Punctuated Equilibrium

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)

In theory an enormous asteroid hit the earth precipitating the Ice Age which destroyed a reptilian civilization now preserved in the Museum of Natural History’s warren of dioramas. What exactly happened in the space of time in which pterodactyls became extinct? You see children’s animations of huge flying birds but there’s hardly ever a depiction of the evolutionary stages. Imagine Jared Diamond’s Collapse on a prehistoric level. Step back the next time you drive or fly into Gotham. It’s a surreal reticulated comic, requiring the kind of advanced graphics dependent on huge memory chips. Will Steven Jay Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium challenge Grand Theft Auto?

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Agnosia

Have you ever had the experience of not recognizing someone you knew long ago? And or of finding a once familiar face lost in flesh? You may have caught your own face reflected in a store window for a second, pausing at the sight of a stranger. You self-conception is at war with time. Capgras is a condition where the familiar facial receptacle is occupied by a stranger prosopagnosia is a complete loss of recognition. Chuck Close a portraitist, ironically, suffered from it. Don’t Google the face of that lost love who creates longing in your dreams. It’s gone forever.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

The Double

The rain forest is the epitome of life. In the winter flocks of geese fly south, along with the Monarchs who vacation in Mexico. The solitary soul exudes silence whose whisperings are the awakening from sleep. One is not to the exclusion of the other, since the mind starts to race when it's left to its own devices. Quietude begets is own discussions particularly with alter egos, dopplegangers and doubles. Dostoevsky's "The Double" is a famous short story in which the Titular Counselor Golyadkin, a genie pops out of the central character's inner life, a sidekick who grows to outdo and finally subjugate its master.  In "El otro," "the Other," Borges meets up with his younger self. "The Picture of Dorian Grey" presents a war between good and evil. There's no dearth of action where the local utility, imagination, is a work. It's one off the ways people survive in the absence of others. Prisoners and those who've become lost in darkness have lots of company.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Guilt

On a quotidian level consider a situation where you feel  obligated to show up for a friend or family member when you would rather be at the high ticket event.You may have promised yourself to stop with the guilt already but failed again. Then you find out the party was a bust. No one showed up and those who did were the were the usual hangers on, who come for the free food and drinks. You didn’t miss a thing and your family were happy to see you!

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Hyperion

Dan Simmons' science fiction novel Hyperion about a group of space pilgrims is a homage to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Though the setting is different and more static—that of a group of nobles recusing themselves from the plague—Boccaccio’s Decameron is a similar idea. "Old wine in new bottles," is the analogy Strindberg uses in the preface to Miss Julie. In 10,000 years an earthling might engage in a quotidian activity albeit with a host of other forces at work. Chaucer’s would not have been able to envision a large metal bird (e.g. an Airbus 320) flying above his Pardoner. Baby boomers did not envision the internet anymore than Gen X did AI. What will be next?

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

One Two Three...Infinity

10 minutes feels an hour until you become numb from the cold. Sprinters traffic in seconds and milliseconds. If a paramecium possessed consciousness it would recognize time in nanoseconds. Time is the question itself in the universe of subatomic particles. Quantum entanglement allows a particle to be in two places at the same time. The enormous magnets of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva are capable of colliding particles at such a speed as to produce bosons, the materiel out if which all matter was created at the time of the Big Bang, 12.9 billion years ago. The light year a product of cosmology enables scientist to represent increasingly immense quantities of space/time. Kepler planets which spectrum analysis has shown to contain carbon are 1200 light years from earth. Due to "dark energy," the universe is continually expanding and in turn becoming more and more devoid of light as objects are separated from each other.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Raising Hell

Botticelli "The Map of Hell"

How to raise hell in hell? Hell is other people is the famed Sartre quote from No Exit. So you don't have to go any further than your the local diner where you have possibly gathered with friends as a break from holiday shopping, a hell all unto itself. Dante conjured 9 circles of hell, each with its own crimes and punishments. So you are not likely to run out of destinations. Just sin and your transgression will be sent on the way to its own fiery punishment. Maybe you just want to have a no strings attached good time, Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck.” Maybe you’d like to inhabit an episode of “Sex and the City.” Do you want to produce or revive pleasure? Maybe it’s a combination of both! Here you can both exorcise your demons “having a good time” while literally raising yourself up from your neighborhood underworld.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver