The Future

Burj Khalifa

The Porn Hub Tower is the tallest skyscraper in the world. Instead of a DUI, you get DEIs for diversity equity and inclusion. BTW it’s He or Her. No They or loitering! That’s the lady’s room, Bud. Which brings up the question of poets. They weren’t welcome in Plato’s Republic. Wallace Strvens was an insurance salesman. Flaubert counseled you should be “regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original in your work.” Writers of doggerel like Ogden Nash would get in under the wire. The banning and burning of books will adversely affect air quality in Red States. You won't have to bother to register to vote or vote--a definite lifestyle improvement. You won’t have to recycle, clean up after your dog or pay for abortions. The weak will no longer inherit the earth. With no inheritance tax, the rich will inherit everything.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" in The East Hampton Star

Ritual

Are you ritualistic? Is the routine of your varying activities a prayer? Do you feel as if you are the agent of a supernal force? Does it smack of compulsion to the extent that you can’t stop for fear of consequence?  It was work when every day was a newbie on which you had to lay your imprint. You live the life of a priest or nun without having taken your vows. There is no alter or sacrifice yet it’s as if you were under the aegis of something outside yourself. Do people try to get you to stop? To free yourself, to liberate yourself to become a free agent? Are they jealous because you have a calling? Is being footloose and having to constantly redefine yourself its own form of slavery. Yes you're weary of another day of the same but contemplate a life totally lacking in intention. The universe is cosmically indifferent and you're no more than a pea. Will you create the illusion of order or simply leave your part to fate?

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" in The East Hampton Star

Dread

Dreadnought

Dread is a specific form of fear. Futurity is the common denominator, but dread is more philosophic, more encompassing than day nervousness. Kierkegaard deals with comparable emotions in The Concept of Anxiety. You might say fear is site specific while its counterpart ultimately pertains to the shadow death casts upon the finitude of existence. Fear is assuaged  by contingency but anodynes for dread are little more than bandaids.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy in The East Hampton Star

Love Story

You strike a vein of gold, literally or metaphorically. Then blood flows out through the arteries, veins carry blood to the heart and arteries out. One speaks of major arteries from a thoroughfare. Curiously veins are never mentioned with respect to traffic though two other words are: viscosity and insisspation. "Es tut mir leid" means "I’m sorry" in German. Usually it’s too late. Remember the line from Love Story, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." You wish you never left or could resume life in a parallel universe either one minute before or after that fender bender or it’s one of those days when you wish there were gridlock statins.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy in The East Hampton Star

Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik!

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a common fallacy. Because something follows does not mean that it's caused by what precedes. CNN’s Sanjay Gupta invoked the "paradox of ubiquity" to refute the assertion that acetominophen causes autism. The piece of illogic in this paradox is actually beautiful--the idea being that there's such a plethora of examples that’s is impossible to create meaningful correlations. Don’t place your bet on the tortoise btw thinking of paradoxes. Then there is the Trolley Problem which is ethics. A conundrum which defeats the notion of necessity is however a lifeline in a platform (ie the world) filled with tendentious and ultimately falsely drawn conclusions.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

and also read the review of The Wormhole Society (graphic novel) in Booklife.

Power

You can see shooting  stars on a clear New England night. Humans have a built-in narcissism which is actually a highly useful defense mechanism. Were one to really assess their importance or significance, they would throw up their hands in despair. Agency—how much does one possess? Fate is determined by numerous actions that are usually out of the eyes or mind of the beholder. Yet there is a tendency to meddle against the odds. Will you be the exception? Will you be a prime mover, if only on a one-time basis? If you look up into the sky or contemplate grains of sand or blades of grass, you are humbled. Still all humans are gamblers. As the Power Ball number increases, you think what the hell. Maybe you’ll get lucky.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

and also read the review of The Wormhole Society (graphic novel) in Booklife.

Light Years

The universe is expanding. Dark energy is the force which expedites distance. Light years is an obsolescent descriptor. The nomenclature is disconcerting if I’m traveling to a Kepler planet 1200 light years from earth. In the course of the voyage the vessel is likely to lose traction—with the ensuing Sisyphean  effect of sliding backwards in the attempt to approach the distant object. The event horizon of the black hole is a different matter cosmologically (since the net effect is of gravity shrinking mass) but the net effect, of growing darkness, is the same. People enter sensory deprivation chambers and either emerge cleansed or rendered temporarily insane. The human needs the presence of other heavenly bodies to survive. 

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

and also read the review of The Wormhole Society (graphic novel) in Booklife.