My memoir book “Venice in Las Vegas: An American and European Auto-Socio-Biography, 1960s to 1980s” has been published on October 20, 2025 in the Counterpoints Studies in Criticality series, edited by Shirley Steinberg, of the Peter Lang Publishing House.
See here:
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1560177#
At amazon, there is a free reading sample of the first 37 pages of the book:
As Donald Trump seeks to transform America, many people talk about wanting to leave the country. I left the USA several decades ago, yet I still love my homeland. I searched for dialog between Europe and America through the link between Venice and Las Vegas. In Vegas, Venice is simulated. You can ride in a gondola. Replicas of the St. Mark’s Bell Tower and the Rialto Bridge exist. Venice is the emblem of European history, culture, and art. I gambled in the Venice Lido casino and drank Italian wine in Vegas. Born into a Jewish family on Long Island, my life was changed by an IQ test that led to skipping two years in school – an event that impacted my education, psychology, and connection to the world around me. I rejected the life path laid out for me and rolled the dice instead. I traveled in Europe, worked strange jobs in New York City, and took part in a student uprising in Italy. My memories are intricately tied to the writers I engaged with: Baudrillard, Camus, Auster, and others.
Table of Contents
Foreword
The Beginning
1 When I Was Twenty
2 The Scene of the Crime
3 The Radical Left Late 1960s
4 High School
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6 Cornell University Arts and Sciences
7 First Year in France and Italy
8 Art Students Make Politics: the “Metropolitan Indians” in Italy
9 Back in America Only to Leave Again
10 Two Years in Bologna
11 Las Vegas in Venice
12 Sociology Graduate Student in New York City
13 Greenwood Mills Marketing Company
14 Wall Street Computer Programmer
15 Venice in Las Vegas
Epilogue
Notes
Excerpt from Chapter 1:
“I was twenty. I will let no one say it is the best time of life.”
This opening sentence of the French writer Paul Nizan’s travel memoir Aden Arabie, published in 1931, has always impressed me for its parallelism with what I lived. Or maybe it was the opposite. Perhaps it was the best time of my life, and I did not know it. I wanted more from life than was my fair share. What I lived, what I was put through, could have killed me. That is the story I will tell in these pages. But since I survived and “made lemonade” from the lemons, as the psychotherapeutic saying goes, it is also a story of the best of all possible worlds.
Excerpt from Chapter 2:
The pathway to the beach at the far west end of the property was the most enchanting site of my childhood. You passed through the gate of a metal fence that was often locked. You entered a wide arboretum strip with many species of trees and sculpted greenery vines overhead. It was filled with the sounds of birds and crickets as summer approached. There were plentiful honeysuckle flowers. This immersion in the sensorium of magnificent nature continued for many minutes as you neared the water. At the termination of the path, you arrived at high cliffs far above Long Island Sound. I ran down the steep slope of loose, moist sand in fearless joy, propelled forward at high speed by gravity, landing safely on the horizontal strand. When I later read J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, it was that cliff I pictured in my mind’s eye as the place where Holden Caulfield, in his fantasy, catches the children playing with abandon in the rye fields close to the edge where they, literally in the scenario, risk tumbling to injury or something worse, or, metaphorically, lose the innocence of childhood.
Excerpt from Chapter 3:
In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War raged. It divided America and generations. Everyone had to decide if they were for or against the War. My brother and I were against it. My parents were for it. They felt it was their patriotic duty to support the War. In 1964, in the United States, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley began a rebellion that spread to university campuses across America, igniting a political movement against the War.
Excerpt from Chapter 4:
April 22, 1970, the day before my fourteenth birthday, was the first Earth Day. I participated in my first political activity, attending environmental workshops and teach-ins at Herricks High School about air and water pollution, oil spills, and endangered species. We took long walks, planted trees, and did “clean-ups” of broad grass fields. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, environmental reform became a political issue. Consciousness about the potential danger of Earth’s ecological devastation and protection of the natural ecology of humanity’s planetary habitat was beginning. Attention was starting to be paid to global warming, climate change, the destruction of the ozone layer, the melting of the polar ice caps, the demolition of forests, excessive oil drilling, and loss of biodiversity.
Excerpt from Chapter 5:
The number of African American students at MIT was extremely small. My second elective political science course in the third semester was “Black American Politics.” I was the only white student in the class. The brilliant Professor Lorenzo Morris taught the seminar. Morris was a young intellectual, only ten years older than me. He became America’s leading scholar of the history of black politics. It was a small group, and we had amazing discussions. Lorenzo talked eruditely about the ideas, social science, and political commitments of W.E.B. Du Bois. The following semester, I did another seminar with Lorenzo Morris called “Urban Politics.” Lorenzo also suggested that I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. That landmark work gave me insights into the institutional contexts of scientific research and ignited my interest in the philosophy and history of science.
Excerpt from Chapter 6:
My two years at Cornell were the heart and soul of my lifetime’s education. The two semesters of Professor Dominick LaCapra’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Intellectual History lectures were a fantastic revelation for me. I also did a graduate-level seminar with him on literary theory, where we read classics in the field, including Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach, Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye, Theory of the Novel by Gyorgy Lukacs, and Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes. LaCapra was the most significant teacher and mentor in my entire biography.
Excerpt from Chapter 7:
M. Peota was fifty-five years old. He looked older but was still physically fit. He had been a postal worker. One time, he came home in the middle of the day and found his wife in bed with another man. He grabbed a sharp kitchen knife and stabbed both his wife and her lover many times. Fortunately, no one died. M. Peota was proud of what he had done since, in France, it was considered a justified and even honorable crime of passion. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Pierre P. confided in me that he was an atheist. He came to understand that he could get released from prison early by faking an emotionally charged religious conversion and embracing Jesus Christ as his savior. He recounted in detail how he staged his performance of declaring himself a sinner and announcing his reborn salvation.
Excerpt from Chapter 8:
In March 1977, art students from the DAMS Arts, Music, and Theatre faculty of the University of Bologna participated in an art, culture, and ideas-inspired political movement called the Indiani Metropolitani [Metropolitan Indians] or the fight for gli emerginati [the marginalized of society]. The art historian Maurizio Calvesi called the Metropolitan Indians the “mass avant-garde.” The ideas and actions of the creative wing of the 1977 uprising were a potential coming to fruition of the utopia envisioned by leading radical artistic movements of the twentieth century, such as Dada and surrealism. It was the possible realization of the dream of overcoming the wall separating art and everyday life, and in the context of new forms of expression enabled by new media and new communications technologies.
Excerpt from Chapter 9:
They did not even seem to mind that I had an unkempt hippie beard and long hair. I took so many typing tests that I started to see and feel the typewriter keys in my nocturnal dreams. I felt like the proverbial monkey who would eventually reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare if given enough time, arbitrarily “banging away.” Having proved myself to be a proficient key-banger and getting told that I was being sent on an assignment, it was crucial to remember to hand in the IRS tax form declaring that your annual income was so minimal that you wanted to have only social security tax deducted from your paycheck and not the federal, state, and local income taxes which would eat away a quarter of what you earned.
Excerpt from Chapter 10:
From the apartment where I was “squatting,” I had a five-minute walk to Piazza Giuseppe Verdi, the hub of student social life. For one and a half years, I had a fixed daily routine Monday through Friday. I read a book or wrote for three hours in the morning. Then I walked to the area around Piazza Verdi, went to the student Mensa cafeteria, or met my friends in a trattoria for lunch. I had a part-time job teaching English in the late afternoons, from 3 to 6 pm, five days a week. After lunch, I drank my strong coffee and socialized some more. I hung out in Piazza Verdi every day. There were artsy cafes, bohemian bars, and gaming arcades. I walked with a sense of strange ambivalence past the Johns Hopkins American University Center – the School of Advanced International Studies in Via Beniamino Andreatta – on my way to the stop of the bus that would take me to my part-time teaching job.
Excerpt from Chapter 11:
I could afford to increase my bet since I was more than six hundred dollars ahead. I started to play one hundred dollars per hand. I waited until I had a hand in the 12 to 16 range, the dealer had a high card, and the player after me had two cards of 11 or less, so he was going to hit for sure. The moment arrived. The dealer had a 10 showing. I had a 12. The player to my left had a low hand and was bound to hit. As expected, the dealer glossed over my “free agent” right to take a card. In a split second, he automatically gave the next player the next card from the multiple decks in the “shoe” device. I saw that the card was a 9. “Wait a minute!” I shouted in Italian. My knowledge of Italian was now going to be worth some money!” Io volevo una carta! [“I wanted to take a card, and you never gave me the chance!”] The dealer apologized. He admitted his mistake. He took the 9 from the next player and placed it over my 12. I had 21! I won the hand easily. The next player was given the next card. His hand improved as well, and everyone was content. I repeated the trick twice more. It was not the kind of thing one could do often. But it was worth three winning hands or three hundred thousand lire. I had so many chips stuffed in my jacket and pants pockets that I lost count of how far ahead I was. Knowing that my luck could at any time turn south and I would start losing it all back, I got up from my chair. I tossed a gratuity at the croupier and declared my seat free. I slipped quietly away. Within a few seconds, another body replaced mine, and everyone at the table forgot that I existed. I recovered my anonymity and slipped back into the crowds in the main roulette salon.
Excerpt from Chapter 12:
I was especially interested in Donald Trump’s involvement in the Atlantic City casino gambling industry. In 1982, Trump acquired a New Jersey casino license. In 1984, Harrah’s at Trump Plaza opened. It was a 210 million dollar, thirty-nine-story hotel-casino. In 1985, Trump’s Castle Hotel Casino opened. In 1986, Harrah’s was renamed to Trump Plaza. Later, in 1990, the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel Casino opened in Atlantic City. It became the largest casino in the world and the tallest building in New Jersey, occupying seventeen acres of land and costing one billion dollars to construct. In 1996, Trump’s World’s Fair casino opened next to the Trump Plaza. The gamblers are seduced into the casino by the promise and lure of Easy Money. They are told they have a good chance to become winners. But the casino only cares about itself. Nearly 100 percent of the players end up as losers. They get fleeced (the process of obtaining the wool from a sheep at one shearing) and come away with nothing.
Excerpt from Chapter 13:
My work week did not begin at 9 AM on Monday. It began at midnight on Sunday evening. The Data Processing Department in South Carolina began a new practice of sending all updated information on textiles produced in the last few days that were available for sale during the forthcoming week to an IBM line printer in the New York office. I had to monitor the behavior of that clunky printer, keep it supplied with paper, and resolve paper jams. The fabric types and quantities data were engraved onto “green bar” computer paper with alternating green and white horizontal stripes and tractor feed holes at the edges. It took several hours for all the wide-format reports to print. There were multiple pages designated for each salesperson. Alone in the wee hours of the morning, I went around to all the desks on the vast sales floor, one level below my office, distributing each printout to its assigned recipient so he or she would be ready to start selling to the max at 9 AM sharp. I had to continue working my regular shifts until 5 PM on Monday. I had to be back at the Greenwood Mills Marketing Company on 40th Street at 9 AM every Tuesday through Friday.
Excerpt from Chapter 14:
Many years later, I think back on my time in New York City, working in the financial industry and supporting data systems for Wall Street portfolio asset managers. This experience inspires some general reflections about capitalism and neo-fascism in me. Neo-liberalism and globalization, as they were carried out, are bad things. Yet globalization is inevitable, unstoppable, and irreversible. The rise of globalization in the 1990s was, in important ways, the consequence of the intensified networking of computers, which catalyzed the virtualization of capital and accelerated electronic and liquid money flows. It does not matter how many pseudo-populist, hate-inspiring, demagogic politicians – with their isolationism, nationalism, racism, and xenophobia – rail against the supposed elites of what they superficially define for their followers as globalization. Contrary to the conspiracy stories spun by these neo-fascists, globalization’s essence is the free-floating circulation of money, the unleashing of high-speed, virtual capital transactions that know no territorial borders, a self-reproducing, perpetual-motion machine seeking limitless profit wherever it can find it. If they came to power, the self-proclaimed populists would implement a reactionary “libertarianism” worse than neo-liberalism that would dismantle and/or privatize many state functions (environmental regulations, consumer protection, worker safety, public education, health management measures, social security retirement funding, etc.), thus giving even freer rein to the wild propagation of speculative capital. We would migrate from so-called globalization to an even more radical and destructive version of the post-industrial economy.
Excerpt from Chapter 15:
The Simulacrum is More (Hyper-)Real Than the Original. The copy or simulacrum has replaced the original in Las Vegas’s architecture and ambiance. Many of the hotel-casinos are simulacra of specific histories or geographies. The simulacra of “the good life” substitute for the good life. At “Caesar’s Palace,” the semiotics of ancient Rome replace the real historical Rome. The Eiffel Tower at the Paris Las Vegas Casino replaces the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The skyline of skyscrapers and the Brooklyn Bridge at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino replaces Manhattan. It was in Las Vegas where I was able to relive all of my essential European and New York wanderings. New York City in Las Vegas. Duplicates of Christopher Street and Sheridan Square in the West Village. The entrance to the numbers 1 and 9 subway lines. Replica of the Statue of Liberty. Copies of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal (in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the East Coast twin of Las Vegas) replaces the ivory-white marble mausoleum in the Indian City of Agra. The replicas of the Campanile (Bell Tower) of St. Mark’s Church and the Rialto Bridge at the Las Vegas Venetian Hotel Casino replace the real Tower and Bridge of Venice. The simulation of Venice in Las Vegas, its cultural-imaginary presence in the former desert of the former territory of Nevade, down to the details of gondalas, canals, and bridges.
Excerpt from Epilogue:
Astonishingly, I became semi-famous as a thinker, a minor intellectual celebrity. After 2012, I changed careers, stopped doing IT consulting work to make money, and started teaching at art and design universities in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. I have taught nearly one hundred seminars in future design research, transdisciplinary design, post-humanist philosophy, and programming or “Creative Coding” for artists. I have been interviewed on TV and radio shows in several countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Estonia. I have been the invited keynote speaker about twenty times at academic, scientific, and business conferences; science fiction fan conventions; and art festivals. I spoke at events solely about my work in front of audiences of five hundred people in Berlin and Milan.