You Can't Eradicate an Idea

The reaction of many to the events in Israel is to aver that Hamas should be wiped out. But you can't wipe out an idea. It's like Trump's base or what Hillary Clinton once termed "deplorables," aka the lumpenproletariat. What are you going to do, exterminate them? The idea of surgical removing that part of a populace which holds wrong-minded views is a form of genocide. Indeed what Hamas and Trump's base have in common is millenarianism and more deeply the painful dispossession that fuels the wish to destroy.Trump was right when he declared that he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue. The love for the former president is totally irrational. The Trumpocracy is a cult for whom Trump represents the Second Coming. Hamas like ISIS is not a political, but religious organization. For its followers Armageddon is not too great a price to pay for heaven on earth.

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department on Booklist

and watch the trailer for Erotomania

War!

You may have been fighting with your wife, with one or another refusing to talk to the other, when you awakened to the declaration of war by Netanyahu in the wake of the Hamas attacks. What you have been fighting over is trivial. You undoubtedly realize it’s all about power and who will ultimately prevail. Usually, these domestic squabbles begin innocently. They gather force like a hurricane, with warm waters of discontent brewing below the surface. History is hysteria is the Alinon expression. A thimble certainly represents one’s mother, but a father too, since it was his sock that was being darned. You're accused of being intransigent. Reprisal is the only move, before your Queen is taken hostage. In Israel the stakes are intrinsic rather than symbolic with land as the currency that's laundered into the next generation of resentments. Every been in a standoff? You exchange words with a cabbie. Before you know it, he’s out on the street, in front of you, while the world (aka your wife, husband or partner) watches with a mixture of fear and distaste. Where does it end? Do you throw that punch? And if you do, do you end up at the hospital or police station?

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department on Booklist

and watch the trailer for Erotomania

 

Would You Rather Be Boring or Matt Gaetz?

Anti-Christ

CNN is horrifically boring. However much you may agree with their liberal views, there are times when you want to turn on Fox the way you go to see a bearded woman in a cage at a roadside carnival. Matt Gaetz is perfectly cast in the role of the Anti-Christ, if only his forehead were a tad larger and he has mastered the art of politics as a sport like saying hunting--with say a semi-automatic. Yup catching school shooters is one of the greatest witch-hunts in history, though it  pales in comparison to the Democratic take over of the DOJ.

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department on Booklist

and watch the trailer for Erotomania

Memoirs of a Bunionaire

WebMD

It was my first visit to Club Hedonism in Jamaica where clothing is optional. I have never had any problem with nudity per se. In fact, I’ll be the first person to get my clothes off where the situation merits undressing—such as in connubial matters. My only problem with public nakedness in this "neck" of the woods had always been my feet--which are a freak show. You may ask what is he complaining about? However, being a bunionaire for all its advantages is not what it's cracked up to be--particularly when you have to be barefooted like the flagstone surface around the pool of a country club. For many people a slippy poolside setting is the perfect occasion for flip flops, but that’s not an option for someone like me who requires specially designed orthopedic ones that resemble the cement shoes mobsters use to put their marks asleep. In any case it was "Toga Night." I knew that even a sizable inheritance or that matter endowment would not make up for the effect created by the Maginot line of my feet whose bunions resemble the cannonballs embedded in concrete next to the Soldiers and Sailors monument on Riverside Drive. My feet scream out “the British are coming” to potential partners who would otherwise consider me a candidate to assist in their bliss. In fact the spotting of a bunionaire is enough to stop most people in their tracks. Muggers, in fact faint when I point to my bare feet, when all they want is my wallet.

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department on Booklist

and watch the trailer for Erotomania

Crimes Against Reality

If you get off Exit 14 of the LIE, just outside the Midtown Tunnel, you will come upon Jackson Avenue--which might simply be called Main Street a la Sinclair Lewis. This hot little crevice of Queens, once a deserted area filled with hulks of empty factory buildings, is now experiencing the Gold Rush. Rockrose Realty advertises rentals in gleaming glass high rises that offer anonymity and duplicability at increasingly premium prices. This is the story of NewYork from the days when Peter Minuit paid 24 bucks for the island of Manhattan. Newcomers outprice the indigenous populations ultimately undermining an often fragile ecology. "The World's UnFair" sits in the kind of vacant Long Island City lot which is now probably worth a ton. How did the collective New Red Order, directed by the brothers Adam and Zach Khalil and Jackson Polys, manage to stem the tide of development for this oasis of public art? "The World's UnFair" is named after the World's Fairs, in the shadow of whose grounds it exists. It's also a comment on the human condition. Extend the contraction and you have "The World is Unfair." The underlying theme is not "decolonization" (been there done that), but "rematriation" (notice not "repatriation") or the question of how lands can be given back. In one video returning land is compared to returning an item to a department store. Do you get your money back? Do you get a store credit? The World's Unfair finally begs the question, what will be the fate of the land it sits on?

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department on Booklist

and listen to Francis Levy's playlist for The Kafka Studies Department on Largehearted Boy

Pros and Cons

"The Holy Virgin Mary "by Chris Ofili (Brooklyn Museum)

The notions of con and transubstantiation are suggestive in a curiously pragmatic and material way. Of course these refer to the Eucharist. Are these the body and blood of Christ? Or are they are in fact symbols which have yet to be. Consubstantionistas, like the Lutherans, who hone to this belief, can’t wait. They need to be reassured that God is in the house while their counterparts in the Roman Catholic Church are content with an abstraction which places the Holy Spirit elsewhere. Though Catholics preceded Lutherans, transubstantiation is more evolutionary in that it propagates a higher order of thinking involving ideation of the loved object--something similar to what happens to children when they're finally able to separate from the mother. It's also a premise of romanticism and that which lies under the creation of paper currency.

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department on Booklist

and listen to Francis Levy's playlist for The Kafka Studies Department on Largehearted Boy

Supply Side

Compassion and solace are in short supply. They’re the kind of backordered items that the manufacturer, it turns out, is no longer making. You may wait for ever and no delivery.To  extend the metaphor, people don't have the time. You can’t can only accomplish so many things at once. Your average metrosexual is so plugged in that their inner computer is on the verge of melting down. It’s the pace of modern life that’s the thing that fails to capture the consciousness of the king. Watch the parade of ear buds crossing the concourse in Grand Central. Most of these commuters are ultimately talking to themselves; they exist in a state of constant rattledom which clogs the flow of axons and dendrites crossing their neurotransmitters. You may receive only so many hits (to your post, data, or site) before you’re knocked out. 

listen to Francis Levy's playlist for The Kafka Studies Department on Large Hearted Boy

and watch the trailer for Erotomania