Goliath

“The last person you'll see before you die is you” is the ominous scrawl Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton), the alcoholic lawyer at the center of the Amazon Prime series Goliath, discovers on the wall of his hotel room. It’s the third season and the plot centers around water and California--a subject also famously the theme of Chinatown. The epigraph is meant to be intimidating, but it’s curiously spot on. Generally it's held that you see your whole life flashing before you at the moment of death. Actually, when you look at the last gasp, the final exhalation that precedes the death rattle, it seems an unlikely moment for such an ambitious activity. If you’ve ever been around someone who's dying you realize the dying are  selfish and exclusive to the extent they no longer have time for anyone but themselves. Perhaps the crossing of the line is more like one of those chalk drawings of a body found at a crime scene. It's also one case where less isn't more.

Read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

and listen to 'Only the Strong Survive" by Jerry Butler

The Hollow

You may be disconcerted by some of the cutesy locutions at the beginning of Greg Jackson’s recent New Yorker story, “The Hollow” (11/29/91). Part of the action takes place in a town called Trevi where a group of college students “opened a lunch counter” they called the Trevi Fountain. The protagonist Jack Francis’ sometime girlfriend is Sophie. He “jokingly” refers to their house as “Sophie’s Choice.” Another character Jonah Valente a one-time college football player with a Van Gogh complex invokes the over used Picasso quote “art is a lie that makes us see the truth.” But here are some others you might not have heard. "When the Gestapo came to Picasso’s studio during the Occupation," Valente relates,"there was a photo of 'Guernica"lying around.They asked him, 'Did you do this?’ and he said, 'No, you did!'" Van Gogh’s last words, “the sadness shall last forever,” are also cited. But there’s a stunning description at the beginning which irradiates the entire story and is an antidote to the "hollowness." It also pertains to both the myopia of the characters and literally to the literal hollow core, an approximately 3'x6' cavity, right out of Poe or Shirley Jackson, at the heart of "Sophie’s choice." Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (with its famous nod to Conrad's Kurtz), of course, comes to mind. But here is the passage: “A water tower bearing the town’s name and stilted up on arachnid legs, with water stains rusting its gray-blue paint, dwarfed the two-story houses and brick storefronts and shops.” It’s as if the author were saying, if you were doubting me, take this. It’s a stunning image that brings back the horror of great stories like “The Lottery” and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”

Read "The End of Genius and the Rise of the Compassionate Artist" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Vincent"by Don McLean

 

When the Shoe Fits the Foot

Kango Nil Crocodile Square Tony Lama Boot

  

In the days before Amazon, you went to a shoe store like McCann’s where they measured your foot and you chose the hush puppy or wing tip of your choice. Brooks Brothers'signature cordovan loafers were a status symbol. There were Bass Weejuns. Pat Boone made white bucks famous. Then came the years dominated by cowboy boot makers like Tony Lama and Lucchese. Shoes fitting feet also begged a greater question of destiny. If a marriage wasn’t working out then metaphorically the shoe wasn’t fitting the foot. Intransigence can lead to irritation while naturally accommodation is what both the vessel and the substance which fills it must allow in order to produce the kind of symbiosis that leads facilitates ambulation. Is an orthopedic shoe a crutch or is it merely dealing with extenuating circumstances—like for instance flat feet, which may end up damaging metatarsals? On the other hand, there are the famous women's "fuck me" shoes that are designed to throw caution to the winds. 

Read "Arbeit Macht Frei" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Blue Suede Shoes" (1956) by Elvis Presley

Grey Gardens As Metaphor

Disposable income results in the proliferation of objects. Among other things Miss Havisham, the jilted bride, living in cobwebs in Great Expectations, is a metaphor for inundation. She can’t let anything, including her grief, go. Grey Gardens (1975), the famous Maysles Brother film about the Beale sisters, is a metaphor for the clutter of post-industrial affluence. You may be one of those gifted individuals who’s capable of disposing of their sometimes ill-gotten gains or perhaps you’re a collector living in a huge warehouse devoted to the things you love or better yet someone who simply can’t throw anything away. Here is Gogol on one of his characters from Dead Souls, an aged landowner and widower named Plyushkin who's a hoarder: "Solitary life gave ample nourishment to his avarice which, as is known, has a wolf's appetite and grows more insatiable, the more it devours." Not to make light of poverty or wish it on anyone, but the only good thing that can be said about deprivation is that it’s a safeguard against superfluity. Denizens of primitive agricultural societies in which materialism is no more than the struggle to survive don’t have to worry about waste and clutter. 

Read "What is Goodness? Or a Gift of Charoset" by Francis Levy,

HuffPost

and listen to "Beauty is Only Skin Deep" by The Temptations

Should Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater Be Taken With a Grain of Salt?

By current standards Freud is politically incorrect. But can the notion that children are sexual creatures with fantasy lives be taken with a grain of salt? Luckily the Standard Edition of Freud’s writings translated by James Strachey’s runs to 24 volumes. The thought police will have their work cut out for them particularly with regard to winnowing out Freud’s repudiation of “the seduction theory.” If there were an elevator filled with politically incorrect authors would there be room for Mark Twain and Nabokov along with more obvious contemporary provocateurs like Michel Houllebecq whose Charlie Hebdo cover story, appearing in conjunction with the publication of Submission resulted in a shooting in which 12 staff members died. Ray Bradbury was of course prescient in Fahrenheit 451 which became the basis for the Truffaut movie. But what to do? Artists and writers are walking on glass and censorship, once as distant as McCarthyism, is now like climate change--increasing exponentially. Words may provoke behavior, but are they acts? Can a word be a weapon? January 6 proved that language can be like the open carry policy that was one of the issues in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is the Hershey Highway the royal road to the unconscious?

Read "Was Hamlet Suffering From False Memory Syndrome" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Dr. Freud"by Pete Seeger

What If the Scientists Looking for Signs of Life in the Multiverse Come Home Empty-handed?

Spaceship Earth (Epcot)

What if among the trillions of stars and galaxies, there’s no sign of life and no habitat conducive to Homo sapiens? One of the great singularities or exceptions could very well be the advent of life itself. And if so, will the species have to change the notion of its perpetuation similar to the way it constantly modifies its conception of God? What if the repository of consciousness, that particular offshoot and evolution peculiar to humankind, is forced to flee its usual hunting grounds? What if it can no longer be encapsulated in a corporeal essence? In the event the earth dies and there turns out to be no Kepler Star around which an appropriate planet swirls, what is to stop civilization from finding a home in virtual reality? Imagine a latter day Noah’s Ark, something between an internment camp and biosphere in which movement is constricted. What if at some point in the journey, bodies and even brains begin to be jettisoned out the hatch. All that remains is pure mind now seeking refuge in cyberspace. There will be stragglers but one by one the earth’s creatures will discard their bodies merging into a world that's remarkably similar to the life they once left with the yoga classes, therapy and afternoon trysts. (The) Mind is an impressionable thing. Envision the vast menu that could be offered to attend to the appetites of humankind.

Read "Worming My Way Back to You Babe" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Working My Way Back to You" (1966) by The Four Seasons

Rejection

Disappointment is an equal opportunity employer. It can come courtesy of a text or e mail. Before the advent of the internet, it arrived in the form of letters from colleges or potential employers or those notorious SASEs (self-addressed stamped envelopes) in which writers manuscripts were returned. Lovers usually called to send their regrets, but rejection was the bottom line. “I want to end the relationship” is a line that might have taken the wind out of you. Perhaps it was October. It had gotten dark early.The black rotary phone stood like a beast or model for a mausoleum. You were awakened from the late afternoon nap you took on Fridays after work by the ringing of the old-fashioned landline. It was the call you were always dreading and which should have come as no surprise. The come down had been on the backburner. You may have hoped beyond hope, but the question was only when. Years later you might find yourself thinking how lucky you were not to get saddled with a troubled person or relationship. However, contentious your marriage might be, it’s a lot better than being hooked up with someone who was, it turns out, continually cheating on you. On the work front, you may have thanked the lord you didn’t get that dead end job. Isn’t "don’t quit before the miracle" what’s usually instructed? On the other hand you don’t want to get used to having the door shut in your face. It’s only a sign of a pathological compulsion to look for what you want in all the wrong places.

Read "The First Law of Emotional Thermodynamics: Longing is Directly Proportional to Self-Hatred" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" (1966) by The Temptations