Emoluments!!!!!!

former Trump International, Washington D.C.

 “ Emoluments!” The word echoes as it falls into the event horizon of a black hole created by the supernova, Democracy.  The cute sounding MBS (crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman) actually has something in common with Elon Musk besides wealth. They are both fascinated with chain saws. He’s also invested $2B in Jared Kushner’s Affinity Fund. Trump, for his part, wants to build towers in Riyadh and Jiddah. There was a piece in The Times about the plight of the stateless illegitimate children of Kenyan domestics raped by their Saudi employers. But that’s not more likely to be on the agenda than the dismembering of Adnan Khashoggi. BTW if you get lost in Istanbul don’t go into the Saudi consulate unless you want to be road kill. F-35s and the Abraham accords are purportedly on the agenda along with the blood red carpet welcome!

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Forbidden City

Imagine the palatial halls through which Kim Jong-un walks. Probably no American has penetrated the inner sanctum more than Dennis Rodman, piercings and all. Though Kim and Trump developed an epistolary relationship (right out of a Samuel Richardson novel), they always met on neutral ground. The palaces of other contemporary tyrants, Putin, MBS (sounds perilously close to AOC no?) and Xi Jinping in Zhongnanhai which is adjacent to the Forbidden City—would be fodder for a latter day Borges. Democracy is inversely proportional to exclusivity. If you’ve ever stayed at luxurious redoubts such as the Hotel du Cap or the Connaught for which letters of introduction can be required, you understand what rarefied means. In academia think of the crypt comprising Skull and Bones at Yale, only there’s no graduation beyond the Tomb of Hotshepsut.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Houyhnhnms and Yahoos

photo: Gage Skidmore

Rain, reign and rein are homonyms. Egregious and blatant are synonyms. If you're looking for an oxymoron, antonyms often qualify. Reverse Midas touch is an oxymoronic use of antonyms. "Good bad" is one. "Pretty funny," "seriously funny" and "awfully good" are examples. The White House for the presidency, however seriously compromised the structure might be by the destruction of the East Wing, is an example of another figure of speech, metonymy, in which you use an associated thing. Synecdoche, the part for the whole, is exemplified by an expression like "all hands on deck."  Let peace "rain" is a poetic use of the homonym which, by the way, has nothing to do with Gulliver's rational Houyhynhyms or their bombastic all too humanYahoos. What about a race of words? Have you ever been in a room with someone whose nonstop talking has obviously been devised to stop them from having to listen to their thoughts?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Speak, Memory

This from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory “His was the kind of colorful neurosis that should have been accompanied by genius but in his case was not, hence the search for a traveling shadow.” One could identify the subject of the observation. However it’s actually more fun to take it out of context to the extent it reveals more about the writer than one of the many specimens in the butterfly collection that he began when he was six. The memoir famously begins: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." And this on his mother's quest for mushrooms. "Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules. Thus, no agarics were taken; all she picked were edible specimens of the genus Boletus (tawny edulis, brown scaber, red aurantiacus and a few close allies), called 'tube mushrooms' by some and coldly defined by mycologists as 'terrestrial, fleshy, putrescent, center stipitate fungi.'" 

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Degeneracy

Orwell’s "newspeak" is now teleportation. Do you dare ask for ICE or ask for scotch “on the rocks” or even for a few cubes? Don’t be surprised if ICE CUBE the legendary rapper changes their brand. Those who reassure you things will pass forget the depredations of the #Me Too era when the then editor of TNYRB was dismissed for allowing a #MeToo’d Canadian journalist to write a mea culpa. The Degeneracy aka Degenerintocracy is following the Gerontocracy, the Theocracy, the Plutocracy, the recent Kleptocracy of Trump-dumb and the generalized movement of cellular organisms to autocratic rule. Do you feel like Winston Smith seeking a sanctum sanctorum amidst the crushing juggernaut of deafening crypto-current noise pollution (Mar-A-Lago raining bitcoins)?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Temptation to Exist

 

Emil Cioran

I and Thou (Ich und du, Either/Or)—what about a philosophical tome Same Different? One wants everything to be the same, to get up, go to work, come home to find the world intact. On the other hand, boredom and the unchanging mess of life are a problem for Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s character even resulted in the coining of a word, Bovarysm. The romantic agony is predicated on the desire for transcendence.  Yet the waves continue to come. There is a hypnotic and reassuring peace in their infinity. They precede and are left for posterity,  without the need for a subjective observer. You read about lives populated with events, the heartthrob with all the lovers. Thrilling existences have an allure, but the free soloist is deprived of serenity. Adrenalin ironically is the antidote for priapism. Anxiety and lovemaking are estranged bedfellows.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Fantasy

 

What is your dirty fantasy? Pornography is a "daydream" according to Robert J. Stoller author of Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred. No matter how much of an exhibitionist, no matter how liberated you are there are certain kinks (do they qualify as "desires?") you won't reveal anyone. Shame is in fact what fuels the arousal. Liberation on other hand is lame. You do the deed, but there is no after party, nothing to butt ones head against. When you transgress, you cross a line. It’s like having a record or rap sheet. Once a pickle no longer a cucumber. Samizdat made poetry precious and desirable.  Caveat emptor. So what is your forbidden thought? What do you try to push down and repress—for fear of being labeled and ostracized? There is a delicious adrenaline rush at the prospect of being caught—but, in your case, doing what?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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