Being There

How could this have happened to me? It's a complaint that's often registered when you find themselves entering those later "stages of man" that Jaques talks about in As You Like It. All of a sudden, you're almost at the foot length of a 12-inch ruler when you might have been at something closer to the half way mark yesterday, or so it seems. At a certain point it’s going to seem overly optimistic or quixotic to sign a five year lease, or fork out for that car or piece of furniture you finally can afford, not to mention friendship and love. Does it make sense to get married for a year or two at most, thereby leaving the other person emotionally bereft—unless, of course, you’ve fallen for a gold digger who’s looking to get set up the rest of their life. Have you ever come to one of those yellow “dead end” signs with the black lettering? You don’t think twice about them, until you begin to consider what the words really mean. Dead End are two nouns in apposition. Does a roundabout exhibit the reality of a real “dead end?” You may have heard someone describing a job that’s going nowhere, with no possibilities for advancement as a “dead end job.” The fact is whether your driving or just living, the end tends to come faster than you expected. The Long Island Expressway or LIE ends at exit 73, but it’s hard to believe for those who have never gone as far as Riverhead. When you’re just taking the LIE to exit 49S or N, the Huntington exits, you feel the LIE will go on forever.

read "Mortal Coil Stuff" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Security" by Otis Redding

Is Democracy An Esoteric Concept?

Many Republicans and especially Trump’s dedicated base don’t have time for democracy. "The Big Lie" has actually thrown doubt on the voting process itself. The mixture of skepticism and despair on the part of the disenfranchised and dispossessed create a potent cocktail that’s employed in such a way that any election can be challenged. In a democracy irrational passions are tamed by reason--something which requires discipline. The Republican party has become a cult where doubt is promiscuously applied to undermine both rationality and empirical truth. It’s like Philosophy 101 where you learn about solipsism and the possibility that the world doesn’t exist.The fact is  democracy is a rather sophisticated proposition dependent on rather subtle and fragile assumptions. Many essential tenets of democracy like, for example, inalienable rights, are counterintuitive. It’s the opposite of majority rules, relying as it doesn’t on the notion of the one versus the many. Due process is another element of democratic thought that can be difficult to understand when a demagogic leader is revving up what’s ultimately a lynch mob. There’s always the urge to make an exception. Yes, it’s wrong to dispense with the law, but what’s the harm in twisting the facts just this one time? Doesn’t the end justify the means? Trump inspires a loyalty that abrogates many cherished assumptions of a free society. One of the first steps in overturning the rights of the electorate is to allow state legislatures to overrule the will of the people—under the theory that a governing body knows more than those who supposedly elected it. Freedom and liberty may seem like fungible concepts, but freedom as Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out in Schenck v. US doesn’t include the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater. 

read "MAGA and the Coronavirus" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and watch the trailer for Erotomania

Hyperbole

Hyperbole is deafening. It’s a WMD that eradicates anything and everything in its path. Firstly it’s a figure of speech that drowns out the sibilant hum of the hive. It’s raison d’etre is the assertion of singularity. Whole lives fall victim to this juggernaut of inflation aka noise. Equanimity is not one of the characteristics of political discourse but the proliferation of warring grandiose assertions is a product of hyperbole. It’s like an arms race which ultimately results in the destruction of the world.Trump is probably the greatest hyperbolist of all time. A product  of the lethal cocktail of reality TV and real estate sales, he uses hyperbole as a blindfold with which to perpetrate free-form assertion.

read "God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "It's Your Thing" by The Isley Brothers

Your Own Personal Default Mode

Has your life become a walking default mode? You have a MacBook, tell yourself you can’t buy another bag of Tate’s chocolate chip cookies, but can’t justify reverting back to Chips Ahoy or Famous Amos. You drive a Subaru (the car of choice for Bernie Sanders supporters), don’t understand people who message on Facebook, insist on the actual book and not the e version. You hate Florida period and refuse to ever go there again (now that the last relative who retired there is no more).You long for the old-style Cantonese food that has MSG and trumpet Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, because of its oxymoronic name and because you like to see the expression on varying health nuts' faces. You’re desperately looking for a series now that you’ve finished Borgen, period, end of sentence, Q.E.D. You refuse to be around the kind of people whose insecurity is manifest in a need to talk hyperbolically about the decisions they have made. You only “socialize” with those who're in a protracted state of mourning, people who look like they’ve received bad news (which they usually have) or even death threats, over whose faces there exists a perpetual pall. You like the going rather than the getting there, but in general have no interest in places, which are all basically all the same.

read "Groundhog Day" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "It's the Same Old Song" by The Four Tops

Bovarysme

Gustave Flaubert

You may long after someone who’s unattainable, but they’re undoubtedly longing for someone or something else they can’t have. It’s Bovarysme and as Flaubert himself said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Waiting for the phone call or e mail that never comes is a tremendously self-centered, in fact, narcissistic activity. It also usually involves some kind of Mephistophelian wager. If I get my poem published or better yet win the love of my Beatrice, I will never ask for anything again. Very few people add the addenda, in the event of the successful execution of the contract with the devil, I will devote myself entirely to other people’s needs and desires. Of course, the very way out of the dilemma of unfulfilled desire is to change the game. Instead of taking, you simply give. Spiritualism is like going the right way on a one-way street. When you go against traffic, you run the risk of having a head-on. NB: Waiting for the impossible is horrible even when it suddenly becomes a possibility since the value of prayers are diluted the moment they're answered. 

read "Paris Journal VII: Madame Ovary" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope

and listen to "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" by Marvin Gaye

Diasporic Dining: The Decline of Hen

 

The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs by Gaston Velle (1905)

 

“Split the lark--and you’ll find the Music” The Emily Dickinson lines are not part of a recipe. But you may remember not so long a ago when you’d split a couple of hens and throw them on the grill, complemented by say yellow rice. Now you’re more likely to invite the self-same guest—not someone who earned another arcane, but expensive dish like Chateaubriand—for thighs, of chicken that is since a hen’s would be nothing to write home about. But “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” to invoke Pete Seeger. Go to your local supermarket and ask for the hen section. A store clerk may point you towards the “poultry” counter simply because a hen is a kind of chicken. During the pandemic the supply chain has been disrupted in many areas. Most recently baby formula was hard to come by. Could it be that all the hens are busy laying eggs?

read "Diasporic Dining: The Running Footman" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Do the Funky Chicken" by Rufus Thomas

When is a Fallacy Pathetic?

Mar-a-Lago

There are times when fallacies are actually pathetic. You, of course, remember the pathetic fallacy in which nature mirrors the inner state of the narrator or dreamer in a work of literature. However, sometimes the history of sensibility allows language to return to its original and basic meaning and intention. For instance, marriage can revert the locution “sleeping together” to its literal meaning. Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole, for instance The White House for the presidency. Of course with the former president demonstrating boundary problems deriving from narcissistic grandiosity, the equation between these two terms is challenged. Trump suffers from a mental disorder in which the everything is his. Is there a figure of speech for Mar-a-Lago representing The White House? How pathetic is that fallacy?

read "Trumpty Dumpty's Great Fall" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Straight Outta Vagina" by Pussy Riot