Understanding

Descartes

Reading comprehension starts to be measured in grammar school. Of course, who knows what the dreaded future will hold! Forget AI! Chance is exponential. Moore’s Law about chips can be applied to anything and there is a cost for everything. Technology in sedentary. Suddenly you don't have to think. Who woulda thought? And how do you know what you’re reading is not the product of a Nvidia chip. Romantic love will really be romantic when it’s computer generated and lives eternally in cyberspace. No more Tristans or Juliets. Advanced systems can’t imbibe poisons though they can get viruses. One computer will request the bitcoin to pay off the hijacker. No need for any human hands to get dirty. Is ChatGBT responsible for the decline of reason?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Omnivorous Rodent

 

Say you want to eat the world. The problem is you've become a cockroach, genus Gregor Samsa and there is only so much space in your gut. Your eyes are bigger than your tummy. Mice and rats are your dinosaurs. It is almost unfair that you have to be satisfied with crumbs while all the other rodents get to dine on you. What could be worse? If only it were possible to talk to one's confreres scratching in the walls. See that water bug scurrying away. It's one thing to sense danger and another to talk about it. Everyone knows that the only cockroaches that have words are the ones who went through their life-changing metamorphoses from man to bug. 

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Is Democracy Dead?

 

Is this Dresden after the fire bombing? Politically democracy has been mortally wounded. One cannot turn back the socio-economic structure of the country to the Enlightenment ideals on which it was based. On an individual basis it’s similar to a relationship in which trust had been lost. Once the fabric is  torn, it’s nigh impossible to mend. Who would have thought the the basic foundations created by the Constitution and The Bill of Rights were as fragile as the East Wing which fell so easily to the wreckers ball? 9/11 was prescient. The United States protected in both sides by oceans never seemed vulnerable to attack and it wasn’t even a foreign government, rather a small guerrilla force. Who would have predicted that Putin would have gone "nuclear?"

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Godfather Grandfathered

Just when you thought organized crime was relegated to film-- and picking up the trash, one discovers the Mafia is grandfathered into the culture. The recent basketball scandal makes it apparent you shouldn't take anything for granted. Could the Bonannos and Gambinos accomplish what congress has been unable to do ie restore law and order? What if Trump or even Kim Jong-un were made an offer they couldn’t refuse? Surely the latter day Corleones can get more done than Nancy Pelosi. The Democrats are looking for someone who can stand up to MAGA world. The answer is the syndicate which will run circles around $ Patel—even if the DOJ is making them jump through hoops.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Make It New

 

Citroen 2CV

"Make it new," said Ezra Pound. Perhaps he didn’t even know what that meant. Does "new" refer to a poetic form (Pound famously wrote in Cantos) or the impulse behind the artistic endeavor itself?  When it comes to appliances most people would say they prefer a new Sub Zero refrigerator to an old Amana, but there's something charming about the waffle iron that comes down in the family bringing with it a host of olfactory memories. Cars epitomize old and new. The word “model” connotes something to be praised and imitated as in a “model student.” On the other hand one talks of vintage cars which have the resonance of a fine wine, One of Anne Beattie’s most famous stories is “A Vintage Thunderbird"--1978! You can go to IKEA to get Danish Modern Modular furniture, or hunt for antiques in Hudson. Everything about this latter runs against the notion of machine line production with its economy of scale. What comes off a conveyor belt is as new as an Ezra Pound poem—if not more so, but in a decidedly mechanical way.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Pizza, Natural Selection, Regime Change and the East Wing Demolition

East Wing Demolition (PBS)

Prehistoric man didn't go down to Third Avenue for a slice. In fact pizza is a product of natural selection along with totalitarianism. Along the way came Pizzagate and QAnon.  Regime change is another form of natural selection. Adolescent love is fake news, a gigantic hormonal fantasy, a gerrymandered election. Is democracy merely a placeholder for cryptocurrency? Recently Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, replied "your mother did" when Huffington's S.V. Date texted "Who suggested Budapest?" Leavitt latter posted the exchange on X. Is this an example of on line bullying?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Darling

Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey are the triangle at the heart of Darling (1965)--currently completing a run at Film Forum. The threesome comprised of iconic figures of 60s cinema actually play odd man out. The movie, a satiric portrait of class and sexual mores, hinging on the creation of a happy advertising image--brilliantly turns on a dime, leaving its alternately glamorous and hapless characters to drown in their own self-created halos. Hindsight is not 20/20 when it comes to revisiting a classic like Darling since it's curiously difficult to suspend disbelief, swimming, as one does, in this school of talent. John Schlesinger’s direction complexly navigates the tightrope of tragicomedy weaving a latticework of reaction shots that counterpoint the entrapment of closeups. The big reveals are what these three image makers refuse to see.The tone of the film is flip to start. Bogart’s wife, a figure out of the kitchen sink school of British cinema, is blind-sighted by her husband. Then Schlesinger wields the cudgel of gravitas. Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother. Christie sleeps with both men and ends up sentenced to life.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Wanted Dead or Alive

Is it possible to get a final message through? Why does it matter? Say dad always wanted you to be a lawyer but you dreamt of being a celebrity dental surgeon or an oral hygienist to the stars? You've won, obviously? It’s tantamount to punching your way out of a paper bag. In today’s age of ear fobs, you never can tell who's the crazy person talking to themselves. It’s a walking seance. You may be dressing to impress while success itself remains the elusive part of the equation. If you’ve ever been doubted, if you've ever had others look at you askance, you realize validation lies in being “wanted dead or alive!”

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Last House on the Left

Terror is something you experience at movies. Psycho and Blair Witch are on your no fly list. The closest you get are those harassing accounts of snipers terrorizing schools. You watch the infamous January MAGA attack in real time on TV—with more than six degrees of separation. 9/11, The Towering Inferno. Encounter a prowler or an irate driver stopping short, your brake screaming as drag racers who weave race in and out of traffic on the LIE. The fact is you’re about as likely to face the barrel of a gun as you are to be swept away by a rip tide. You have a bad dream and reach across the bed for solace but there’s no there. You hear your own heart beating when you watch Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972).

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

House of Pain

House of Pain

There is physical pain and psychic pain. You notice people who attempt to use physical pain to quell emotional disturbances. You may have noticed suspicious cuts or burns on a disturbed person. Physical exercise, especially when it test one's limits, is another way of muffling hurt. Interestingly one may start from a position of great emotional turbulence, arriving at another state that is uncomfortable in a totally different way. Sublimation is one of the ways a person can turn untoward life experiences into art, though the art itself may be painful for others to experience. It's similar to passing the baton in a relay race or "passing the buck." A writer is kicking the can down the road. One of the great lines in Charles Ludlam's Bluebeard is "remember the house of pain."

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Art

 

Marinetti

Was art ever value-free? Just ignoring the Anschluss is not a recipe for imagination. However, the current climate is so ideology driven that absence becomes a conviction in and of itself. There was a time when you read The Magic Mountain to literally ascend as did Mann's characters to an aerie above the cares of everyday life. The fact is they aren't, in the end, spared either. The inward turning novel which spins on the ideational conflict between Settembrini, a representative of Enlightenment rationalism and Naphta, symbol of the transcendent and supernal is laid to rest with the murder of the Archduke at Sarajevo and the onset of one of the great massacres in human history. Both the country and the world are polarized. MAGA style populism is evidenced in Britain with Nigel Farage and in France by Marine Le Pen. Ironically Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of The Futurist Manifesto, was a fascist. You may remember Winston and Julia seeking to escape Newspeak in l984. Was Art ever a neutral country?

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

 

Cartel

drug cartel?

Max Weber coined the term “disenchantment” to account for scientism. AI has turned against the mystery of the universe in the same way MAGA discountenances democracy, AI is in fact an offshoot of populism. But there are three things over which AI is powerless: birth, death and consciousness. AI is a false self that can only put on a face. There have been reports of artificial intelligences advising their hosts to commit suicide, sadly with success. But what’s AI to say about the creation of life on an ontogenic or phylogenetic basis? There’s the sperm and egg and finally the zygote. Similarly On Death and Dying, in which Elisabeth Kubler-Ross plots the end, does little to explain that instant life leaves the body.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

 

Attraction

Idealization is the mind’s way of negotiating the shoals of desire? But what creates attraction? Is preconception a factor? Are familial, ethnic or cultural prototypes at play? Is it the collective unconscious? You may desire the blond and the blue a la Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kroger." Are you drawn to Slavs or is the swarthy Southern European your type? Romance languages create their own allure as do cuneiforms and Sanskrit which can seem exotic--and Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets when you've grown up A-Z. Infatuation is sometimes created by mystery, but it's often similar to the shoe fitting the foot. Jayne Mansfield was the classic pinup, but appearances can be deceiving. She was, by all accounts, not simply a bimbo. Her allure was a mixture of body and mind.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Peter and the Wolf

 

Remember the score for Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” (Opus 67)? It leaves as indelible an imprint as The Wollman Rink? How did they ever skate backwards? Then there was the carousel, the seal pool and the  mysterious dank underpasses inhabited by trolls. There were the Belvedere castle and later the clouds of pot around The Bethesda Fountain. You may have manned the cannon overlooking the Hudson by The Soldiers and Sailors Monument if your grandparents occupied a grand old West End Avenue apartment. Perhaps you took the 86th Street crosstown which ran through the “transfers,” with their signature Olmsted gray stone slabs. What other magic? Sledding on the hill at 79th, the horse drawn carriages lined up on 59th opposite The Plaza, the baseball players in the fields at 99th with their corporate sponsored teams and proud matching shirts.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Tenth Millennium Man (Man in the year 10,000)

Moore’s Law related to microprocessors but it can be applied to futurity itself.The brain is a chip which has a chip on its shoulder. However change itself is geometric and even exponential, rather than arithmetic. Remember the covers of those old sci books such as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination? The main character is actually the prototype of a rootless earthing but he’s not like any human  you have ever seen—he's actually a distant traveler returned to earth, but imagine life thousands of years in the future when English is tantamount to a cuneiform or an ancient language found in papyrus? Perhaps humankind will have departed into the cybersphere with daily life a virtual reality game. That’s one way to deal with global warming!

read the Italian translation of Erotomania by Francis Levy (translator Franco Malanima), Articoli Liberi

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Uriah Heep

Uriah Heep (painting by Frank Reynolds)

Reverence can be confused with fawning or even the kind of humility associated with a Uriah Heep. A person's irreverence may be in protest against their own tendency to unctuousness.  Many personality traits are compromise formations that are compensatory in nature. Shrews may not need taming. Of course that's also a hope. You want to believe that a belligerent individual is just acting defensively since underneath it all, they’re afraid of being totality engulfed by a stronger personality. Alas, depth psychology!

read the Italian translation of Erotomania by Francis Levy (translator Franco Malanima), Articoli Liberi

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Fashion Neurosis

 

Imagine hooking up with someone only to find an ATM in their bedroom. “I like sex. Why shouldn’t I be paid for it?” Is your partner a sex worker?  It's unlikely you'll find a cash machine in an analyst’s office, but it’s not totally inapropos considering the expensive fees charged by by Park Avenue and Central Park West practitioners of what Janet Malcom termed “the impossible profession.” Monetizing psychiatry may sound callous. After all the brain, which tackles emotion, is not an appendix. Group is one way your shrink may apply economy of scale to your encounter. Imagine a handsome elegant couch like the one you see in Freud’s Vienna office at Berggasse 19 accompanied by one of those appliances you find in a supermarket which sucks in your bills and shoots back the change. Freud's great granddaughter, Bella, hosts a podcast entitled "Fashion Neurosis" and while you're at it, see "Dress, Dreams and Desire: Psychoanalysis and Fashion" at FIT.

read the Italian translation of Erotomania by Francis Levy (translator Franco Malanima), Articoli Liberi

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

also read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

White

"White on White" by Kazimir Malevich (1918)

Kandinsky wrote “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”--which was about color.  Franz Kline established a b&w style of abstraction. Dreams are color blind. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat” is Oliver Sacks’ vade mecum of neurological anomalies (he was the Dr Johnson of mental disorders). White on the spectrum is the presence of all color and black is usually considered the absence. However white is a singularity—since it cites a being that is before the coordinates of time and space which the average artist attempts to navigate. Being and Time, Sein und Zeit is the Heidegger tome. Is white the ether preceding creation of all matter? “The Whiteness of the Whale” is chapter 42 of Moby Dick. Dark energy posits the universe is loosing its luminescence due to the growing distance between bodies, but besides consciousness the biggest mystery of perception is white.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

also read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

Respectability

Is respectability only a social matter or condition? There are certain people held up as paragons of virtue  and historically others you warn your kid to stay away from—like the nasty old hermit at the end of the road. Virtue signaling is something that creates suspicion. Deeds are one way that people attain status, another is birth. On an individual level one achieves pride in one’s being, a feeling that derives from behavior in the world, ethics. There is a tradition of impudence carried on by those who rebel against norms. George Simenon and other infamous philanderers including Wilt Chamberlain who wore a fur covered in seals noses and boasted of having slept with a 1000 women create a topsy-turvy world in which what is bad is good. You get your stripes on the basis of how naughty you are. Utilitarians believe that the good is defined by what makes one happy. "All I'm asking for is a little respect when I come home," sings Otis Redding.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

also read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

One Battle After Another

The first thing one might remark seeing bizarre cast of revolutionaries and their right wing counter-revolutionary counterparts in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is how familiar they seem. The Battle of Algiers has a cameo but this is a new form, surreal cinema vérité. "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo Di Caprio) and "Jungle Pussy" (Shayana McHale) are part of French 75. "Colonel Lockjaw" (Sean Penn) is "reverse raped" by "Perfidia Beverly Hills" (Teyana Taylor). Then there is The Christmas Club, a proto Project 2025, composed of Steven Miller, Russell Voigt  Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon type characters. All of this may recall Dr. Strangelove, with "Jack D. Ripper" (Sterling Hayden), "Major King Kong" (Slim Pickens) and Peter Sellers in the title role. The movie navigates a fine line between drama and parody and is also inadvertently a parody of itself. Sean Penn will undoubtedly receive an Academy Award nomination for his tour de force performance. Similar to Strangelove, One Battle After Another, which is based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, is a tone poem as it switches from bizarre cartoons to photojournalistic realities. The cages in the migrant detention camps and the rioting in the streets are  all newsworthy. The director's brilliance lies in his enduring ability, in The Master, Phantom Thread and this current release, to create worlds that are and are not of this world.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Memory

Yom Kippur is a holiday of remembrance. Yizkor the first service is often attended by mourners—though by definition everyone is a mourner. "Kaddish," the prayer for the dead is a poem by Allen Ginsberg. The greatest work about memory A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was written by someone  whose mother was Jewish. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is the title of his autobiography.  Judaism is not alone. The Tibetan Book of the Dead influenced Gaspar Noe’s Into the Void in which the central consciousness is a dead soul. Dead Souls is the Gogol masterpiece. Then there is the architecture of death the necropolis and the practice of the mortician. Charon takes his passengers on their final voyage across the Lethe—the river of forgetfulness.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Tenacity

Tenacity is a labile quality. It’s invaluable if you're competing in a tournament, but it can easily turn you into a pariah. Social capital is a requirement for exercising what the Japanese call Bunraku or  non-quitting spirit. If you are not a desired commodity then you are a pest if you don’t skiddaddle. However like everything there is a graduated cylinder which tells you whether your glass is half full. A stranger who has something to offer may find their perseverance rewarded. Then there is lust, the lingua franca of all social intercourse. Sexual attraction exerts an almost gravitational pull as does charisma. Willfulness is required, but not in the perverse doses that can result in ostracism. 

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Anarchy

 

WB Yeats

Anarchism has replaced democracy, but it’s more mental condition than political philosophy, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the human form of mad cow. "Unitary Executive Theory" is a prime tenet of Federalism. The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Presidential Immunity. Why? The roots ultimately derive from the notions of monarchy and dynasticism—that Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Hume and Hobbes discountenanced. Hobbes in particular held that human appetite needs to be checked. The violation of the notion of "the emoluments clause" by the current administration is a just one example of unchecked balances.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy in The East Hampton Star

The Future

Burj Khalifa

The Porn Hub Tower is the tallest skyscraper in the world. Instead of a DUI, you get DEIs for diversity equity and inclusion. BTW it’s He or Her. No They or loitering! That’s the lady’s room, Bud. Which brings up the question of poets. They weren’t welcome in Plato’s Republic. Wallace Strvens was an insurance salesman. Flaubert counseled you should be “regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original in your work.” Writers of doggerel like Ogden Nash would get in under the wire. The banning and burning of books will adversely affect air quality in Red States. You won't have to bother to register to vote or vote--a definite lifestyle improvement. You won’t have to recycle, clean up after your dog or pay for abortions. The weak will no longer inherit the earth. With no inheritance tax, the rich will inherit everything.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" in The East Hampton Star

Ritual

Are you ritualistic? Is the routine of your varying activities a prayer? Do you feel as if you are the agent of a supernal force? Does it smack of compulsion to the extent that you can’t stop for fear of consequence?  It was work when every day was a newbie on which you had to lay your imprint. You live the life of a priest or nun without having taken your vows. There is no alter or sacrifice yet it’s as if you were under the aegis of something outside yourself. Do people try to get you to stop? To free yourself, to liberate yourself to become a free agent? Are they jealous because you have a calling? Is being footloose and having to constantly redefine yourself its own form of slavery. Yes you're weary of another day of the same but contemplate a life totally lacking in intention. The universe is cosmically indifferent and you're no more than a pea. Will you create the illusion of order or simply leave your part to fate?

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" in The East Hampton Star

Dread

Dreadnought

Dread is a specific form of fear. Futurity is the common denominator, but dread is more philosophic, more encompassing than day nervousness. Kierkegaard deals with comparable emotions in The Concept of Anxiety. You might say fear is site specific while its counterpart ultimately pertains to the shadow death casts upon the finitude of existence. Fear is assuaged  by contingency but anodynes for dread are little more than bandaids.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy in The East Hampton Star

Love Story

You strike a vein of gold, literally or metaphorically. Then blood flows out through the arteries, veins carry blood to the heart and arteries out. One speaks of major arteries from a thoroughfare. Curiously veins are never mentioned with respect to traffic though two other words are: viscosity and insisspation. "Es tut mir leid" means "I’m sorry" in German. Usually it’s too late. Remember the line from Love Story, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." You wish you never left or could resume life in a parallel universe either one minute before or after that fender bender or it’s one of those days when you wish there were gridlock statins.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy in The East Hampton Star

Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik!

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a common fallacy. Because something follows does not mean that it's caused by what precedes. CNN’s Sanjay Gupta invoked the "paradox of ubiquity" to refute the assertion that acetominophen causes autism. The piece of illogic in this paradox is actually beautiful--the idea being that there's such a plethora of examples that’s is impossible to create meaningful correlations. Don’t place your bet on the tortoise btw thinking of paradoxes. Then there is the Trolley Problem which is ethics. A conundrum which defeats the notion of necessity is however a lifeline in a platform (ie the world) filled with tendentious and ultimately falsely drawn conclusions.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

and also read the review of The Wormhole Society (graphic novel) in Booklife.

Power

You can see shooting  stars on a clear New England night. Humans have a built-in narcissism which is actually a highly useful defense mechanism. Were one to really assess their importance or significance, they would throw up their hands in despair. Agency—how much does one possess? Fate is determined by numerous actions that are usually out of the eyes or mind of the beholder. Yet there is a tendency to meddle against the odds. Will you be the exception? Will you be a prime mover, if only on a one-time basis? If you look up into the sky or contemplate grains of sand or blades of grass, you are humbled. Still all humans are gamblers. As the Power Ball number increases, you think what the hell. Maybe you’ll get lucky.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

and also read the review of The Wormhole Society (graphic novel) in Booklife.

Light Years

The universe is expanding. Dark energy is the force which expedites distance. Light years is an obsolescent descriptor. The nomenclature is disconcerting if I’m traveling to a Kepler planet 1200 light years from earth. In the course of the voyage the vessel is likely to lose traction—with the ensuing Sisyphean  effect of sliding backwards in the attempt to approach the distant object. The event horizon of the black hole is a different matter cosmologically (since the net effect is of gravity shrinking mass) but the net effect, of growing darkness, is the same. People enter sensory deprivation chambers and either emerge cleansed or rendered temporarily insane. The human needs the presence of other heavenly bodies to survive. 

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

and also read the review of The Wormhole Society (graphic novel) in Booklife.