Publix

Purgatory is Florida. Or is it hell? Striptease by Carl Hiaasen and Harry Crews's Karate is a Thing of the Spirit  both take place in Florida. Publix is Limbo, the First Circle. Hot August day crossing Acheron, Christmas trinket concession on Military decaying high-rises and pensioners on Collins Avenue, Miami. The stink of spoiled meat left on the counter of retiree who unsuccessfully dashed across the median to get a potato,  solitary stripper on stage at club in back of Palm Beach International airport, shaded by lone Palm. Florida is a holding cell. Prete a porter...or prone. You can't have hell or purgatory without Paradise. Imagine a world without pleasure or temptation! Desire is but the beginning of suffering. You'll know you've achieved Buddha mind, when there's nothing left to relax about.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Putting the Damage On" by Tori Amos

The Writer As Pastry

photo of profiterole: Tamorian

The writer who proliferates at a level that becomes profligate becomes a pastry--in particular a profiterole, which makes your mouth water when you spot it in a pastry shop window. There have been lots of brazenly profligate writers from Rimbaud, to Henry Miller, Mailer, Roth (taken to task by his former wife Claire Bloom) and V.S. Naipaul whose mistress was disfigured by his beatings. Doris Lessing left her husband and two children to pursue her career. Patricia Highsmith was predatory, sexually. Joyce Carol Oates is a furiously prolific novelist. She also writes mysteries under a pseudonym and also book reviews. However, of prolific writers Stephen King, particularly due to his breadth of vision. The Shining is only surpassed by Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge--as an essay on alcoholism. If it were a choice between Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, you'd probably ending up picking SK out of the pastry shop window. Too bad Napoleon wasn't a writer.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Nothing's Too Good For My Baby" by Stevie Wonder

Let's Say You Were Tolstoy?

Tolstoy in l908

Even Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would likely feel deflated by each other's company in the unlikely event they were at the same party. The only things that can happen when you reach the top of Mount Olympus is to either become one of the gods or fall off. Every kid dreams of growing up to become Zeus though the likely realization, about even their own hero, is that he is only a god amongst gods. Monotheism was created to deal precisely with this "constitutional" problem. God is not bidden to play by any rules since he lords it over all of us and is the ultimate maker. 

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to "Everybody is a Star" by Sly and the Family Stone

Finality

How to absorb the notion that someone is completely out of existence? That you can't add something you forgot to say or  explain. Everyone wants to have the last word. Life is an extended argument, comparable to Dickens' Jaryrdyce v Jaryrdyce in Bleak House, until of course there are no more plaintiffs, defendants or case! "Get off of my case" is an expression that's used by those who don't like to be nagged. They will unfortunately get their wish when either the accuser or respondent is no more. It's, of course, true that there are those who carry on the conversation talking to the dead, still insisting on their wishes. It's indeed very human to court such impossibilities.

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to Wagner's Liebestod played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim

Oneiric

statue of Hermione. comes to life

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. But when you think about it, everything is. Life is a dream is the title of a play by the 17th century playwright Calderon. In The Winter's Tale the statue Hermione comes to life. The unconscious is supposed to be the repository for the clandestine knowledge one might even be hiding from oneself. Yet isn't life itself the last stop on the line. "Everything comes out in the laundry" and even the most repressed wish finds itself sewn into the tapestry of existence. It's really just a matter of time. You might also look at dreams as sayings in Chinese fortune cookies. It seems random when a waiter places the dish on the table. Then there's the aleatory movement which determines which one is finally yours.

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols

The Crack-Up

You know the novels and films about people who lose everything. There were numerous defenestrations after the crash of 29. Alumnae of money make appearances in the novels of Fitzgerald, O'Hara and the now forgotten John Marquand. The Crack-Up Is the title of Fitzgerald's controversial volume of essays. And the one in which he famously wrote, "there are no second acts in American lives." Does fortune then mask the reality that your "run," good or bad, will be cut short by mortality. Pleasure is the radioactive fallout following a major blast. And it's also a black hole. You stand at the event horizon and implode like a super nova. Imagine a biopic about Courbet gingerly walking the line between eros and art. Narcissus drowned in his own image. And what are the viewers to do--as they gaze, mesmerized and disarmed, by the wantonly splayed legs of the artist's model in "L' Origine du monde?"

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and watch the trailer for animation of Erotomania

The Go-Between

The past actually is a closed book. It's tantamount to Yom Kippur where the Book of Life is sealed, on a yearly basis. It's not that one can't remember specifics. Rather the feeling is similar to examining an antiquity --say the Ming Dynasty princess on the porcelain base of an old lamp you've grown up with. Remember the case of the Florida man who fell into a sinkhole while he was lying in bed? You may be caught unawares by the pasf. Bergson called it "involuntary memory" lest one "forget" the Proustian "madeleine." Bergman's Wild Strawberries is  a journey. Supposedly the professor is being honored. In fact, he's swept back into another sometimes unwelcome world of recollection--that's both hauntingly vivid and reeking of impossibility--filled, as it is, with chances missed snd turns not taken. Which past do you prefer-- the chronological timeline or the  sometimes haunting nightmare in which one struggles to remain afloat? FromThe Go-Between: "the past is a foreign country."

read Mark Segal on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo"

and listen to Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department