The Revolt of the Masses

Steven Soderbergh films with his iPhone. It’s a simple sentence. The director is a noun. Film is the verb but it tells a story. Blair Witch Project (1999) and before that David Holtzman's Diary (1967) created the impression of extemporaneous filmmaking. Will your home movies earn an Oscar? Of course Facebook pulled the rug out. People's everyday lives were immortalized ad nauseam. The Revolt of the Masses was Ortega y Gasset's screed on the democratization of art. Now everyone has a platform. The Robert Brustein essay was “No More Masterpieces. It turned out to be prescient in another way. Digitalization creates pixels of data which are grains of sand. Yes you are heard but so is everybody else. Scenes From a Marriage? That’s me. Empathy is a fundamental element of art, but the reader of Chekhov may think, I could write that too. Possession and identification go hand in hand.  You don’t need to know how to paint the figure or write a sonnet. You take your iPhone 14, with its 5G capability, out of your pocket, push the button and create…what else but art?

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C

and watch the trailer for Erotomania which will be featured in the Nihilist Film Festival

The Salvation Army

George Bernard Shaw's "Major Barbara" (1905)

When you think about it, The Salvation Army is an oxymoron. Armies are usually symbols of war, and salvation--love. But think of the blue uniforms worn by these imperturbable creatures ringing their bells as a parade of materialists imperviously passes them by—tempted by Mephisto to sell their souls for the promise of eternal bliss. Yes, it will be Christmas again even when your days are numbered, perhaps even exhausted. On your way to oblivion, you’ll leave the agora behind and a whole market of souls for sale. As Kurt Weill put it in Threepenny Opera, "Let's all go barmy/join the army/see the world we never saw..."

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

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

Free Will

Free will is always a fun topic on a rainy afternoon. If you take the biological paradigm favored by such varied fin de siecle thinkers as Zola and Freud then one’s fate rests in that mixture of genes and environment that comprise the discipline of epigenetics. Jews believe in free will while Calvinists famously hold to the notion of predestination—which is curiously close to   scientism. However, there's one caveat, one back door into the problem. That is grace. Max Weber spent a whole book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, dealing with this form of exceptionalism. If you were prosperous and successful, you'd received god's Grace. Luther may have inveighed against the selling of pardons, but is this not exactly what went on in Geneva—a city that was predestined to be what it became (if you buy the idea that everything is as it’s meant to be or it would be different) and the home town of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

and watch the trailer for Erotomania which will be featured in the Nihilist Film Festival

and listen to "Gypsy" by Fleetwood Mac

le Carre's Con Job

John le Carre aka David Cornwell was according to his biographer Adam Sisman a serial philanderer. The Secret Life of John le Carre is Sisman's followup to his 2015  authorized biography. If you conjured the notion of le Carre living a totally ascetic life on a cliff in Cornwall, far from the temptations of the flesh, you’re off the mark. He, of course, was in good company. V S. Naipaul and John Updike are just two amongst the legions of literary lotharios. Naipaul was also a renowned sadist. But it begs the question of genius and infidelity. To be a literary whiz kid do you have to become polyamorous? Does polyamory lead to being shortlisted for the Booker? According to Sisman, le Carre used his lovers as models. When he finished a book, he was finished with them. The apple didn't fall far from the tree. Apparently le Carre's father pulled cons too.It’s reminiscent of Picasso whose varying periods corresponded to his muses. Plutarch and Dante by comparison both only had one. Oh yes le Carre had an at home wife or mother just like Beckett whose partner, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, was also left in the dust. However, the real question relates to an artistic process that requires the painter or writer to kill off his models in order to begin another period or work.

and listen to "Everywhere" by Fleetwood Mac

and watch the trailer for Erotomania which will be featured in the Nihilist Film Festival

Sleep

When you think of it sleep is a palace or if your nights are fitful, a tower filled with cackling mad creatures who are out to get you. It's a momentous occasion. Hail the trumpets! Remember Dr. Foster when you were a kid, the troll with the fedora who was always about to leap out of the darkness. Speaking of which “ darkness” is the “piece d'occasion.” JFK purportedly could fall asleep anywhere but most people require lights out. It's at this point that the daily nocturnal journey begins. One literally lays down arms aka defenses. Anything can happen. The unintended consequences of oneiric flights of fancy are the stuff of legends like the headless horseman. Take Coleridge’s “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure- dome decree... ." You don’t just go to sleep. Sleep is hardly innocent. In fact it’s guilty of all manner of outrages—pillaging plundering. What does Donald Trump dream about?  What does he or any tyrant really want, in the end? 

and listen to "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac

and watch the trailer for Erotomania which will be featured in the Nihilist Film Festival

The Iliad

In his reviews of Homer and His Iliad By Robin Lane Fox and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (TLS 10/6/23) Nick Lowe remarks that The Odyssey has a limited scope ie “home and family” compared to the Iliad which “is about something different for each year’s reading or intake of students, routinely turning out all along to be about something we never noticed until it happened in front of us…At the heart it is the story of one man’s double discovery that the rules of his world are a consensual fiction, yet the consequences of trying to live outside them are more terrible than he has been able to imagine.” Not a bad iteration! You might say it’s a little like Thucydides who stuck to the facts and Herodotus who could be more transcendent in his approach to history. Interesting it's The Odyssey not The Iliad, however, that inspired Joyce's Ulysses. The notion of finding different interpretations every time one returns to The Iliad is true of most great works of art from Oedipus to Hamlet. You never see the same thing when you view one of Rembrandt’s "tronies." As Pound said: "make it new."

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

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

Rest in Peace

photo: Zarateman

Here is a question you may have been entertaining. What will be your epitaph and who’s going to write it? If you’re proleptic and have already answered and are a male New Yorker genus “Larry David,” the answer is undoubtedly, “HE FINALLY GOT LAID.” Montaigne couldn’t have thought that one up. Look at the double entendre “laid to rest” and you know…in fact the latter may be far from the truth. You may go to your grave without getting laid at least within the final weeks of your life. Yes Nelson Rockefeller died in flagrante, but even your beloved partner is unlikely to come near an old crow who's in the process of decomposition. Violent sex of the kind that is practiced by most couples in these contentious times is not a sport a gerontocrat needs to indulge unless he or she's willing to break a leg (to invoke another double entendre). And whether or not one satisfies a wish, there's no way that, once you’re buried, this all purpose epigraph won’t prove true. 

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

and listen to "Shake Me, Wake Me (When It's Over)"by The Four Tops