Author: James Livingston

The Modern Decameron, Book II, rev. ed.

Neifile goes next in The Decameron, Book/Novel 2.  She tells the story of Abraham the Jew, a devout adherent of the faith, who, being a friend of Johannot de Chevigny, a fellow merchant, is constantly subject to proselytization–convert now or forever find no peace!  Abraham finally says OK, OK, but I’m going to the headquarters, all the way to Rome, to see what your religion is made of.  There he finds strange grounds for new belief–he converts to Christianity because its practitioners are whoremongers, pedophiles, mendicants, and morons, yet their empire keeps expanding.  Here’s my retelling of that story for our times, as a screenplay, of course. ____ INT. Abraham bent over a church pew, the reverse shot shows his old friend John, another stalwart of the garment trade, pacing in the aisle.  The camera rises, we survey the incredible wealth and majesty of this cathedral, and the 2000-year old Church it represents. ABRAHAM: Jesus fucking Christ, wouldja?  [the cameras descend into standard shot-reverse shot format at eye level] I’m a Jew, what do you want, a conversion experience?  How can I be a Christian, what are you people FOR–except, what, the end of everything?   You hope for death, the end of the fucking world, so you can see the large one, the big guy who tortures us because he thinks it’s good for us?  This is not a...

Read More

Dreaming of Despair

Last night my dreams were soaked in the cold sweat of despair–a function, I believe, of two small waking events from the day before. First, I endured a remote session with the shrink (yeah, I know, I’m privileged, I don’t have to show up for work, and, with my solid insurance, I can shop for mental health). In psychotherapy, the rule is you talk about yourself, not everybody else, on the assumption that each of us is a unique individual in the grip of a highly specific set of intimate or familial circumstances.  That rule is now moot, because nothing stands between the world and me.  The shrink would keep asking how I felt, and I’d keep responding with rants on Trump’s murderous lies, by saying, “How do I feel, I feel the same way everybody else feels,” as if his words and deeds had immediately lacerating effects on my body, and, more to the point, as if I’ve become an interchangeable part in a rhetorical machine rather than a unique individual with opinions of my own (about myself to begin with). I disappeared from the conversation because I had become, and clearly wanted to be, the anonymous mouthpiece of people I don’t even know.  And vice versa. Second, I had a low-key argument with my cellmate about resistance through writing.  She worries that I stress myself out by too...

Read More

The Modern Decameron, Books IV-VII

Now we’re in the thick of it, now we know God himself is on trial, because his representatives on earth are so cunning, lustful, stupid, and wise.  These four “novels” compose a suite, a kind of story within a story–within a story–that tells of how the men of the Church have betrayed its promises, and will, accordingly, soon lose their hold on the hearts and minds of the masses.  Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” are the contemporary complement (and remember that Geoffrey stole from Giovanni). Dioneo (Boccaccio’s stand-in) tells the story of the monk and the abbot, the man who, caught by his superior in sexual shenanigans, exposes the boss to the same temptations and, having recorded the sordid results, prevents his dismissal from the monastery and guarantees his future as a cleric.  How to succeed in business without really trying.  Fiammetta (Boccaccio’s nickname for his real-life lover) follows with a lesson in how to say “No” to a man with superior standing and powers.  It ain’t easy.  Emilia then explains why charity–philanthropy, we call it, that’s how we dress it up these days–is worse than death without last rites.  How so?  And then Filostrato the straight arrow tells us stories of men who admitted their sins of greed, who tried to “give something back” (of what they had previously taken from others), having been embarrassed by their own greed.  Would that...

Read More

On Lenox Ave

My girlfriend and I are holed up in Harlem, just south of its epicenter at 125thand Lenox Ave, a.k.a. Malcom X Blvd.  Since there are no delivery dates available from any purveyor until far into next week (I write on March 31), I’ve been going out to shop for groceries every three or four days at 7:00 AM, when Whole Foods opens its doors for one hour to customers 60 years and older, then lets the less vulnerable in to hunt and gather. There’s a police-style metal barricade that runs 50 feet west on 125thStreet from Lenox, channeling us senior citizens into a socially-distanced single file so that security guards can check our ID.  Once inside, it’s clear sailing–the aisles are bustling with employees stocking the shelves or filling carts with food for delivery, but the masked customers are few, no more than 20 percent of the store’s current population. Outside–a security guard has to let you out–there are even fewer civilians.  Used to be that at any given morning hour, dozens of addicts of all kinds would be gathered on the corner of 124th, waiting for the rehab/detox clinic behind Whole Foods to open.  Not yesterday.  Maybe three or four old guys waving canes, talking trash, smoking cigarettes.  The hallal truck wasn’t there, either, nor the tented vegetable stand.  Suddenly you can feel a lot of social distance...

Read More

The Modern Decameron, Book 1

In Boccaccio’s Decameron, there were seven women and three men, self-quarantined in the time of plague, Florence, 1348.  The women were Pampinea, elected queen by her peers because she was so decisive, insightful, and cheerful; Fiammetta (Boccaccio’s nickname for his lover in real life); Filomena; Emilia; Lauretta; Neifile; and Elisa.  The men, all dashing and handsome per Boccaccio’s specifications, were Pamfilo, Filostrato, and Dioneo (the last a stand-in, according to Rigg’s translation, for Giovanni himself).  Book/Novel 1 commences when Pampinea commands the bashful Pamfilo to start the stories that will become The Decameron. He rises to the occasion and tells us, with surprising eloquence and detail, of a man, Ser Chiappelletto (the Cheater) who lived a life of crime and died a saint.  This is my retelling for our plague time. ____ Now that I’m locked up with you, ladies and gentlemen, I withhold the compliment when it comes to these two punkass motherfuckers, men who still carry their weapons as if  they might protect their impoverished souls against the pestilence that waits outside the doors of this church, now closed against a disease that would waste the world, yes, now I will, as commanded, tell the story of a man whose transgressions made him a saint, a man whose sins became virtues, a man so steeped in the foul sewage of iniquity that he could say shit you...

Read More

Subscribe