Is Shakespeare's Shrew Bipolar?

The Taming of the Shrew is an illustration of how ideological alarm bells can create myopia. To a modern audience Petruchio’s taming of Katherina is simply an insult to women. He's the Skinnerian cat   employing "operant conditioning" to create a system of rewards and punishments. Unfortunately, this interpretation disregards the symbolic subtext of the play. Katherina is an unstable element, the fissile U-235, that will implode and explode the same time. Rather than being a free spirit, she's a bipolar personality prone to fits of mania and depression. She isn’t so much an exemplar of a liberated woman, as a human being bereft of any role. When she finally does her husband's bidding, she becomes a force of order and a power of example to the other wives. On one level Kate’s character seems to be submitting, but if you look at the denouement of The Taming of the Shrew in the context of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play’s more about order and chaos then patriarchy per se. The provocativeness of the play’s superficial content is belied by the complexity of the intention. Is "Kiss me, Kate," the call of a colonizing chauvinist male or merely a wiley lover?

Read "King Kong Theory" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope.com

and listen to "Woman, Woman" (1968) by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap

Compare and Contrast Bicycle Thieves With The Overcoat, The Trial, Waiting For Godot, Dead Souls and The Nose

Remember Gogol’s “The Overcoat’ (1842)? A civil servant, Akaky Akakievich, spends his last cent on the item of the title, only to have it stolen almost immediately. He knocks on doors with no luck and then dies. Gogol was involved in the notion of loss. “The Nose” (1836), which was made into an opera by William Kentridge, centers around an assessor, Major Kovalyov, who discovers his olfactory appendage has disappeared into a loaf of bread. Of course the apotheosis of this idea is Dead Souls (1842), where Gogol’s hero Chichikov comes up with a plan by which he can profit from someone else’s loss. In the canon of neorealism, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) is an indelible depiction of the poverty of post-war Rome. However, is the plot in which the snatching of a bike in an instant has an enormous impact on a father and son, two forlorn characters who helplessly seek to find one missing possession amidst a plethora of similar objects which propagate exponentially like a devouring creature, taken from the original Gogol story? Both the Russian writer and the Italian director create a vision of powerless human beings facing an impregnable bureaucracy also similar to that depicted by Kafka in The Trial (1915). Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949) is titled En Attendant Godot, “while waiting for Godot” in French. The real subject is the cosmic indifference of the universe, a.k.a the cosmic yawn in which the odds are against puny man whose prayers are rarely if ever heard.

Read "Separated at Birth: Keith Richards and Samuel Beckett" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Brown Sugar" by The Rolling Stones

Trump's Legal Gymastics and Quantum Mechanics

CMS Detector for LHC (photo: Tighe!)

What happened to all the cases? Let’s start with Fulton Country’s against Trump for attempting to meddle in the election? A special grand jury may soon be convened, but what took so long? What about the highly published case waged by Cy Vance which was supposed to get off the ground after Trump left office and the rape defamation lawsuit leveled by E. Jean Carroll? Looks like Trump is suing his niece, Mary Trump, faster than her initial lawsuit against him can get off the ground? Are the strongarm techniques continuing even with the strongman out of office? Is there a legal rabbit hole or better yet black hole which sucks up the hundreds perhaps thousands of lawsuits against the former president. Newton's third law states "For every action, there is an an equal and opposite reaction." It's also the Trump legal strategy of countersuing. Actually, if you notice Trump operates in a quantum universe where a particle can be two places at the same time.  Doesn’t that remind you of the former president’s treatment of facts—in which equal and opposite answers to the same question emanate from the same mouth? Fake news, indeed. A legal case comes to light like the Boson in the Large Hadron Collider, only to disappear before it can be reported in print or on the air. Many commentators averred that Trump would be so busy defending suits he wouldn’t have the time or money to run for reelection in 2024. Looks like they’re wrong.

Read "The Final Solution: Quantum Politics" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope.com

and listen to "Cry Baby" by Janis Joplin

Dear Ethicist: The Dating Game

Dear Ethicist: I have spent more time trying to make a date with some old friends of ours than we will eventually end up spending together if the stars finally get into conjunction and voila we find ourselves facing them over dinner with nothing left to say since we’re so drained and exhausted from the dating game and are beginning to hate them almost as much as we hate ourselves. I realize that’s a mouthful (speaking of dinner) and that further these are small problems compared to all the dying people. But the one thing I have always said about my problems is they’re mine. We’re busy New Yorkers with yoga, therapy schedules and late afternoon trysts that all have to be scheduled in. You may or may not go way back with someone, but at a certain point you may throw your hands up and ask “is it worth all the trouble.” BTW, let’s not forget the phone tag that precedes the dating game.

 

Scheduling Problems

Brooklyn, NY

Dear Scheduling Problems: Have you ever heard the expression, "belly button gazing." It’s synonymous with self-involvement. Your belly button must be so gazed upon that it has the equivalent of an interpersonal sunburn.

Read "Sperm Count: Should You Give Your Child Viagra?" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

 

 and listen to "Monkey Time" by Major Lance (1963)

Dear Ethicist: What To Do When a Eulogy is Being Given By a Fucking Asshole Who Never Gave You the Right Time of Day

Dear Ethicist: I feel the obligation to attend a memorial service but the person giving the eulogy is someone who’s never given me the right time of day. What should I do? Its no fun being snubbed at a funeral. The only problem is, I’ll risk getting the cold shoulder from my dead friend’s wife--who's somewhere betweeen mildly attentive and disinterested. My failure to show up could tilt the scale in the wrong direction and seal my fate in so far as my social capital is concerned. I’m now leaning towards not attending. Let the chips fall where they may. I know everything is relative. There must be people who think the eulogist is smart and at least empathetic, but let me invoke Kant's categorical imperative and say that this guy is categorically a fucking asshole. As you can see I’ve worked through my feelings. Still I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. If I don't take your advice in this situation, they're likely to come in handy in the event I attend any memorials presided over by people who don't like me, in the future. 

Angry
Madison Wi

Dear Angry:

I believe there is an 800 number for people with your problem.

Read "Is Guilt a Time-Bound Emotion?" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Love Train" by the O'Jays

Being John Malkovich?

Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s famous existentialist tome. Then there’s Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sein und Zeit. But what's the difference between nothingness and time? For instance, say you were able to go back before the Big Bang, the prequel to "being," over 13.8 billion years ago, when there weren’t even bosons. What if you went back in time and crashed that rusted yellow “dead end” sign, journeying to the universe before matter, would you find degrees of nothingness that were tantamount to time, but not quite the same thing? To use anachronistic Greenwich Mean terminology, does 10 minutes before the Big Bang represent a bigger piece of the void, a greater degree of lessness or emptiness than one solitary minute or second? Imaginary numbers are a branch of mathematics and, by definition, much cosmology and particularly the quantum universe exists in In the Realms of the Unreal to quote the title of the novel by the outsider artist Henry Darger. So while no time machine traversing through wormholes is likely to take a traveler to the “Minor Verse,” before there were Gods inhabiting Mount Olympus, it’s still possible to possess the kind of synthetic a priori knowledge that makes it possible to accurately conclude that the sum of 2=2 is 4.

Read "Something Out of Nothing, Nothing Out of Something" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "I (Who Have Nothing)" by Ben E. King (1963)

Timebound

Most people conceive of a timeline, albeit of a Borgesian sort, a ruler with infinite gradations. Naturally this presupposes a continuum. After all a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but there are all kinds of limitations, the foremost being consciousness which presupposes faith in the notion of a before and after. Does the afterlife which flirts with eternity in terms of either salvation or damnation play by the same rules? The very notion of forward progression is disingenuous in the face of the divine which is by definition unknowable. The classic conception of linear time may turn out to be a little like Newtonian physics when contrasted to quanta in terms of accounting for exigencies which defy visual observation. What kind of time do bosons exist in? What's time at the event horizon of a black hole or in the plasma of some unknown cosmic ether or soup? Time may turn out to be provincial, the watersheds of life like the faded signposts on a country road. "What time is it" is not an easy question to ask when you've departed from the Euclidian coordinates of here and now.

Read "The Final Solution: Trump's Tweets and Black Holes," by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to Gene Chandler singing "Duke of Earl"