Only Fans of Flesh

David Szalay

Flesh was exuberantly Booked or Booker (ed), but it is also soft core porn. Titillation is the lingua franca and the message is not particularly mediated by a self-consciousness about its own manipulations. Istvan our feckless hero is seduced by the upstairs neighbor as a teenager (the author is keen to note the hair running from her vagina to her belly button). The protagonist then murders the neighbor's husband, an act that could be viewed as random or intentional depend how you view it. He joins the army and shows his mettle. He's good with his hands and with women and ends up marrying the wealthy widow of his benefactor. Her friends sunbathe topless by the pool of the estate in which the couple live, their breasts described in some degree of detail. Around every corner lies a seduction. There is a rather graphic for The New Yorker set of photos (shot by Katy Grannan) accompanying a piece on OnlyFans by Jennifer Wilson. That's soft core porn too.

King of the Hill

Casey Greenfield and Jeffrey Toobin (Daily News)

There is a lot of justifiable outrage at Trump ghouls such as Goring Himmler Clone, Stephen Miller,  but look at some of the left's Plutocrats. Jefffey Toobin, a former Crimson editor, banished New Yorker writer and now sometime legal contributor to CNN, himself a scion of media aristocracy (his mother ABC's Marienne Sanders and his father TV producer Jerome Toobin.), marries his Harvard sweetheart, who he also worked with on the Crimson (they are both distinguished Dumpster House alumnae) Amy Bennet McIntosh, only to fly the coop for Casey Greenfield, theYale Law School progeny of ABC's Jeff Greenfield, who in turn sues her former lover for child support. Family law is her deal btw. Nice people huh? Sure Access America, E. Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels are all part of Trump's CV, but how can you compete with someone jerking off at a New Yorker staff meeting? Yes, Tina Brown, the consummate insider praises Toobin's writing in spite of it all. Then there's the Graham Platner affair. Trump is Hitler,  but Stalin and Big Brother are alive and kicking in the world of pronouns vetting and  #MeToo vigilantism.

Sportsocost

   Tadej Pogacar

Are you getting tired of sports? If the American team were so great and highly-low-minded (which all lionized competitive athletes need to me), why didn't they boycott the FIFA mafia? Trump makes a call to the don and voila. Do you also have a headache pursuant to Knicks fever and a feeling of disgust at the Bryant Park watch party where Seattle fans were pummeled by inebriated crowds of toughs. What is this? Who cares about the Yanks or the Giants? Then there's hockey. Yes, the athletes are in great shape like their counterparts on the Tour de France, but these are basically savages on ice. To come back to biking. That's OK, right. Climbing is the metaphor and at a certain point the act transcends the competitive angle and becomes a spiritual act. You have the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, Icarus and Daedalus or perhaps sad old Sisyphus. The Tour and the Giro before it are the stuff of dreams.

Reciprocity

"spotted Hyena" (photo: Eli M Swanson)

Can aggression and reciprocity co-exist? Is there, for example, aggression in a romantic embrace? No one regards love as selfless, but is it similar to eating? Is passion an appetite little different from wolfing down a steak and potato? Take language. You can harangue or treat talk as form of listening. The average person having little consciousness of the other, equates speaking with relieving themselves and most interchanges with others as "dumping" (aka one's problems on a defenseless fellow traveler). The supposed therapeutic bond treasured by practitioners of talk therapy is merely an exchange of bodily fluids, in this case saliva, between the patient and the doctor who, if they are lucky, will be able to dart away before they're hit smack in the face by a glob of angry spit.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Truth

tracking of engraving of Sosibious Vase by Keats

A Million Little Pieces was not so much a succes de scandal as a simple scandal, due to the fact that James Frey's journey of recovery was at least partially fictionalized. In this era of gaslighting where the titular leader of the country makes things up at will, it’s almost refreshing that anyone cares about the facts. The other side of the argument is that all autobiography is art and all art, autobiography. Deconstructionism has added to the problem since it views statements to be culture bound. In addition, there's the problem that the fuzzy waves in the air you may see on a hot day are the presences of parallel universes bursting at waist.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Is the Universe a Gated Community?

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

Closed universes are tantamount to gated communities, albeit on a phenomenological scale. They are a philosophical version of the Great Chain of Being. Essentially human existence is a level playing field. Attempts to frame it, as Einstein or Freud did, are always subject the new kid on the block syndrome, whether it's quanta or the latest neuroscientific discussion of serotonin, axons dendrites or whether memory is procedural or episodic in rats.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Flesh

David Szalay's Flesh received a Booker before the judges could say "boo." The subject is Istvan, a Hungarian version of Kosinski's Chance in Being Time, (played by Peter Sellers in the Ray Ashby movie. Szalay's main has what might be called "out-of-body, body experiences." In other words, lots of sex for which he is "here because he is not all there," to coin a phrase used by 12 steppers. He is seduced by a neighbor at the beginning. At first, he isn't attracted, but the sex is an awakening particularly to her anatomy which includes an alluring bit of hair that runs up from her vagina to her belly button. He is rebuffed in his first love experiences and ends up in juvenile detention after accidentally or not so accidentally killing the woman's husband, by pushing him down a flight of stairs. This question of intention is of course essential in determining culpability, but it's a metaphor for Istvan's condition, which vacillates between the conscious and unconscious. You may recognize this personality type from an adolescent reading of The Stranger, It may even register more intimately, but that is also the problem. The book is sexy and hard to put down, but is it original? Does it expand the readers horizons? Or does it leave them trapped like a rat on the behavioral  or even psychoanalytic treadmill? (to be continued).

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star