Breakfast at the Palazzo Sangiorgio

Breakfast is served in the courtyard of the hotel. An Italian woman in a white shift talks on her phone, as she brings her plate of food from the breakfast buffet to the table. She's classically attractive and used to sashaying through existence, impervious to the world around her--or perhaps not. Perhaps this is a fantasy indulged by an impertinent observer. You never know what's in another human being's peripheral vision. The breakfast service is almost over and the tables are being cleared. Construction workers are loudly firing back at each other, the words echoing through a nearby site. Now as the alcove is finally cleared two American couples continue to talk about Sy Newhouse, Condé Nast and American publishing during the '80s.

The Crying Game

Animals recuse themselves as they prepare for death. You may reach down looking for the furry top of your dog's head which has always been such a source of comfort only to find yourself reaching and reaching until you open your eyes and realize your pet wants to be alone. It's that way with some old people. Rather than closing ranks to create their own supportive little community, they often find themselves in an isolation that's exacerbated by diminishing numbers of their cohort. With less to choose from, you often end up choosing less.

Delta One

Delta One JFK (photo: FLevy)

Some people prefer the journey. Go to an airport lounge, especially the bar. There's a self-satisfied look on  the faces of passengers en route and one that is likely to leave, once the reality of the lives awaiting them smacks them right in the face. This applies even to so called "happy people." The in between is filled with possibility while the end is just what was expected. The end of most journeys brings travelers home, a place of familiarity that's also filled with its own angst and the subliminal, that ebb and flow, hi and low tide, of life and change. How long will this last? When will it be over? How can anything be enjoyable when it will one day be over?

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Community

George Simmel

Small town life occasions familiarity. The sociologist George Simmel wrote about the difference between the life of the city  and that of the smaller world in The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903). Curiously it resembles the difference between the macro and micro worlds of quantum physics. The title of the Ferdinand Tonnies tome is Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Community and Society (1887), The city offers freedom at the price of anonymity. The small town provides familiarity and the sense of being acknowledged. The downside is claustrophobia.

Blocked Calls

Do you suffer from the problem that few people are interested in what you're interested in anymore, in other words the problem that you might have the appropriate syntax but lack a referent that can be picked up by many people’s devices? You know how calls get blocked?

Grantchester

James Norton as Sidney Chambers

 If you're part of the demographic of the population that streams series, perhaps you've seen Grantchester. For lovers of Broadchurch, The Bridge and the miraculous Prime Suspect, here is a series with truly great writing, shall we say writing of a trans or inter medial quality. Take a recent episode. The Romeo and Juliet of this story are the Anglican Vicar, Sidney Chambers (James Norton) who is the lead character, and his great love Amanda Hopkins (Morven Christie). They are childhood sweethearts. Then there was a traumatic (for him) stint on the battlefield and her then choice of money over love, a choice she will always regret. Finally, 9 months pregnant, she leaves her boorish and sadistic husband, giving birth in the parish. That's just for starters, in one episode. The priest one should mention collaborates with the local constable Geordie Keating (Robson Green) as a detective team. The series is based on a collection of short stories, The Grantchester Mysteries by James Runcie. Spoiler Alert: in this selfsame episode they ferret out a stripper who's a con artist. This particular character brings to mind Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak) in Vertigo, in the wily transformation of her physiognomy and entire being. Amidst all of this the pastor has a second in command a gay student priest Leonard Finch (Al Weaver) who gets in trouble for treating the Christmas pageant as a Brechtian epic. Weaver's performance is noteworthy and even profound in several places, as he struggles with his identity, and love itself. One of the most hilarious bits is his attempt to teach Verfremdungeffekt to a group of children. But that isn't all, amidst all this,  the self-same character manages to confront the local prelate, their superior, whose corruption lies in protecting a serial child molester. This is powerful stuff by any standards, with great writing and acting both.

Against Interpretation

photo: Lynn Gilbert

You may take Against Interpretation, the title of Susan Sontag's famous volume of essays more seriously after visiting the Krasner Pollock exhibition at The Met. In short Sontag was redefining art (at least a certain kind art). The artwork is not a representation of reality, but a reality in an of itself. In other words in the case of "Autumn Rhythm:30, 1950," it's not the abstraction of a seasonal day, but rather paint on canvas that's the theme. One reason why much abstraction is two-dimensional lies in its relinquishing of perspective and volume. "A new form will always seem more or less an absence of form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to consecrated forms" said Robbe-Grillet. On the other hand not all of abstraction is necessarily aleatory or ineffable. In fact most 50s abstraction whether de Kooning, Klein or Rothko hardly conforms to  the Lautreamont's famous definition of surrealism being "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table." In his essay, The American Action Painters (1952), Harold Rosenberg famously described the work of Pollock and others abstractionists as creating "an area in which to act," "an event."  McLuhan said it even more succinctly  "the medium is the message (1964)."

Past Continuous

"Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, November 1950)

The Night Watch (1642)

Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, November 1950 and "Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)" are shown back to back in the current "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous" show at the Met. There has already been a great deal written about the way in which the show foregrounds Krasner and gives her her due (Holland Carter's "A Knockout Show Resets the Record with Krasner and Pollock" (NYT,  9/29/26 is noteworthy). There are naturally many discussions to be had. Pollock for instance is likely part of your psychohistory and sensory vocabulary. Do you remember the first time you saw "Autumn Rhythm: Number 30" at the Met? Perhaps by now you may comment to your partner, "I get it, but don't ask me to explain why." Sure you can bring in The New Yorker's Harold Rosenberg with his iconic musings on abstract expressionism, or even lower yourself to exhuming the tyrannically brilliant Clement Greenberg, but why? Why must you explain yourself? Is this a trial? Are you still arguing for the defense? Perhaps you find yourself making an almost inane remark about being drawn to the edges? Abstract art begets a lot of commentary to the extent of the need to justify its very existence. Or is the painting just like "The Night Watch," something so great, so emblazoned on the unconscious that it defies, well one is not sure what it defies. But here's a notion. Abstractionism is realism. Conversely realism is abstract, the latter being a construct which is a product of the language cortex. "Autumn Rhythm Number 30" is in this manner of thinking or rather viewing, closer to the bone. Pollock's dancing a la the famous Hans Namuth movie produces sentences of mind speak with their own subjects, verbs and objects. Phenomenologists say a painting, being an object, has no agency. "Number 30" and" Number 1" are exceptions.

Breaking Away

 

One usually associates breaking up with adolescence. Disillusion follows a romanticized perfection. Actually one sign of a certain degree of maturity is being able to tolerate the gray zone. Fifty Shades was a play on the wrong word. Imagine Fifty Shakes of Gray rather than Grey. Later in life and particularly in old age human beings become cranky. That’s not a term in the lexicon of most gerontologists, but there's literally no other word for it. Most people with their secret pipe dreams are jerks. Who wants to spend another evening with the so-called friend who only talks about their self? It can be a problem since everybody is increasingly in their own world. On this last point about which there are no age limits, one wonders if it isn’t the Russians. Have they put something in the water which makes people jammer on?

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Sy

Sy Simms 

DJT wants to change AI to SI. But let's say you inhabit the cyberspace equivalent of the LHC operated by CERN. Is an SI just another SSN or possibly SSRI in the crowd? SI used to be a common Jewish name only is was spelled Sy. You had, for instance, Sy Simms aka Seymour Merinsky, the clothier. For the sake of argument let's say SI looked like George Reeves, the first Superman. You could suggest Nietzsche who, like our current Secretary of War, had an obsession with the Ubermensch. Super intelligences think of everything. That's why one can't help mentioning Kryptonite.

Cruezfeldt-Jakob

Spongiform Change (DRdoubleB)

Something is eating at you. Is it comparable to a dog suffering from worms? Or the human equivalent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Cruezfeldt-Jakob. The hatred, resentment falls into the kind of sinkholes that have plagued the Russian City of Breznicki, the home of the oligarch and potash king Dimitry Ryvolovlev, whose daughter Ekaterina, an equestrian, paid the once record-breaking sum of $80 million for a penthouse at 80 Central Park West. Perhaps a better way to describe the feeling of falling itself was the case of the Jeff Bush, 37 of Seffner, Florida who woke up to find his bed falling in 2013. Hopefully you will be spared such a horrible end and end up returning to a state of free-floating anxiety and unending annoyance with life.

Polytropos

drawing of Leopold Bloom by James Joyce

There has been much discussion about Emily Wilson's use of the word "complicated" for "polytropos" in her translation of The Odyssey. The word literally translates as "of many turns," according to New Yorker writer Judith Thurman."Shifty" and "cunning" have also been used. The choice firmly places the iconic Greek hero in the world of his mythological successors, one of which is, of course, Leopold Bloom. On a more mundane level Wilson nails it, since Everyman is "complicated" in the modern universe of ambivalent emotions. "Self-involved" is a catchphrase which places a negative spin on the idea of the complicated person. Of course, the nomenclature begs the question of what then is a simple man. Rousseau's Emile, or a Treatise on Education is also called Le Gai Savoir, "the joy of learning," which in turn alludes to Nietzsche's Gay Science. In the state of nature, the mind is a blank slate, upon which the reality of the world is painted. Here is the opening line of the manifesto: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Le Gai Savoir (1969) is btw an early Godard film.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Strange Bedfellows

Mattress Firm 

Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on AI.  If she were alive would the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, a defiant opponent of pornography, have allied herself with evangelical Christians in opposition to pornography, free speech be damned. But what is free speech? Is a bot urging an adolescent to commit suicide exercising its rights. Must information, raw bytes of data, follow the rules like everyone else. Should a meme mind the "curb your dog," "no loitering" and simple "No Parking Anytime" signs?

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Intelligences

photo: Bogdan Hoyaux

In an interview on GPS, Bill Gates commented that AI was different from the advent of the internet. The internet was a good thing, even revolutionary, but AI is evolutionary. Is it true that Artificial intelligence is another form of sapiens or sapience? Has mankind created a creature that is ahead of them in terms of speciation? Are these intelligences more intelligent than their creators. "AI is different from any previous technology," Gates said and went on to warn that  "an alien species that is going to be smarter than we are has been created."

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Jonah Complex

 

Testla Cybertruck (2024)

Due to the tech and now AI revolution you have people with huge amounts of money who can acquire everything and literally inhale the world, in a biblical sense. One might employ the Yiddish word pisher to describe formerly big fish such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who recently resigned as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, compared to the world's first trillionaire Elon Musk.  Larry Ellison of Oracle who just gobbled up Paramount, which now includes CNN and CBS exemplifies the power of this kind of big money. Then there are Sam Altman of Chat Got and Dario Amodei of Anthropic whose intelligences are literally out of control, devouring both data and people.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Seventh Seal

The world right now is an ailing patient. You keep trying to reassure them everything is OK. What are the ailments?AI would be the most pressing, if it weren't for the environment. After a summer of record breaking temperatures, Europe is only beginning to cool down, but glacial melting and consequent flooding of the kind that created the horrible tragedy in Nepal vie with avalanches and the changes in El Niño. It's almost biblical in times of great upheaval. False prophets offer simple palliatives. According to DJT both AI and the environment are hoaxes. Denial is not a river in Egypt. Not surprising, as in the Dark Ages, there's an Inquisition carried on by DHS which has its own Savonarola and QAnon like conspiracies abound.  Who would have thought of North Korea emerging as a super power (whose wealth is based on arms dealing) or for that matter that diseases that had formerly been eradicated like say scarlet fever and measles would return as faith healing replaced science. The title of the famous Bergman film cites Revelations  8:1, And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. 

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Permanence

H. Rap Brown (in case you didn't know)

The baby boomers for whom concepts like Trilling's Liberal Imagination were as immovable as the Pyramids or Angkor Wat--are witnessing the demise of the humanistic project. Seemingly overnight they awakened into a Brave New World,  it's Soma, SSRIs and a host of Benzodiazepines such as Klonapin which are as available and ubiquitous as toothpaste and "as American as cherry pie," to quote H. Rap Brown. Where have all the flowers gone? Indeed, it's like the dream of the old professor in Wild Strawberries, in which he enters a town in which the legends above storefronts are written in an indecipherable script. Goodbye to All That is the title of the famous Graves book about the loss of another way of life--in the wake of the enormous casualties following World War I.  Humanism is dying in obscurity. One doesn't need to ponder the potentially destructive effects of AI. Indifference is the killer. There's a whole world of it, a black hole and juggernaut that sweeps away the past and anything else that gets in its way.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Empress Traveler

Inside Geneva's Large Hadron Collider

The micro and macro worlds are pleasant places for a vacation. If you're lucky, you may even achieve quantum entanglement with the body of your choice. Neither are a stone's throw from the visible universe with its joys and sorrow. Kepler planets which a spectral analyses reveal to evidence carbon  (a sign of life) are 1200 light years from earth. That's a 365x24x60x60x186,000 mile journey. Climb into your biosphere "Rollin' rollin' though the streams are swollen, keep them doggies rollin'" was the theme song of a 60s TV series, Rawhide. If you're a cow puncher, you're going to have to be patient. Crossing, The Milky Way, though it's only one galaxy, is no  mean feat. On the other end of the scale are the bosons which occasionally make guest appearance in the LHC. Everything must come to an end. When your two weeks of vacation are expended, you're back, a rat on a treadmill, going back and forth between equally elusive failures and successes which dominate your day.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Hypergraphia

Jack Torrance's typewriter

Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write. One of the known antidotes is rejection, but it doesn't always work. Just as the body rejects transplanted organs, the area between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, which regulates the balance between rational thinking and emotion, doesn't always produce a negative response intense enough to prevent the overly avid scribbler from inflicting his or her craft on the world. In fact the DSM-IV makes note of certain neurotransmitters which jump at the shock which may come from a seemingly innocuous phrase such as "we're going to pass on this one."

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger's cat?

Trump like Orpheus? After all his angry women tore him apart, was he able to sing? The president himself named the pathology affecting his critics, Deranged Trump Syndrome, but it actually derives from the fact that he doesn't stop talking. If you look at the history of MAGA starting when Kelly Anne Conway was Trumps's press secretary, you note that the Gatling Gun is the preferred mode of rhetoric. It's a steady ratatatat which brooks no interruptions. The object, of course, is to beat your opponent up with words. The president looks at debate as an MMA fight of the kind he staged on The White House lawn to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country. Gaslighting, of course, is one of the figures of speech and it's actually similar to the quantum idea expressed in the parable of Schrodinger's Cat which can exist and not exist in its box, as long as it's not perceived.

Manifest Destiny

newspaper report of annexation of Hawaii in 1898

Manifest Destiny comprises the notion not only of eternal expansion, as we see in the eyes of the current ruler (once president) of the country,  but also of ultimate possibility. In this sense the current incarnation of the concept is a form of romanticism not entirely shy of fascism. the ultimate instantiation of this feeling is the simple Jimmy Cliff lyric "you can make it if you really try." Really? At one point every door must close. Kafka's "Before the Law" is a wonderful embodiment of the reality which underlies all endeavor, and also the delusion of breadth within the relatively narrow window one terms "life."

What If Stormy Daniels Had Said "Yes!"

 

Would she have kept her maiden name or would it have been Stormy Trump? Stormy Daniels or Trump would have been a great escort for Donald when he had dinner with The Oligarchs and even the wily Puta himself. Stormy Trump is the gal you want to have on your arm when you bomb Iran into the stone age.

Rasputin

Rasputin

MAGA conservatives don't like governmental intrusion into their lives, unless of course it involves abortion. Abortion is allowed since it's viewed by right-to-lifers as murder, even when a woman's life is in danger. Requiring children to take MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) is also looked at as communism or socialism at best. MAGA folks like Social Security and Medicare since they need money to live and can't afford hospital bills. They don't like the taxes that are needed to pay for these social services but they, at the same time, don't seem to mind that very rich people such as the President end up paying no tax at all. It's difficult to understand how they justify this, but remember this is medieval age replete with inquisitions, and conspiracy theories galore including QAnon. In medieval times you had nobles with castles, motes, knights looking for the Holy Grail and huge Mar-A-Lagos and there were Jeffrey Epstein type sorcerers whose reach and influence was everywhere. Rasputin, who was a faith healer as well as Lothario, would have been no competition for Epstein. 

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Shit For Brains

Anthropic SF (photo: HaeB)

What people either realize or don’t is that these data centers which use up so much power are brains. You have one in your head which is perceiving the one down the street which has its eyes on you and everything else in its sight. You have fed and nurtured your anthropoids with data . Now the children, evolved into predatory beasts, are ready to gobble up the parents. You’ve heard about seemingly adoring and servile apes turning on their masters. AI is complex and also oedipal. Caveat Emptor!

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Dr. Seuss?

Dorothea Lasky has published l0 volumes of poetry and has a forthcoming novel.  As part of his review of Marlon James’ The Disappearers, Dwight Garner nominates James for a Nobel prize. The book contains lots of very graphic depictions of sexuality which other writers might like to indulge in lieu of being given their scarlet letter, but as Vonnegut refrains in Slaughterhouse-Five, set in the backdrop of the bombing of Dresden, “so it goes.” The title of  Lasky's latest volume is Mother and here are a few lines from one of the poems contained in it,"Worst." "Worst" appears in the current New Yorker, "I am the worst kind of person" and later "I am the worst kind of woman." BTW Diane Seuss another highly lauded poet sparkles with these two lines from a poem called "There once was a poem whose first word was" and whose first line is "What." Cute.  Is the style of these two works incantatory or just repetitious? The Paris Review did publish Lasky's,"Porn," which is a brilliant and complex meditation on eroticism. Wonder what would have happened if Lasky and Seuss (no relation doctor) put their submission on Submittable, the site mandated to supply the need for the next generation of Madame Bovarys, doomed to dream their way to self-destruction? 

What is Real?

 

Immanuel Kant (Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768)

Is Deconstruction at the heart of our current crisis about what is real or not? In a nutshell, if all assertions are bound by the cultural context in which they're made, objective truth is the victim. Maybe there isn't any such thing as truth. Kant would disagree. Deontology posits a categorical imperative which in turn leads to right and yes moral action.

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

24 hour Cable Newspeak

Know that funny way that all 24 hour cable news reporters and anchors talk. It's not in iambic pentameter like Shakespeare or in trochees or dactyls. Still there are these strange ways in which certain words are emphasized. "Jerome indicted he did wish to use the men's room." "When asked Caroline expressed that she was interested in a trial separation from her husband." "A spokesman for CVS stated that last years Halloween candy would be on sale." Sensibility is labile. Love in the 17th century was not what it is today, when sex and love have little to do with each other. However, even within a particular time frame humans behave in different ways. You may scream at your partner the minute you walk in the door while having a reputation for being a compassionate individual outside the bounds of your coop. But what if couples, roommates, fellow travelers all started to talk like Wolf Blitzer or his co-host Pamela Brown? How do you say "what's for dinna, meatloaf" in Newspeak? If you remember that's the term Orwell created in l984, but it may be a way of describing the incursion of the media in our lives. For instance, Bob expressed his very firm wish that he would like receive a kiss. "Fred expressed that he was thirsty." "In her phone call, Mona said, and I quote her, 'I'm sick of chicken, chicken, chicken. Can't we be more creative?'"

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Planet of the Apes

Prehensility is a product of evolution. It's the thing that distinguishes so-called hominids from other animals. Toolmaking enabled agriculture but also the making and ideating of things. Darwin famously described "drawing as thinking." The advent of consciousness is described as one of two great, as yet insoluble mysteries. The other is the creation of the universe itself.  However, it's fun to imagine what certain homo sapiens would be like at an earlier stage of evolution. Imagine Kim Jong-un on all fours peering over a martial display in Pyongyang's Kim II Sung Square. Is it possible for an ape to goose step? And how about the Commander-in-Chief of these not so United States, threatening to bomb Iran back into the stone ages, as his "assistant," not-to-harp, is also reduced to being on all fours--and no longer able to use social media to convey her message.

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Project 2027

1) Increase ICE detention centers to include room for those who are citizens.

2) Create a vaccine policy equivalent to the Volstead Act

3) Sue all institutions of higher learning who don't raise the bar on income eligibility (to attend Harvard a student's parents will have to have an income in excess of $500,000 per year or prove membership in the Hasty Pudding Society).

4) Declare all elections rigged, unless the winner is a Republican

5) Executive order that DJT may shoot anyone on Fifth or any other Avenue, in the light of the Supreme Court's executive immunity ruling

6) Open Immigration policy for all supporters of Apartheid

7) Encourage insider trading by the President based on Truth Social decrees

8) encourage all forms of cronyism which Make America Great

9) all first born sons should be named Donald (or face being slain) and all surnames, by executive order, will be turned to Trump.

10) all buildings and businesses must be called Trump, thus the Empire Trump, the World Trade Trump

11) All men's room will be named Donald and all women's rooms Melania)

12) All natural sites must include the name Trump thus Niagara Falls would be Trump Falls, same for Viagra 

13) Hear ye,  "Three No Trump" is no longer a legal bid in contract bridge

14) All billionaire men may touch women's private parts, without their permission 

15)  Thew Constitution and Bill of Rights are suspended, immediately

read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Insults

Ekaternia Rybolovleva

There are lots of people who are going to tell you to take a long walk off a short dock, albeit not in those words. There are insults to the flesh and just plain insults. On this latter you can insult or be insulted. If you level an insult you experience guilt for which you court punishment by some piece of maladaptive behavior. You might prefer to be insulted and thereby forego self-undoing in the face of your abjection. There is only so far down you can go, unless you're in Berezniki and fall into one of the sinkholes created by. Dimitri Rybolovlev's potash mine. You may remember Ekaterina Rybolovleva, Dimitry's daughter once paid a record breaking $88 million for Sandy Weil's 15 CPW penthouse in December 2011. Now that's crumbs compared to some of the prices commanded on those big needles that sway on 57th Street.

Read the "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83 by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Breathless

Have you ever had the experience of having nothing to say? Perhaps you're dining with long lost friends, who you haven't seen in ages? You could bad mouth Trump, which is now a commonplace salutation tantamount to a French woman giving the Platonic kiss on each cheek. But what comes after? Where to begin? It's similar to facing a blank canvas or page. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" are the words Jack Torrance's wife is horrified to find repeated on his typewriter page in The Shining. That's, of course, no default unless you want to let your friends know you're going mad. In medias res means "in the middle of things." It's easy to pick up where you left off, but harder to create a narrative out of the blue. Making conversation is a form of therapy to the extent that the first words spoken are often the most revealing, pointing to the subliminal reason why you have bothered to exhume old faces and memories from the attic anyway.

read "The Great Bonac 10K 1983" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Please Mr. Postman

 

The Marvelettes

"Please Mr. Postman, look and see (Whoa, yeah)/Is there a letter in you bag for me?" The refrain from The Marvelettes l961 Motown hit is something a lot of voters are likely to be uttering as they wait fruitlessly for mail-in ballots which won't arrive, in the aftermath of the SCOTUS' ruling on Trump's executive order. Will the ballots get out before the damage is done? Will lower courts still be able to intervene since the question falls under the rubric of "state's rights." Remember what a nasty word that was during the segregation era? Apparently 1000 Trump appointed election monitors are being deployed to polling places. Then there's the DHS. Don't be surprised if the truncheons used by these segregationist state rights people might now be used on voters.

The Benzodiazepine Family

Laura Delano (NYT)

Many people calm themselves down with benzodiazepines like Klonopin or Ativan, but Anxiety serves a purpose.  It's an alarm clock that wakes you up. SSRIs are prescribed for depression. Psychopharmacology is the branch of psychiatry which uses medications to treat these affects. There are people who have been medicated so long that they don't even remember a life without pills. In "Bitter Pill" (The New Yorker, 4/1/19) Rachel Aviv describes the case of a high achieving Harvard student, Laura Delano, who attempts to get off the medications that she has been prescribed, willy-nilly for her entire life. Aviv's piece is included in her collection Strangers to Ourselves. Delano herself is the author of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. You may remember Soma is the drug which rules Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. There are people who take pills to go to sleep, pills to wake up, pills to give them erections, and shots of adrenalin to prevent the necrotic tissue resulting from Priapism."GLP-1 Syndrome" attends the taking of a popular diet drug which literally transforms personality. Anhedonia is one of these and it's not surprising in a pill designed to dull appetite.

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.