Racism

The origin of racism is economic. Disenfranchising a minority leads to subserviance. In many instances the employer/ employee relationship is thinly veiled master/slave. Scrooge legendarily paying Crachit a pittance is a robber baron in microcosm--the factory owner paying his worker the smallest amount possible to guarantee ever larger profits which in turn will increase stock price. Lo, have things really changed? Has some genie magically humanized the profit motive? Racism takes on all kinds of cultural guises one of which is a nefarious invisibility aka Ellison's The Invisible Man and Percival Everett's Erasure (the book on which the film American Fiction is based). For instance, a benevolent despot like Frederick II or Tito is a pater familias providing the anodyne of liberalism to the wound. Still dominance and submission define any system in which there is an underclass who lack the same benefits rights and privileges as the manager or "boss." Even after the Russian Revolution in which there was ostensibly a "dictatorship of the proletariat," you had a relatively small but privileged Nomenklatura, de facto aristocrats who exploited their serfs.

read "Frankel" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Two State Solution For US

 

map based on last senate race as of 2024

What the United States requires is a "two state solution." Trump has said he won't accept defeat--no matter what the results. Actually the same is true of Dems. What person who has voted for Kamala Harris is going to accept project 2025 and go softly into the night? What liberal-minded American will go along with Trump's bloody mass deportations, his weaponizing the DOJ for retribution, his national abortion ban or his surrender of Ukraine, not to mention his insane tariffs and tax plans and his replacement for Obama care which is still "a concept." The fact is as Trump has always said he could go down Fifth Avenue and shoot people or for that matter create a cabinet level secretary of golf. The opposing parties in the Middle East are more intractable than ever. Israel will retaliate against Iran any day and the Iranians will attack back. The "two state" solution is a perfectly sensible compromise that extremist elements on both sides never allow to occur as October 7 demonstrates. But who is to say it won't work in the US? All the big cities New York  LA, Chicago, Atlanta would be given to the Democrats and all of rural America would remain red.

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Make American Great Again" by Pussy Riot

The Infernal Machine

Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine premiered on April 10, 1934 directed by Louis Jouvet. It's a wonderful title since it hearkens to the ineluctability of the Oedipus myth. Oedipus, as you may call, famously brought about what he feared. Sometimes  you hear about self-fulfilling prophecies, but that's not Oedipus. He doesn't say I'm going to meet daddy at the crossroads and hence undo us both. He doesn't know his interlocutor is Laius. It's a seemingly didactic point that accounts for the true tragedy at work ie the infernal nature of ignorance. Who cares? Spiro Agnew who must have been the bastard of Fred Trump once railed at effete intellectuals. His life was devoted to demonstrating that stupidity pays. The philosophical and spiritual state of being a dumbbell is the lingua Franca of history from the Greeks right down to Matt Gaetz.

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy The East Hampton Star 

and listen to "Land of a 1000" by Wilson Pickett

On the Nature of Things

When you're born you begin to die becoming Yeats' "tattered cloak, "sans everything" as Jaques says in As You Like It. Then there's the exchange between Nagg and Nell in Beckett's Fin de partie. "Do you believe in the life to come?" "Mine was always that." But what about the fly swatter or "Roach Brothel, " SNL's satire of Roach Motel. The fact is there's no God to punish or protect. A soothing and terrifying notion propounded by Lucretius in his 1700 line poem De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things. You might say that Democritus who introduced the atom to the Greeks was the country cousin or ancestor of the Roman, Lucretius. Time may be eternal but life is horrifyingly finite with the famous sign over Dante's Inferno warning "Lasciate ogni speranza all ch'entre." No mention of another Italianate expression, "the dog that barks doesn't bite." 

read "The Sale of My Parents' Apartment," Metropolitan Diary, The New York Times

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Astor Place

You read about relativity and space/time but when you're seeking limited objectives like running to catch the Third Avenue bus, you're remanded to a Newtonian universe where apples accelerate at 32 feet per second/per second. Btw here's a problem which neither Einstein, Newton or Schrödinger would likely be able to solve. You're on your way downtown and there are plenty of buses going to Astor Place, but whenever you're going uptown from Chinatown on a cold rainy night when you have to take a pee or worse, there isn't a bus in sight--something which defies even the simplest notion of physics ie, "what goes up must go down." Can it be said that cosmopolitanism is a science unto itself which has yet to follow any precepts other than say Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. People go to weddings and funerals, memorials from which they run to be in time for yoga or their afternoon tryst. No law is at work other than the fact that you will pay a $75 fine for parking in front of a hydrant. New york is one game that has an infinite number of connections. You're not going to solve Manhattan life with A.I.

listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C

and read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy,"Exquisite Corpse

The Paris Review

If you'e an artist or writer has your partner ever told you they're tired of seeing depressing images or reading one more vignette about receiving rejection slips on rainy days? Sure Edvard Munch painted "The Scream," but people have already gotten his drift and either cottoned to it or not. About rejection what can one say? Unless they're self-employed most people have gotten pink slips and KOs --which is exactly how those "we regret to inform you" letters feel like. Remember how Al Goldstein did his "fuck yous" on Channel 35? Remember April 15 in high school, the day all the rejections came? It was biblical. There were the thin and fat letters and then the accusatory stares from disconsolate parents who had to tell their friends you were in your way to Podunk U--which didn't they know has a top rate home economics department and a division one mahjong team. Your response to being upbraided about another rejected book, story or poem, which, btw, is undoubtedly some thinly veiled and self-fulfilling tale of rejection is probably a defensive take it or leave it attitude. So take it or leave it. Oh yeah and va te faire foutre!

read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Rejection

 Kudos to The New York Times Book Review for all the first novels reviewed in last Sunday's issue, but it's not only the willingness to hear new voices that's praiseworthy. Many of these books reviewed appear to be wonderfully negative and gratuitous. The Scaffolding by Lauren Elgin "traces the multiple infidelities of two Parisian couples a generation apart." Transition by Angela Lashbrook concerns "a woman..haunted by change while grappling with the death of a friend." However, the piece de resistance is Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte," about which the reviewer of the book, Dwight Garner, who is also a Times staff member remarks, "I read Rejection during a week when I felt down, and it almost snubbed me out, like a cigarette. If it were an Instagram friend, I would have unfollowed it." In one fell swoop Garner has redefined the meaning of what it means to write the kind of review that writers and publishers crave. "Rejection" is, indeed, a fertile theme that is too often passed over by editors who think the submission they are reading is a self-fulfilling prophecy, or roman a clef to be. As of today Rejection is #3796 on Amazon which is a pretty damned good!

read "Ultimate Rejection!"by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Land of a Thousand Dances" by Wilson Pickett