Bukowski

Are you so obsessed with yourself that you don't know whether you're coming or going? Freud talked about love and work, but many professionals whose career paths are, for good or bad, set in stone might say sex and food--two ephemeral entities that create a discussion that far exceeds their duration. Look at the literature of sexuality Catallus, Caligula, Sade, Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding and in modern times Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Phillip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, Erica Jong,  Annie Ernaux, John Updike, Harold Brodkey and Daphne Merkin. And the literature of food is no slouch either, if you consider all the writers from  Escoffier to Marcella Hazan and Julia Childs. It's a paradox of fleeting pleasures that one could spend a lifetime writing about culinary exploits that take only a fraction of their production time to consume. Nevertheless, you'll probably be hungry and desirous until the bitter end. In fact, lust is a peculiar animal that owes as much to animal instinct as serotonin and is often masked by an intrinsic dissatisfaction with quotidien reality. In essence, humans afflicted by imagination, are all spurned lovers.

read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail