Anthropoid

Dostoevsky (1858)

Have you ever found yourself swept into a maelstrom of misunderstanding? Usually it's electronic. In the old days it was an online purchase gone awry, but now you undoubtedly have a doppelgänger. Call it what you will. An avatar, a ghost, a creation of Anthropic. Dostoevsky wrote a famous story The Double which was appropriated by Borges. Essentially a Titular Officer runs into his double on a bridge in St Petersburg. The author of the famed Grand Inquisitor poem in The Brothers Karamazov, a diatribe  leveled a Christ with the premise that only the Devil or Anti-Christ can bring about the salvation of mankind, hit the nail.  Sound familiar? It's MAGA social policy, aka Spencerian "Social Darwinism" at work and one of the first examples of gaslighting in literature. The Double goes rogue and becomes everything  his counterpart is not, to wit a partygoer, ladies man and manipulator. Isn't this precisely the problem that AI proposes, ie letting the genie out of the bottle.

read "Talk to Her" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Calculating

12/1/53

Shelley lived approximately 10, 585 days, Lord Byron, 1,140 or 315,360 hours or 18, 921, 600 minutes. This last amount of time is less than Elon Musk's dollars. What other figures lie in the celestial cash register? You know the heavy set object, the numerical equivalent of one of those old black rotary phones that sat by your bed,  impassive Buddhas. If you're told to wait 6 months, it's 15, 552,000 seconds, a year 31,104,000 give or take. April, June, September, November all the rest have 31, except February which has 28 or 9. Greenwich Mean Time  is 6:49:29, Wednesday November 11. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the baseline time zone--set at 0 longitude-used as the starting point for measuring time all over the world.

read "Talk to Her" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

NASA is now making plans to inhabit the moon. Creating a manned station there is the next step towards a Mars expedition. Will AI be capable of handling concepts such as "eminent domain" when the Robert Moses of tomorrow starts thinking about infrastructure? Will the first housing be condominiums or coops? What about rent stabilization on the moon? What would be the equivalent of the LIE in outer space and where would it end? If you remember The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was based on the demolition of the earth for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent is the last surviving earth man. It'll be a case of life mirroring in this case comic art, as residents of this planet now find themselves on the brink of facing the judge in a celestial housing court.

read "Talk to Her" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Streetwalking on a Ruined Map

There's an undeniable mystique about the silent film era--and a notoriety, too.  D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation includes a lynching. Nate Parker's 2016 film appropriated the title and another species of controversy, when Parker was accused but ultimately acquitted of involvement in a rape at Penn State. The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931) are two of Chaplin's'most famous silents. If you believe in the power of unspoken thought you're on your way to understanding the power of quietude. Imagine Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929), without explanations or perhaps the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925). The nurse's face is caught in a moment of horror which would later inform the mouth in Beckett's Not I (1972). Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence (2025) is a documentary about the work of one of Italy's most prolific silent filmmakers, whose Neapolitan works paved the way for neorealism. Unfortunately, only fragments of her films are extant. The fact she recused herself from society, did or did not increase her fame, depending on which way you wish to look at it.  In Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, film historian Guiliana Bruno restores Notari's legacy, but if you like ghosts, the less you know the better.

read "Talk to Her" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Bible

"Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law" by Rembrandt

There is something biblical about almost everything. It rains and it’s Noah. You’re swallowed up like Jonah. Turning the other cheek is the other side of the coin from an eye for an eye. Athens and Rome the Hebraic and the Hellenic. Spontaneity of consciousness versus obedience is the way Matthew Arnold put it in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Even The pre-Christian Odyssey is biblical as Joyce illustrates  in his description of Leopold Bloom's wanderings. The notion of the angry God is the fabric of existence in almost all cultures. The compassionate Buddha is also Janus faced in its impassively. Cosmic indifference, in the existential sense, is, when you look at it. the stuff of faith. It’s what made the Israelites worship idols—as they waited impatiently for direction.

The Marshall Plan

the firebombing of Dresden

Reality is currently akin to Strindberg's A Dream Play. In the preface to the play the author writes: "The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, dissolve, and merge. But one consciousness rules them all: the dreamer's; for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples and no laws. He does not judge or acquit, he merely relates; and because a dream is usually painful rather than pleasant a tone of melancholy and compassion for all living creatures permeates the rambling narrative." In "The Midnight Sun," the famous episode of The Twilight Zone where a heatwave which seems to be the result of the earth tumbling out of orbit towards the sun is only a dream of the reverse. It's another way to describe the country the day after the midterms. Well, perhaps that's dour. It's a time to celebrate! However, the results are so outlandishly unexpected as to throw doubt on any reality. Revenge or reconstruction are the two impulses. Congressman Robert Garcia who will be the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee thinks it should be both and he's in a good position to know. One point he does make is that rampant corruption is tied to the stress American families feel. There's no doubt that a rodeo is more exciting than a dog and pony show, but on the other the level of destruction and pilfering under Trump is so high that one wonders if the United States won't need a Marshall Plan to recover from its own self-imploding impulses. USID is destroyed, the staff of the CDC and the DHHS have been decimated with many posts filled by anti-vaxers and other medical shamans. The FBI under $Kash Patel is stripped of qualified agents and the Department of Defense or Department of War as Hegseth likes to call it is literally a war zone. The United States has been living through the Middle Ages replete with a plague and Inquisition. Pete Hegseth should be cast as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor sentencing Christ to burn in hell in the same of Christian renewal. The Reformation and Enlightenment have occurred almost overnight. Is the next stage of history, Vertigo?

The 38th Parallel

Roosevelt Stalin and Churchill all met a Yalta in the aftermath of The Second World War. With Hitler vanquished, the conferees set out to divide German in 4 occupation zones, run by England, France, Russia and the United States. The rest is history or silence which ever way you will have it. By l948, the allies were negotiating the Berlin blockade. Yalta is the setting for a famous Chekhov short story, "The Lady With the Dog," about two lovers trapped in unhappy marriages. Yalta is part of the region annexed by Russia, but still considered part of the Ukraine. Now the day after the midterms, new alliances, which will inevitably engender discord, division and exclusion have already metabolized. In the Chekhov story, the lovers are never fully able to escape their predicament. They inhabit a literal "no man's" land. The DMZ between North and South Korea was established at the 38th Parallel in 1948.