B.C.I.

Bedminster Correctional institution. What are they going to do? You can’t sent the Secret Service to prison. This is the one area where Jack Smith has got to negotiate. With Bedminster  the problem of conjugal visits is solved. Walt Nauta is probably the best person to speak to about accommodations, but why not place him in that room where the documents were kept? Call it work/study. Let the punishment fit the crime. It’s also a good place for Trump to work on his daily ingratitude list. So there are two possible scenarios. Trump is sentenced to play golf for life or he becomes president again, pardons himself for Jan 6 and the documents and finally succeed in getting Kemp to change his mind, go against his principles and fire Fani Willis. Russia will win the war. The FBI will be dissolved. And Michael Flynn will be declared attorney general. True and social all right!

Listen to "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols

and read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

That Obscure Object of Desire

 

Say the stars align and you achieve a condition beyond satiation. These objects of desire all must defer to a host of new aspirations. Essentially desires are like viruses that by nature only proliferate, ultimately forming even more toxic variants. There’s an expression used by those seeking to put their addictions into remission—you have to want what you have. A tall order if you're on a roll and beginning to entertain the delusion the world is your oyster. A nuclear reactor melts down when it overheats, creating the kind of toxic emissions that emanate from those suffering from chronic Bovarysme. 

listen to "Every Little Bit Hurts" by Brenda Holloway

read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

Exam Question

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 32nd President of the United States

Compare and contrast “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny” to “Just say the election was rigged and stollen.” Answer: firstly FDR did not repeat the homily an indefinite amount of times. He said it once. It’s been quoted ever since. How does it compare to MAGA? Actually they're phrases that act like homonyms to the extent they sound similar but mean different things. The import of the “rigged and stolen” piece relates to the people and the implication is that voting rights are taken away. Here you have to choose. The country is divided. Was the election stolen or is it being stolen by those who claim it was stolen? “I have a dream…” is another quote that comes to mind.

Listen to "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols

and read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The headlines today are glum. Kim Jong-un and Putin are meeting and Trump’s approval ratings continue to rise. Abortion rights will hurt the Republicans but what's to stop the autocratic juggernaut? Putin and Kim are a match made in heaven. North Korea desperately needs cash on the face of international sanctions. Needless to say Russia needs arms. You might say the balance of power will be maintained to no good effect since before it was leaning towards the West. It’s hard to fathom how the isolationism advocated by the right justifies itself. Chamberlain's famous “I have returned from Germany with peace for our time" appeasement speech is long forgotten. You even hear a smattering of reticence about the war effort amongst pacifists on the left. How history creates strange bedfellows! Hope springs eternal, though Putin’s desire for Imperial Russia will never be satisfied by one annexation anymore than a hungry lion would turn down a second feeding of meat. Cassandra like prophesies notwithstanding the world will sputter on with delusory periods of peace and prosperity—as if it were honing to the Second Law of Thermodynamics--"as one goes on in time the net entropy of any open or closed system will increase."

listen to "Dance With Me"by Peter Brown

read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

Mental Heath

He needs help. She should see someone. Therapy is the current be all and end all and one of the best ways to kick the can down the road. If you can’t deal with your kid, make them someone else’s responsibility. You get your cake and eat it too! Though your goodness may rest in a handoff, you're a hundred of times better off than the denier. Sadly the proliferation of all this brain washing has produced its own “key words” which have some resemblance to the nervous breakdowns advertising executives were having in the 50s. Today people are bipolar, depressive or borderline. Many routinely express their anxiety. SSRIs are like toothpaste and literally everyone is questioning their gender. Cis is no longer the nickname for sister. Is this new state of affairs simply the result of people being more "honest" about "expressing their feelings?" Freud liked to use archeological metaphors, but is his archeology of the brain merely a set of evanescent descriptors? Think of an Ancestry.com genome service. XY or XX? Need your own space? Sounds like a plan? To be on the same page? The lingua franca shortlists states of feeling and desire. The ubiquity of these footnotes may result in dilution but what would neurotic humanity do without them?

listen to this great version of Band of Gold by Freda Payne

read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

Curb Your Dog

photo: David Shankbone

In a priceless Curb, Mel Brooks hires Larry to play the lead in The Producers with the hope the show will fail—and he and Anne Bancroft can get a break from counting all the money. There’s a subplot. In honor of a tenth anniversary, Larry’s wife offers him the opportunity to fuck around. Just before curtain call he meets a woman who is enthralled by the soon to be Broadway star. When asked what she does, she replies she teaches fellatio, “I’m a fellatio teacher,” she says. In the meanwhile the show must go on. Mel and Anne are gleeful when their mark forgets his lines and audiences start to file out. Then Larry starts to improvise. Fill in the blanks and...curb your dog.

read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

and read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy

The Metamorphosis of De rerum natura

Ovid and Lucretius were two Roman philosopher poets. Lucretius De rerum natura and the 15 books of Ovid Metamorphosis anticipate Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost in the attempt to create an iconic and transcendent worldview. Both poets lived at height of the Roman empire with Ovid’s work attempting to account for Rome up to Caesar. They emanated from similar historical periods though their lives didn’t really overlap (Ovid was 2 years old when Lucretius died in 45 BC). But talk about CP Snow’s famedTwo Cultures essay in which the writer inveighed against the separation of science and art. Imagine Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time as a poem. Just think of  absorbing complex scientific concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy in verse form. Advanced ideas like the quantum notion that a subatomic particle can be in two places at the same time make more sense as prosody than they do when expressed as laws. 

read the latest review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy in Booklife

and read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy