one’s life is bound to end?

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

View From the South Meadow

'View From the South Meadow" by Fairfield Porter (1969)

Those who constantly feel pain are enjoined to change their inspirations. Imaging is one method that can be suggested. Think of something which catalyzes positive thoughts. It's like trying a new route to the destination when you're facing delays. Some drivers only follow Google maps while others may choose a more arduous path that circumvents traffic and adds different scenery along way. Freud compared free association to looking out of the window of a train. Fairfield Porter, an exhibit of whose work has recently completed a run at the Art Student's League, adhered to the notion that "the real is specific." What is there to look for, when the present lurks right before one's eyes? He chose to paint the empty field above offering no anodyne for its emptiness.

The Sorrow and the Pity

Au jour le jour means from day to day. The expression conjures the image of a French provincial town out of the pages of Flaubert or Balzac, as opposed to the sophisticated salons of French Vogue or Marie Claire. One day, in this reckoning, is similar to the other. "We must work" was the refrain of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Marie Claire is au contraire "un prenom familier, " but no matter. If you took language lab in high school you will remember the iterations of a whole way of life life out of the reader "la maison," "la cuisine," "la table" that could translate as Middletown USA. There’s Paris and the elegant Polo Club in the Bois de Boulogne then just the life in Clermont-Fernand, the town in which Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity takes place.

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

Cosmic Indifference

Black Hole

Have you ever faced the cosmic indifference of the universe? You always think that your behavior is what's causing the problem, going through the painful analysis of what you would or would not have done or said to deserve the treatment you received. What's worse is the realization it has nothing to do with you.

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

Head

Head

Sex has nothing to do with love. Sex has to do with sex. Some people like George Simenon who fucked chambermaids and everyone else are good at it. IB Singer fucked lots of women and Wilt Chamberlain boasted a thousand. Maybe they were turned on by his seal nose coat. Sex is an equal opportunity employer. There are women who hire gigolos when they’re not satisfied by lovers who boast about their technique. There are lots of people of both sexes who blow each other. Females blow men and guys blow their male friends. In the old days this latter took place guiltily in the back rows of sleazy porn houses in deserted downtowns or in the bathroom of a Trailways, but now that passionless sex has become normalized you just get blown. It’s like getting a haircut. People blow each other's brains out. Have you ever gone to a dinner party where instead of greeting you at the front door with a kiss or hug the hostess or host simply gets down on their knees and blows you? It’s sexist not to include the vagina, but when you're talking about blowjobs, someone has to have a dick. Of course the host or hostess may want to pleasure their female guests  before dinner. However, to perform oral sex on a woman requires a bed, unless you want to do it on the floor.

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

What if the Earth Were Square?.

AI generated image of Rubik's cube

What if the earth were square and warning sides put up everywhere, "Beware the steep descent." Ancient Greek thinkers such as Eratosthenes and Aristotle discountenanced such notions in the 4th century BC. But what if reality is the illusion? For instance many people wrongly think that abstract paintings are just about the surface of the canvas, when in actuality abstraction is tantamount to photorealism with so called figurative art being the delusion. What is the world? In this universe, you learn to take "he's going off the deep end" seriously. Christo might be employed or of course each country could put up its own fence. A square world would give new meaning to the concept of a "rip tide," since the inertial force of the water falls would continually wash away existence.

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

Misery

 

Misery is a great title for a horror thriller. Many people wrongly. associate the emotion with malaise. However,  the kind of drudgery and hopelessness one associates with cement shoes is truly terrifying. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of the Amontillado" deals with revenge by immurement. Waiting For Godot and Endgame are generally regarded as existential comedies, but Hamm and Clov live in garbage cans, only poking their head up to answer a turn of phrase. "Do you believe in the life to come?" Clov asks. "Mine was always that" is Hamm's response. "Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results" is a common saw. Another one is often framed in flowery plaques on bathroom walls, as an admonition to men. "We aim to please. Will you aim, too, please?" The joke rests in between the commas.

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

Straight Flush

 

"Fountain." Duchamp" (1917)

  
SNL modified Trump's "we have all the cards" remark to the Iranians. "We have all the cards, you only have a straight" was the joke.  You can be flush with victory which is the expressions Hegseth and Trump have evinced repeatedly, as they counted their chickens before they hatched. Or simply flushed like the heroin in that famous Trainspotting scene. You night say that The White House has a straight flush when it comes it comes their continually declining arsenal.

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

Cage Aux Folles

Unless you're polyamorous, a great deal of weight is placed up the notion of faithfulness. The underling notion is truth of course. A polyamorous individual is being as truthful and one who is monogamous. Things get a bit more complicated when a supposedly monogamous individual cheats. The reverse is not true of polyamory. Few polyamorous individuals who ware secretly monogamous will ever be upbraided for the feeling that they only want to be with their legal partner in life, although as strange as it may sound there are covens of gay, straight and trans people who demand a certain allegiance to the cause. The Sullivanian analytic movement argued for promiscuity as cure for possessiveness. The underlying notion was a critique of the oedipal triangle which also came under scrutiny by French analysts like Deleuze famous for his Anti-Oedipus tome. The comic possibilities of perverse or not so perverse arrangements are legion. Remember Cage Aux Folles?

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

Embarrassment

"An Embarrassing Proposal" by Antoine Watteau

Are you the kind of person who has always had their hand up waving for attention? Did it start in grammar school, when you got kicked out of class after calling out an answer? Did you do it because you felt you weren't being called on fast enough or potentially at all? Has such behavior become a humiliating practice that makes human existence itself a source of embarrassment for you? You can stop crying out for attention, but nothing is going to change. Once a pickle no longer a cucumber. Society has your number. People realize full well that you're shutting up because you're enraged.

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

Hatshepsut

Queen Hatshepsut

This is a horror movie, one of those old 30s British affairs, where the Oxbridge archeologists upset the spirit of of some dignitary like Hatshepsut. If you haven't visited her tomb at the Met, here's the details. Hatshepsut c 1505 BC was the sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, ruling first as regent, then as queen regnant from c.1479 BC c. 1458 BC and the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Thutmose II. She's not the kind of person whose sleep you want to disturb. You think this is it. In honor of Lindsay Graham, Russia will finally be sanctioned. Cornyn and Tillis will stick to their guns and refuse go along with an agreement about President's fund that's not worth the paper it's written on. Even fanatics like Laura Loomer and Jean Pirro will stand up. But there is no slaying the monster, whose fingers crawl like bugs out of their crypt, just as you're convinced you've buried them forever. 

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

What is to Be Done?

There are two basic lessons to be learned from history--beyond the fact that Hegel's "world historical figure" is a value free notion. Avoid nice guys and those who threaten to "get things done." Chamberlain made the mistake of thinking Hitler was a nice guy when he promised the Sudetenland was Germany's last grab. Most recently Pete Hegseth and Trump both have threatened to bomb Iran into oblivion."A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," Trump recently declared. Hamlet is always held up as an example of what happens when you think too much. Trump, one might say, is the opposite of Hamlet. In the name of bringing industry back home, he exercises tariffs for which the consumer pays the price.

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

Anxiety

Senator John N. Kennedy

John N. not F Kennedy is the Republican senator from Louisiana. You may not like his politics, but his iterations can be amusing such as his description of Trump in regard to the president's insistence that vandals were responsible the failures of the reflecting pool. "He exists loudly, and he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought." Iterations about states of existence are an art form in and of themselves. You might call them existential memes. It's an ability that crosses the aisle and is an odd value neutral touch of light. A Republican with a name like John Kennedy is, btw,  subliminally bipartisan. Is it not?

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

The Fly

You will say this has been said before. Why do you insist on dwelling on the depressing fact that one day you are not going to wake up? Not to beat a dead horse, you will no longer be perceiving the world. Can you get arms around that or the fact that your dying has no more significance than that of the death of one of the ants in the pile you step on creeping out of the cracks in pavement or the irritating fly you wreak vengeance on with your swatter!

Read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

TOE

 

photo: StoneIsland 24

TOE is the acronym for "time of the essence." If anyone ever asks where you got it, just answer "podiatrist." You might send a foot fetishist, someone who likes to "shrimp" or suck toes to a psychoanalyst. Remember Freud's "Rat Man" who was fixated on his anus? But if you really want to get under the surface, it's probably better to look at the metatarsal, which lies at the very heart of the human sole.

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

Kissing

"The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt (1907-8)

Do you remember the first person you ever made out with, the way your lips found those of your lover and seemed to freely search out a cavity of the body that's even more intimate than the genitals? You were in love, but because you hadn't learned to fuck, you soon grew bored and even tired of the other's mouth. After all saliva is not particularly known to be an aphrodisiac. Spittle was all that was left from your moment of passion. Only later in life when you learned that romance was nature's way of facilitating the shoals of desire, did the magic of kissing then return, as something once passed over and taken for granted in the rush for consummation. 

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

Hemorrhoid

 

Naomi entreating Ruth and Oprah to return to Moab (William Blake)

Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein have given perversion a bad name. They make the Marquis de Sade, with his 120 Days of Sodom, a good guy. Well at least Sade didn't gaslight like the President. Words play a role in transgression since they're the way one iterates desire, words and actions, that is, and certain words are almost impossible to spell. Take hemorrhoid or Naomi.  You're likely to strike out with the former. It sounds like hemmorrhoid or hemorhoid. Niomi, Nioami are frequent misspellings. It's hit or miss to get to hemorrhoid. Hemorrhoids are not celestial objects, like asteroids Quite the contrary. They're part of the GI rather than solar system.

read "Cri de Coeur" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Too Solid Flesh

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt" is the key to the Booker prize winning Szalay novel. If you were one of the doubters who felt the out of body inner body experience of Istvan, the central character, was a bit of the been there done that, then you will be chastened by two pages near the end. Spoiler Alert: they are two blank pages that are two of the most eloquent expressions of nullity in all of literature. There is a scene in Sean Baker's Anora, when the whole world of the movie's central characters is destroyed. It's not even a matter of starting all over again or rebuilding. Flesh does melt. Cars do crash changing the lives of their occupants forever.

The Paradox

Do you feel like the tortoise or Achilles in the famous paradox? Or a member of a member of the Trolley Problem focus group? Will you finally decide to run down the one unlucky soul in lieu of the group? What a hero you will be to everyone but the loved ones of that unlucky soul who gets run over! Are you increasingly in a rush to take care of things, knowing your end is growing increasingly near? It’s not a morbid  thought. It’s no different than making your arrangements, choosing the site and even the stone or maybe the urn in which your ashes will lay.

A Last Dream

"Man Behind Bars" by Franz Kafka

You haven’t experienced this yet, since if you did, you wouldn’t be here to tell about it. But imagine your last dream. You’re stuck inside and there’s no way out. It’s a dream in which there is a long hall with lots of black steel doors. They could be monks cells or prison cells, unforgiving, solitary. You run up and down the corridor looking for a way out. There is no way the inmates can help you since they themselves are locked in forever. It’s the ultimate silent retreat. Just in passing you think: How are they fed? However, the idea is soon forgotten. You have more pressing matters at hand like how to get out of this nightmare and back to life?

The Rape of the Lock

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Alexander Pope’s mock epic "The Rape of the Lock" is a satire of the sententiousness and superficiality of 18th century aristocratic society and its obsessions with relatively minor sufferings. You might say Pope’s poem took on the “woke” culture of its time. The lock is, if you will, the "survivor." The poem resonates with our current culture where there are so many would be victims that the real ones are lost in the shuffle. What many fail to remember is that there was Stalin as well as Hitler, Big Brother as well as a Fuhrer.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

 

Improvisation 27, Garden of Love ll (1912)

Kandinsky's l911 treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," is a classic essay on abstraction. The famous painter draws an analogy with music which by turn sets the stage for a discussion of abstraction in painting and other arts. Prosody can be a linear and seemingly realistic literary form such as in the case of  "Tintern Abbey," but modernist poets like John Ashberry use language in ways that can be difficult to parse. The experience is tantamount to not being able to navigate one's way around a canvas. If the medium is the message, then, in this case, don't mistake the messenger. Going back to plasticity, can it be said that Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)" is the real realism, reflecting neuronal movement of axons and dendrites between synapses to regulate the flow of serotonin while so-called realism is, in effect, a construct, a delusion constructed by the mind, as a way of regulating bodies in space?

Therapy

 

Have you noticed that within the demographic of educated affluent liberals that everyone speaks like a therapist? They don't even need training or accreditation. At the very least, they will ask what their fellow discussant feels about this or that turn of events, instead of shooting off at the mouth, which is what they may have done in their past lives. Accompanying the restraint is a meaningful gaze. They may not really be listening or even care, but the simple posture of holding back on thoughts confers an undeniable power. Let the other person babble on in the face of silence, like the nurse in Persona and you will come out on top or bottom, depending on your penchant, both literally and metaphorically.

Sick

Popeye (King Features)

When you were a kid, you stayed home from school when you were sick. School was boring and it was more fun to watch cartoons. On the other hand, you had to deal with your symptoms, whether fever, coughing and sneezing or even diarrhea. Such vacations from the normal order of things have almost no appeal for adults, who like to reassure themselves of their longevity and the degree to which they're survivors who can brave the elements. Some people even have a need to demonstrate their ability endure under the most adverse of conditions. The weak shall inherit the earth is not their mantra, until something happens.

The Whopper

There's a new Whopper in town. Go to the Met or anywhere on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have a salad in the cafeteria, and you'll get Legionaire's Disease and cyclosporiasis--which is not something you want to contract in your peloton. Everyone says  Legionaire's is not contagious, plus you don't have to get eat raw vegetables, which are where the cyclosporiasis bacteria reside. Legionaire's is found is microscopic droplets and lettuce can be sautéed, but let's take a best case scenario. You are in a space capsule, a la Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), or on the Mars mission that NASA has been touting. You eat the lettuce, since there is no time to sauté it. Which way will the powerful diarrhea propel you, towards the red planet or earth?

Denial

signing of Versailles Treaty  (June 28, 1919)

One (and there are many) ways  to explain the phenomenon of Trump is denial. Climate change is a hoax. Even as the rivers overflow and the forests burn away, the easy thing is to say it isn’t happening, to wish it away. That's why gaslighting Trump's favorite rhetorical device. The same thing happened in Weimar Germany. In that case the villain was the Versailles treaty with its onerous sanctions. Hitler's Willing Executioners is the title of the Goldhagen book. The Germans particularly the lumpenproletariat, who paid the price economically,  were on board with a messianic unifying message which blamed the Jews. You don’t have a Trump or for that matter a Jim Jones, unless you  have followers. 

Algae

c

cyanobacteria on Lake Erie

There has been a tidal wave of humanity engulfing the East End of Long Island a new form algae that is flowing along the highways. It has been preceded by flocks of sickly Canadian geese. You know something is wrong when you see a goose or bird standing motionlessly along the shoulder of a road, but as another kind of roadkill are the visitors with their horrendously blank expressions, faces that are airport runways in a vanishing perspective. Flocks of expensive cars drown out the tweeting of birds. Who are these people? What do they want? You might think it's pleasure, but the expressions aremean spirited and filled with exasperation at having to wait in line. "Where have all the flowers gone?"--sang Pete Seeger.

Poltergeist

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

Ghosting is a pregnant notion. Of course people have rejected each other by refusing to answer calls, or even walking right past them without saying hello, but with the explosion of social media and now AI, the possibilities are relentless. Do you want to create damage or merely dodge bullets? The best way to accomplish either is to refuse to acknowledge their existence. It's definitely a great way to inflict a wound. If you just want to be, bothered you get a twofer. After all, the kind of person you want to stay away from is generally someone who is annoying--and even though you don't really have an axe to grind, it's fun to give them a dose of their own medicine, ie annoyance.

The Invite

 

Olivia Wilde's The Invite is Strindberg on Xanax, one of the drugs that's actually taken by Wilde herself playing the characterAngela as she attempts to quell the anxiety-producing prospect of couples swapping. Actual it's Miss Julie and The Father tinctured with Scenes From a Marriage. The conceit is simple, the old married couple upstairs hears their younger counterparts going at it. To be diplomatic  they decide to invite Penelope Cruz (Pina) and Ed Norton (Hawk) down for snacks. Cruz is a sex therapist married to a former firefighter who Rolfs for a living. The combination is funny and sexy as Cruz and Norton unleash their "menu" which includes pegging with strap-ons and DP, (double penetration). Anagnorisis is recognition in Greek tragedy, but here it may refer the list of paraphilias the film rolls out to the cackles of the audience. Seth Rogen (Joe), a failed musician who gloats in his misery is the last to come on board, but the comedy soon gives way to self-revelation, as Rogen's back spasm stops the orgy before it even starts. Rogen is brilliantly funny and the acting, of this dialogue driven movie is totally on point. The Invite is a chamber film and its brilliance lies in the way it juxtaposes slapstick with inevitability, as the plot leads to the sweet pathos of a piano duo.

Only Fans of Flesh

David Szalay

Flesh was exuberantly Booked or Booker (ed), but it is also soft core porn. Titillation is the lingua franca and the message is not particularly mediated by a self-consciousness about its own manipulations. Istvan our feckless hero is seduced by the upstairs neighbor as a teenager (the author is keen to note the hair running from her vagina to her belly button). The protagonist then murders the neighbor's husband, an act that could be viewed as random or intentional depend how you view it. He joins the army and shows his mettle. He's good with his hands and with women and ends up marrying the wealthy widow of his benefactor. Her friends sunbathe topless by the pool of the estate in which the couple live, their breasts described in some degree of detail. Around every corner lies a seduction. There is a rather graphic for The New Yorker set of photos (shot by Katy Grannan) accompanying a piece on OnlyFans by Jennifer Wilson. That's soft core porn too.

King of the Hill

Casey Greenfield and Jeffrey Toobin (Daily News)

There is a lot of justifiable outrage at Trump ghouls such as Goring Himmler Clone, Stephen Miller,  but look at some of the left's Plutocrats. Jefffey Toobin, a former Crimson editor, banished New Yorker writer and now sometime legal contributor to CNN, himself a scion of media aristocracy (his mother ABC's Marienne Sanders and his father TV producer Jerome Toobin.), marries his Harvard sweetheart, who he also worked with on the Crimson (they are both distinguished Dumpster House alumnae) Amy Bennet McIntosh, only to fly the coop for Casey Greenfield, theYale Law School progeny of ABC's Jeff Greenfield, who in turn sues her former lover for child support. Family law is her deal btw. Nice people huh? Sure Access America, E. Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels are all part of Trump's CV, but how can you compete with someone jerking off at a New Yorker staff meeting? Yes, Tina Brown, the consummate insider praises Toobin's writing in spite of it all. Then there's the Graham Platner affair. Trump is Hitler,  but Stalin and Big Brother are alive and kicking in the world of pronouns vetting and  #MeToo vigilantism.

Sportsocost

   Tadej Pogacar

Are you getting tired of sports? If the American team were so great and highly-low-minded (which all lionized competitive athletes need to me), why didn't they boycott the FIFA mafia? Trump makes a call to the don and voila. Do you also have a headache pursuant to Knicks fever and a feeling of disgust at the Bryant Park watch party where Seattle fans were pummeled by inebriated crowds of toughs. What is this? Who cares about the Yanks or the Giants? Then there's hockey. Yes, the athletes are in great shape like their counterparts on the Tour de France, but these are basically savages on ice. To come back to biking. That's OK, right. Climbing is the metaphor and at a certain point the act transcends the competitive angle and becomes a spiritual act. You have the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, Icarus and Daedalus or perhaps sad old Sisyphus. The Tour and the Giro before it are the stuff of dreams.

Reciprocity

"spotted Hyena" (photo: Eli M Swanson)

Can aggression and reciprocity co-exist? Is there, for example, aggression in a romantic embrace? No one regards love as selfless, but is it similar to eating? Is passion an appetite little different from wolfing down a steak and potato? Take language. You can harangue or treat talk as form of listening. The average person having little consciousness of the other, equates speaking with relieving themselves and most interchanges with others as "dumping" (aka one's problems on a defenseless fellow traveler). The supposed therapeutic bond treasured by practitioners of talk therapy is merely an exchange of bodily fluids, in this case saliva, between the patient and the doctor who, if they are lucky, will be able to dart away before they're hit smack in the face by a glob of angry spit.

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

Truth

tracking of engraving of Sosibious Vase by Keats

A Million Little Pieces was not so much a succes de scandal as a simple scandal, due to the fact that James Frey's journey of recovery was at least partially fictionalized. In this era of gaslighting where the titular leader of the country makes things up at will, it’s almost refreshing that anyone cares about the facts. The other side of the argument is that all autobiography is art and all art, autobiography. Deconstructionism has added to the problem since it views statements to be culture bound. In addition, there's the problem that the fuzzy waves in the air you may see on a hot day are the presences of parallel universes bursting at waist.

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

Is the Universe a Gated Community?

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

Closed universes are tantamount to gated communities, albeit on a phenomenological scale. They are a philosophical version of the Great Chain of Being. Essentially human existence is a level playing field. Attempts to frame it, as Einstein or Freud did, are always subject the new kid on the block syndrome, whether it's quanta or the latest neuroscientific discussion of serotonin, axons dendrites or whether memory is procedural or episodic in rats.

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

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).

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

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.

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