The Believer

A cynic is someone who questions and is challenged when it comes to belief. God is not the only thing that may elude those who are lacking in faith. Trust in others and the feeling of belonging that comes from adherence to the values and mores of a group are also denied those who live in doubt. Friendship is utilitarian to the extent that a friend is also a “gonnegtion,” to invoke Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it's Tomas who differentiates between love and sex, thereby turning his relationships into a game of bait-and-switch. You might very well discountenance the advances of someone who's seeking another notch in his belt. Even though the realist usually has evidence, they may find it difficult to make the leap that's required to embrace literally anything. Deconstruction undermines the moral order to the extent that it makes judgement a product of culture. The “motiveless malignity” that Coleridge described in Iago is essentially a disease. One piece of negativity leads to another. Soon nihilism and anarchy replace feelings of belonging, making it almost impossible to adhere to any credo or system of thought.

read "God Redux" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and watch the trailer for Erotomania

Obnunctious

Johann Mendel

The cross-pollination of a peach and a tangerine is a nectarine, but what about obnoxious and unctuous two unlikely bedfellows? An obnoxious person, in fact, is rarely unctuous unless you're talking about Dickens’ Uriah Heep whose protestations of “umbleness” mask his smarmy ingratiating nature. So what does the Mendelian cross- breeding of obnoxious and unctuous produce? Nothing other than “obnunctious.” You can imagine how what an obnunctious person would behave like if you combine a step-in-fetchit personality with any number of despots. For the sake of economy Jair Bolsonaro, who would open up the virgin Amazon to industrial development, rears his procrustean head. However, Hitler, Mussolini, Victor Orban and Alexaner Lukashenko (who is providing a home-away-from-home for Russia’s ambitious nuclear arsenal) and that Tomaso de Torquemada of US presidents, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor incarnate and the murderer of American democracy himself, Donald R. Trump all fit the bill.

read "The Final Solution: Democrazy" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "When Something is Wrong With My Baby"by Sam & Dave

Our Father

George Washington was the father of the country. Donald Trump, the 45^th president, is the father of Ivanka, Baron, Eric, Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany Trump. He also presided over a populist uprising against democracy. One Trump supporter demonstrating in front of Mar-A-Lago described Trump as Jesus, who was betrayed by Judas and crucified. How neatly the biblical story fits if you buy the idea of Trump as a deity, believing further that his prosecutions are politically motivated! Trump himself revels in his victimhood, using the threats of arrest and conviction as rallying cries for fundraisers. Despots arise out of unhappiness. When you invest ultimate authority in one person and attempt to destroy constitutional safeguards, you make a Mephistophelian wager-- to sell your soul for some undefined notion of salvation.

Read "Trumpty Dumpty's Great Fall" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to 'Do the Funky Penguin"by Rufus Thomas

 

Flight Attendance

H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895. It’s one of the Ur works of science fiction. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land dealt with an earthling raised on Mars. Here the speculation had jumped from a mere trip to the prospect of a hypothetical return from the red planet. Quantum physics postulates that a sub atomic particle can exist in two places at the same time, which is, in effect, an example of a one-time fictive ideal becoming a reality. Imaginative inventions, once considered unrealities, now proliferate around the planet all the time. Will there ever be a space vehicle that surpasses the speed of light turning into pure energy (which say propels it through wormholes) before shifting gears and materializing as an interplanetary taxi. Is Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth becoming a possibility? Certainly, there've been journeys to the bottom of the ocean? Using a submersible called the DSV Limiting Factor, Victor Vescovo dove 35,853 dove into the Mariana Trench. It used to be said about sex, "if it's been said it's been done, if it's been done it's been said, but the same thing applies to the wildest machinations of dreamers and writers. Will man ever learn to fly? It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a new generation of Icaruses will one day take lessons at the Y.

read "The Wormhole Society" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Out of Sight" by James Brown

Achilles Heel

The end of life is like the famous race between Achilles and the tortoise. Zeno, who coined the famous paradox, was an Eleatic (Zeno of Elea). The stoic tradition out of which this school derives argues for the unchanging nature of the world. The Milesians, Anaximander, Thales and Anaximenes believed  in change. Pound said it best in his translation of "Exile's Letter," “if you ask how I regret that parting? It’s like the flowers falling at Spring’s end, confused whirled in a tangle." You would think that death was not proud and that its mission was expediency. Yet anecdotal evidence shows it as an incredibly slow process. Like Achilles who's always going half of his previous distance, the dying person may complain of emptiness, boredom and the feeling of never getting there until  the day they die. 

Read "Magnitudes of Finitude" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "I've Got Dreams to Remember" by Otis Redding

Enough Pants to Last For the Rest of Your Life

Gap (skinny style jeans)

Have you ever bought a pair of jeans and asked yourself, will this be my last? Over the years you've bought jeans at The Gap and actually have an inventory of them. All this time you've been like a collector of ancient coins. But now it doesn’t seem justified to buy any more pants—since no one collects pants—and you definitely have enough to last the rest of your life. You might like the “Skinny” or “Slim” fits, but there is no way there are going to be enough years left to put your feet through the legs of all the pants you've already accumulated. Buying pants will no longer be on your itinerary, just as one day you won’t need to stock up on any more Bumble Bee Tuna or Campbell’s Soup. You’re not going to leave your canned goods or jeans to anyone; they will not be part of the estate or even a simple yard sale. You may remember Tallulah Bankhead who had that role in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. She had an insatiable appetite for men and women (she claimed to have slept with over 500)—though no one would have said she collected partners the way Nabokov did butterflies. 

read "Magnitudes of Finitude" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "I've Got Dreams to Remember" by Otis Redding

Marriage of the Minds

 Rachel Aviv (Frypie)

Rachel Aviv’s “Marriage of the Minds” (The New Yorker, 3/13/23) is an extraordinary and unusual piece. In a way it reads like autobiographical fiction in which the major characters, in this case the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard (who happens to be autistic), Arnold Brooks (a grad student who marries Callard) and Ben Callard (the former husband) are avatars. This is not to say that Aviv’s life is anything like Callard’s. However, the piece is personal and reflective of the authorial disposition. It sets down new protocols and ways of considering human relationships. “It’s like the philosophy-is-a preparation for death thing,” Arnold says. “Maybe marriage is a preparation for divorce.” In fact, Callard has not been previously unhappy in her marriage, which she decides to end overnight. In her new marriage, her former husband, who is part of the family, adjudicates when the newlyweds fight. Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage is invoked, along with a number of other "pregnant" citations. Susan Sontag is quoted as saying “Marriage is ‘an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.’” The author herself introduces the idea of “immaculate divorce…a divorce without grief or sorrow or pain.” When Aviv describes the Callard household to a friend, the friend says “she was reminded of a ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,’ a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin about a utopian city where everyone’s happiness depends on the suffering of one child, who is locked in a dark cellar, abandoned and starving.’” Janet Malcolm's “The Journalist and the Murderer,” revolutionized the form she was working in a way that went beyond the “Gonzo journalism” practiced by Mailer, Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. “Marriage of the Minds” doesn’t hold a  mirror up to itself, the way the Joe McGinniss/Jeffrey MacDonald piece did, rather it offers a "paradigm shift" in terms of both journalism and life where the pieces on the board, the subjects, the frames of reference are all inimitably curated. Aviv is also the author of a book entitled Strangers to Ourselves, which includes her unforgettable piece about a Harvard student who attempts to get off the regimen of psychiatric drugs.

read "Deconstructing Harriet" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope

and listen to "I've Been Loving You Too Long" by Otis Redding