Aftershock

Is civilization suffering from PTSD? When you get into an accident you go into shock which is also the way the body protects itself. But what about the body politic? Is it numbed or prone to violent outbursts as a way of dealing with violence? It is a popularly held misconception that people become inured to their own suffering. Actually, every action produces another wish or hope and opposite reaction according to Newton's Third Law. Aftershock is what you have when an earthquake hits. Apres coup is the psychoanalytic term.

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Collective Thwarting

Hassan Nasrallah

Russia is thwarting Ukraine under the guise of restoring what was theirs. It's the old Imperial Russia impulse going back to Peter the Great, an impulse known as irredentism. Iran is Russia's proxy along with Syria which is a fellow traveller. Iran is also the proxy of China and North Korea. The impulse, in the case of Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas is millenarian and hence cloudier with the ultimate result perhaps either oblivion or armageddon (and a life after death)--take your pick. 

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

Midnight Train to Georgia

When you study montage there is always the scene of the train coming and the maiden on the tracks--which is sexist btw. Why not make it a man? Then there is Philippa Foot's "trolley problem." Should the engineer veer off one way to kill one soul and avoid the crowd? Plainly there are two trains bearing down now, one in Ukraine, the other Israel. The election train has yet to leave the station. If Trump loses he is likely to be a train wreck--if Jack Smith has his say. "Midnight Train to Georgia" is a famous Gladys Knight song. Georgia is also a train wreck. You have Jeff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia election commission who is doing everything in its power to create chaos, and then the governor, Jack Kemp. Quantum entanglement is a better description of these goings on.

read an "Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and listen "Midnight Train to Georgia" by Gladys Knight and the Pips

Mayor Adams

Someone with the strongly held beliefs Joe Biden has would not weaponize the Justice Department. That is what Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to get his then attorney general William Barr to do. CBS political correspondent Marcia Kramer's attempt to draw a line between the present federal indictment against Adams and the mayor's anger at White House migrant policies is far flung. Kramer alluded to Adams' attendance at a White House migrant conference last November (which he purportedly left against the background of early revelations of wrongdoing by fundraiser Brianna Suggs) and his current troubles. Isn't this actually not a salient point? Isn't this what the current election is all about? Or should we take the stated and strongly held conviction of the current Justice Department chief Merrick Garland to be disingenuous?

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)

The Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China and the women of Afghanistan constitute some of the most oppressed minorities in the world. Unspeakable accounts of atrocity have emerged from the civil war in Darfur where both starvation and mass rape have become sickening almost routine factors of life. Where is the humanity? In the comfort of Western households with well stocked cupboards, outrage is disingenuous and easy to muster. Then back to the argument about where to go to dinner if which top university will send the letter your child's  been waiting for. "Decolonization" has been become a chic byword of educated speech, but there's a dissonance between theory and practice. Should one give back the lands under which wealthy metropolises have produced so-called civilization? "Radical chic" was the term Tom Wolfe used to describe Leonard Bernstein lionizing the Black Panthers. Abhorrence is a sport amongst elites who secretly gloat that the savagery is far away (like the gladiatorial sports of ancient Rome) not happening  to them as they succor their Lafites.

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Profiles in Courage

JFK wrote Profiles in Courage. What better soubriquet for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama famously said, "When they go low, we go high." Many people think Biden stepped away because he was incapacitated--pure and simple. So what! It's still a hard thing to do. No more poignant counter example than Ruth Bader Ginsberg who didn't rise to the occasion. Fareed Zakaria had Hillary Clinton on GPS last Sunday. She revealed herself to be a profound thinker about campus unrest, the Middle East and a host of other issues. However, she's also a woman of courage as it relates to her own marriage. Cynics will cry that she couldn't leave it, if she wanted to make her mark. Yet it's plain. She Ioves her husband, despite all that's transpired. "Heart" is a word applied to prize fighters, but it's something that characterizes these two figures. It's nice to know there'a still someone adults can look up to.

read "Removing Your Unconscious" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Mistah Shawn--He Dead!

photo: Janet Malcolm

Mistah Shawn, he dead. The old New Yorker offices on 43rd street are another country. Brendan Gill famously wrote Here At The New Yorker and there were Tina Brown, Bob Gottlieb and most famously William Shawn at the helm. Mystique is probably not an adequate word. For good or bad the current editor a man of multifarious talents and seemingly unfathomable energy, is an all hands on deck down to earth editor who himself has covered Russia and written portraits of pop icons like Paul McCartney (he's a lover of rock). He recently published a piece about Yahyah Sinwar and Hamas. Is Max Weber's concept of "disenchantment" a way to describe the evolution of the magazine? You can't produce a character like Shawn without a premises  inhabited by a tribe like the one that originally constituted the nearby Algonquin round table. The prestigious Century association, home to the city cultural elite, was right down the street. Shawn had a long affair with the legendary Lillian Ross. Good for him but he was no good-ole-boy. Harold Brodkey, V.S. Naipaul the Johns Updike and Cheever were all legends at this sometimes alcoholic clubhouse. Then there was Genet in Paris--definitely  not a John or Jean, but Janet Flanner, not a flaneur! Pauline Kael was the magazine's controversial film critic who compared Last Tango in Paris to Le Sacre du Printemps. John McPhee and Robert Caro are just two of the legion of non-fiction writers, including Janet Malcolm. She wrote about psychoanalysis and psychoanalyzed journalism.The famous fiction editor Roger Angell was New Yorker aristocracy being the son of the magazine's first fiction editor Katherine Angell and step son of the famed E.B. White.

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