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