Antigone

How does one handle suffering? Numbness or rage are both symptoms of Grief. Antigone famously rages at Creon's refusal to allow her to bury her brother, Polyneices. You may have been praised for taking things well for complying and assuming that the losses, failures and disappointments you're experiencing are part of life. You can get used to almost anything, including, imprisonment, solitude, perhaps not death. If it's your demise, you won't have the luxury of the vote. One of the first casualties of mortality is expression. On D Day soldiers scaled the cliffs of Omaha beach. Such self-sacrifice is almost unimaginable within a universe where self-seeking is the lingua franca.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Closely Watched Trains

The Orient Express is a legendary train that has since become a curiosity and whim indulged in by wealthy esthetes like the late William F. Buckley who famously recounted his travels ("Buckley Aboard The Orient Express, NYT, 11/22/81). If only he could have carried his harpsichord on board! Apparently during the purges Stalin removed whole populations to far off regions in Uzbekestan like Tashkent, by train. Needless to say such trains exhibited no luxuries. Notoriously Hitler’s box cars transported Jews to their deaths. E.M Frimbo was the alter ego of Roger E.M. Whitaker, The New Yorker's famed train traveler. Then there’s of course Freud who likened free-association to the perception of passing reality through a train car window.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Punctuated Equilibrium

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)

In theory an enormous asteroid hit the earth precipitating the Ice Age which destroyed a reptilian civilization now preserved in the Museum of Natural History’s warren of dioramas. What exactly happened in the space of time in which pterodactyls became extinct? You see children’s animations of huge flying birds but there’s hardly ever a depiction of the evolutionary stages. Imagine Jared Diamond’s Collapse on a prehistoric level. Step back the next time you drive or fly into Gotham. It’s a surreal reticulated comic, requiring the kind of advanced graphics dependent on huge memory chips. Will Steven Jay Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium challenge Grand Theft Auto?

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Agnosia

Have you ever had the experience of not recognizing someone you knew long ago? And or of finding a once familiar face lost in flesh? You may have caught your own face reflected in a store window for a second, pausing at the sight of a stranger. You self-conception is at war with time. Capgras is a condition where the familiar facial receptacle is occupied by a stranger prosopagnosia is a complete loss of recognition. Chuck Close a portraitist, ironically, suffered from it. Don’t Google the face of that lost love who creates longing in your dreams. It’s gone forever.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

The Double

The rain forest is the epitome of life. In the winter flocks of geese fly south, along with the Monarchs who vacation in Mexico. The solitary soul exudes silence whose whisperings are the awakening from sleep. One is not to the exclusion of the other, since the mind starts to race when it's left to its own devices. Quietude begets is own discussions particularly with alter egos, dopplegangers and doubles. Dostoevsky's "The Double" is a famous short story in which the Titular Counselor Golyadkin, a genie pops out of the central character's inner life, a sidekick who grows to outdo and finally subjugate its master.  In "El otro," "the Other," Borges meets up with his younger self. "The Picture of Dorian Grey" presents a war between good and evil. There's no dearth of action where the local utility, imagination, is a work. It's one off the ways people survive in the absence of others. Prisoners and those who've become lost in darkness have lots of company.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Guilt

On a quotidian level consider a situation where you feel  obligated to show up for a friend or family member when you would rather be at the high ticket event.You may have promised yourself to stop with the guilt already but failed again. Then you find out the party was a bust. No one showed up and those who did were the were the usual hangers on, who come for the free food and drinks. You didn’t miss a thing and your family were happy to see you!

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Hyperion

Dan Simmons' science fiction novel Hyperion about a group of space pilgrims is a homage to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Though the setting is different and more static—that of a group of nobles recusing themselves from the plague—Boccaccio’s Decameron is a similar idea. "Old wine in new bottles," is the analogy Strindberg uses in the preface to Miss Julie. In 10,000 years an earthling might engage in a quotidian activity albeit with a host of other forces at work. Chaucer’s would not have been able to envision a large metal bird (e.g. an Airbus 320) flying above his Pardoner. Baby boomers did not envision the internet anymore than Gen X did AI. What will be next?

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

One Two Three...Infinity

10 minutes feels an hour until you become numb from the cold. Sprinters traffic in seconds and milliseconds. If a paramecium possessed consciousness it would recognize time in nanoseconds. Time is the question itself in the universe of subatomic particles. Quantum entanglement allows a particle to be in two places at the same time. The enormous magnets of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva are capable of colliding particles at such a speed as to produce bosons, the materiel out if which all matter was created at the time of the Big Bang, 12.9 billion years ago. The light year a product of cosmology enables scientist to represent increasingly immense quantities of space/time. Kepler planets which spectrum analysis has shown to contain carbon are 1200 light years from earth. Due to "dark energy," the universe is continually expanding and in turn becoming more and more devoid of light as objects are separated from each other.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

Raising Hell

Botticelli "The Map of Hell"

How to raise hell in hell? Hell is other people is the famed Sartre quote from No Exit. So you don't have to go any further than your the local diner where you have possibly gathered with friends as a break from holiday shopping, a hell all unto itself. Dante conjured 9 circles of hell, each with its own crimes and punishments. So you are not likely to run out of destinations. Just sin and your transgression will be sent on the way to its own fiery punishment. Maybe you just want to have a no strings attached good time, Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck.” Maybe you’d like to inhabit an episode of “Sex and the City.” Do you want to produce or revive pleasure? Maybe it’s a combination of both! Here you can both exorcise your demons “having a good time” while literally raising yourself up from your neighborhood underworld.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

Embarrassment Redux

Embarrassment is not a malady or syndrome. It's an existential condition. Nearly everyone has had one of those dreams where you’re caught with your pants down either literally or metaphorically. In dream life it tends to be fairly literal eg you realize after it’s too late that you have only your underwear on at an oneiric social gathering. On a more global level, there's the subset of people who suffer from chronic embarrassment over their misspent lives. They’re fuck-ups. Shrinks more benignly allude to maladaptive behavior. You may know somebody like this. Maybe you’re one. Shame. You live in a state of pre-snubual bliss in your attempts to avoid those humiliating social situations in which someone may ask you what you do. Even worse, however, is indifference. You may find yourself lingering and trying to figure out what to do with your hands. The advent of devices like cellphones and androids has been a help since it makes you look too busy to be aware of the sniveling condescension of your “peers.” Shame can be a delicious vigorish to sexuality, but that's a subject for another day.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

Regret

Regret is a form of time travel. If only you hadn’t decided to go to the gym that day you would never have met up with the lover or friend who has become such a bane--or had that fender bender in the parking lot. In fact, the expression "accident waiting to happen" expresses the notion of predestination, another way it’s put: everything is as it’s supposed to be of it would be different. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism monetizes the aphorism. One’s class is therefore legitimized as a divine calling. You may marry your mother or father first time around, but what follows might as well as well be a factory part. Free will has little to do with what you do or who you choose to do it with.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

Physical Control of the Mind

Tom Wolfe citing neurophysiologist Jose Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind in I Am Charlotte Simmons:  "His position was that the human mind, as we conceive it--and I think all of us do--bears very little resemblance to reality."  Delgado btw worked with an invention called the Stimoceiver, a brain wave stimulator attached to an EEG. Seance or sayance? From The Ants by Bert Holdabler and Edward O. Wilson: "Ants are everywhere, but only occasionally noticed. They run much of the terrestrial world as the premier soil turners, channelers of energy, dominatrices of the insect fauna--yet receive only passing  mention in textbooks on ecology. They employ the most complex forms of chemical communication of any animals and their social organization provides an illuminating contrast to that of human beings, but not one biologist in a hundred can describe the life cycle of any species."

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

Vanity

Shelley’s “Ozymandius” is the playlist for this marching band. There’s comfort in the notion of living as vanity. Once you're born you begin to die. Are you guilty of comparing and despairing? Do you compare your insides to other people's  outsides—even when that someone is no longer here? Parenthetically you may have wished to get the last word in, to get a reprieve which will allow you to ask or tell over the river of eternity, with its mythic rower, Charon. Today you wake up and feel almost relieved at the fall of an idol, but who knows? Tomorrow's another day.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

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

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Do you find yourself spinning like dervish or top? How nice it would be if one could harness that centrifugal force. Imagine confusion and sensory overload as an enormous implacable turbine, a satellite generator in some back road, emitting its persistent hum. You enter reality at Times Square. Someone points you to that tunnel leading to the A . You think "great," until you begin to realize you’re not going to get there so fast. You stare at your phone suddenly realizing you didn’t allow  enough time  No sense turning back, but the platform is three deep and it had already started to rain when you ducked into the subway. You’ll never get a cab. To make matters worse, it just happens to be one of those meetings. They can do without you but you’d rather make your presence felt. Now make a paradigm shift. You’re a subatomic particle pulled by the huge magnets of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, on your way to becoming a boson whose fleeting existence will appear as a scratch. Movement creates kinetic energy is another way to look at it. You’re a fart, punching your way out of a paper bag and beginning to love it.

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

Touchez pas aux grisbi

Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) which was recently revived at Film Forum is a gangster film--Tarantino reincarnated as a French director of the 50s. There are a succession of locations all either cafes, offices or bedrooms where gangsters hangout. The café has horrible dancing girls who wear pasties. Jean Gabin is Max, the lead gangster who is looking to have his uncle fence 50 million francs in gold bars. Rene Dary as Ricot is his pal. Jeanne Moreau plays Josy, the dancer who is leaving Riton. Above all the dancing girls are shots of other dancing girls in a state of undress, leading up to the Ricot's solemn deathbed scene in which there's full frontal nudity.Nothing really happens. One of the funniest scenes has Ricot and Max getting ready to go to bed, putting on their pajamas and brushing their teeth, with Ricot examining his chicken neck. One other element is the profusion of point of view shots, many of one group of gangsters or another driving and others of typically French winding staircases with an elevator rising to the top floor apartment of the local moll. The real source of the comedy is ultimately the fact that very little transpires. Waiting for Godot in French is En Attendant Godot. Touchez’s humor comes from turning its action genre on its head. What do gangsters do in between heists? 

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

Village of Mind, Inhabitants 1

There are streets, avenues, cul de sacs even little gardens that populate the neurogenic pathways of the brain, Memories are the signposts. You arrive and depart from villages of sentiment. The self is established at the moment which is clearly marked. As brainy as you think you are, mind the speed limits when you come into town and the warnings not to loiter or expectorate. You will surely pay if you are guilty! Dreams are your secret life, full of infidelities amongst the transgressions the imagination conjures. 

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

Stoicism

The stoics Zeno and Epictetus had it right. Going nowhere fast is a good description of existence. So what’s with all the drag racing and the hair’s breadth weaving in and out of traffic on the LIE. LIE is the perfect acronym for Robert Moses’ masterwork which often looks more like a parking lot than a highway. How to undertake any endeavor amidst the seeming changeless of a world populated by the same fast food chains and cankerous strip malls? The tortoise in the famed parable has the right idea but in fact Achilles will literally win. The paradox of Zeno’s paradox is that it’s untrue. Death is another matter. Heidegger argued only those who were aware of death led an authentic existence. Of course, if you’re too aware of it, you give up. It’s like a seesaw. Realizing death lurks you have to choose 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

Hans Brinker

In Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates a boy puts his finger in the dike to prevent a flood. The tale is often used to illustrate the notion of trouble shooting problems before they get out of control. It also describes obsessive compulsive disorder. In this case the paradigm moves from management consulting to fantasy. Mumschsusen Syndrome by Proxy is a disorder whereby a parent treats a non-existing medical condition in a child. Prolepsis is when one answers a question that has yet to be asked  Anxiety is the common  denominator of all these pathologies. Are you someone who can’t get out if the house for fear it’s going to explode? Checkers posit a Groundhog Day of catastrophic thinking. It’s also comforting to have a reason for being and purpose, in this case getting the world under control.

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

Fatwa

It’s been a banner year for book burning with To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved and Huckleberry Finn removed from the shelves. Salman Rushdie made the point on Fareed Zakaria's GPS. The famed author who was the subject of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses (1988) and who appeared on Fareed Zaharia’s GPS  with a dark lens covering his stabbed eye is, however, an equal opportunity employer “I disapprove of what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it," Zakaria and Rushie both said, quoting Voltaire, in chorus. To wit at the height of the #MeToo movement censorship and blacklisting were rampant. Big Brother is watching whether you’re looking right or left.

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

Jay Kelly

The peculiar thing about Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly is that it’s an interesting film about which there is little to say —and it’s not because it’s derivative of 8½. George Clooney plays an actor on the way to receiving a tribute for 35 years. It's as if Fellini were playing himself. In another regard the film also recalls Wild Strawberries where the old professor relives all his mistakes and lost lives on the way to an apotheosis. The central conceit here is "the price of everything" to borrow the title of a famous documentary about the monetization of art. The price Jay pays is directly proportional to the degree to which he is willing to forswear his relationships in the service of his Faustian ambition. He's singlehanded in going after what he wants and once he gets it, he only wants more. This is epitomized by the very first take of the movie, where Clooney is on set and he asks the director if they can do the scene once again. Well it's disingenuous to say there's nothing to say. Perhaps it’s better to say it feels like there is nothing to say. Clooney's performance is a tour de force, as is that of Adam Sandler, the Chaplinesque manager who also gives up his life, in this case not for his own art, but in the service of his client's.

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

Dick Cheney

Al Gore, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris were all in prominent attendance at Dick Cheney’s funeral Though in a Protestant Church,  it was a truly Catholic event. In a divided country where assassination threats are freely bandied about, it was a validation of the democratic project. Still the assembled mourners represented the old elite that Retrumplicans have sought to destroy in favor of something far more onerous, despotism. Only an autocrat can challenge an aristocracy! Class is the enemy of the populist. It’s no wonder Trump went after Harvard. The funeral was not only a swan song for the former Vice President, it was a challenge to everything Trump stands for. If one were a Mamdani supporter, the service might occasion conflicting emotions. Liz Cheney was a prominent member of the January 6 Committee. But remember her father was associated with Hallibuton. With Pete Hegseth heading the Pentagon, the old military industrial complex can seem appealing until you remember the CIA brought down Mossedegh and Allende and was ultimately responsible for the Shah and Pinochet. Edit note: you may have been alienated from the world of fly fishing, football and 4x4s, but you start to appreciate Americana when the President of the country is issuing bitcoins while putting out the red carpet for a murderer. You may hate military industrial complex, but it starts to look only malign in the world of Palantir.

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

Who Are "the American People?"

From Nabokov's Speak, Memory:"My mothers grandfather, who being afraid of fires, had the staircase fashioned of iron, so that when the house did get burned to the ground, sometime after the Soviet revolution, those fine wrought steps, with the sky shining through their openwork risers, remained standing, all alone but still leading up." But getting back to present reality, "the American people" is a much bandied about phrase on the part of both parties. Everyone wants the best for "the American people," but there's no consensus on how to get there. In the meanwhile just "people" are getting threatened with assassination. Senator Fetterman, a Democrat, thinks the radical left is even more culpable in this area than the right.  Where would you rather be? America in 2025, before the fall of Trump? Or Russia l905. Having experienced one failed revolution, Lenin had yet to travel To the Finland Station.

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

Emoluments!!!!!!

former Trump International, Washington D.C.

 “ Emoluments!” The word echoes as it falls into the event horizon of a black hole created by the supernova, Democracy.  The cute sounding MBS (crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman) actually has something in common with Elon Musk besides wealth. They are both fascinated with chain saws. He’s also invested $2B in Jared Kushner’s Affinity Fund. Trump, for his part, wants to build towers in Riyadh and Jiddah. There was a piece in The Times about the plight of the stateless illegitimate children of Kenyan domestics raped by their Saudi employers. But that’s not more likely to be on the agenda than the dismembering of Adnan Khashoggi. BTW if you get lost in Istanbul don’t go into the Saudi consulate unless you want to be road kill. F-35s and the Abraham accords are purportedly on the agenda along with the blood red carpet welcome!

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 Forbidden City

Imagine the palatial halls through which Kim Jong-un walks. Probably no American has penetrated the inner sanctum more than Dennis Rodman, piercings and all. Though Kim and Trump developed an epistolary relationship (right out of a Samuel Richardson novel), they always met on neutral ground. The palaces of other contemporary tyrants, Putin, MBS (sounds perilously close to AOC no?) and Xi Jinping in Zhongnanhai which is adjacent to the Forbidden City—would be fodder for a latter day Borges. Democracy is inversely proportional to exclusivity. If you’ve ever stayed at luxurious redoubts such as the Hotel du Cap or the Connaught for which letters of introduction can be required, you understand what rarefied means. In academia think of the crypt comprising Skull and Bones at Yale, only there’s no graduation beyond the Tomb of Hotshepsut.

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"

Houyhnhnms and Yahoos

photo: Gage Skidmore

Rain, reign and rein are homonyms. Egregious and blatant are synonyms. If you're looking for an oxymoron, antonyms often qualify. Reverse Midas touch is an oxymoronic use of antonyms. "Good bad" is one. "Pretty funny," "seriously funny" and "awfully good" are examples. The White House for the presidency, however seriously compromised the structure might be by the destruction of the East Wing, is an example of another figure of speech, metonymy, in which you use an associated thing. Synecdoche, the part for the whole, is exemplified by an expression like "all hands on deck."  Let peace "rain" is a poetic use of the homonym which, by the way, has nothing to do with Gulliver's rational Houyhynhyms or their bombastic all too humanYahoos. What about a race of words? Have you ever been in a room with someone whose nonstop talking has obviously been devised to stop them from having to listen to their thoughts?

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"

Speak, Memory

This from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory “His was the kind of colorful neurosis that should have been accompanied by genius but in his case was not, hence the search for a traveling shadow.” One could identify the subject of the observation. However it’s actually more fun to take it out of context to the extent it reveals more about the writer than one of the many specimens in the butterfly collection that he began when he was six. The memoir famously begins: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." And this on his mother's quest for mushrooms. "Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules. Thus, no agarics were taken; all she picked were edible specimens of the genus Boletus (tawny edulis, brown scaber, red aurantiacus and a few close allies), called 'tube mushrooms' by some and coldly defined by mycologists as 'terrestrial, fleshy, putrescent, center stipitate fungi.'" 

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 Degeneracy

Orwell’s "newspeak" is now teleportation. Do you dare ask for ICE or ask for scotch “on the rocks” or even for a few cubes? Don’t be surprised if ICE CUBE the legendary rapper changes their brand. Those who reassure you things will pass forget the depredations of the #Me Too era when the then editor of TNYRB was dismissed for allowing a #MeToo’d Canadian journalist to write a mea culpa. The Degeneracy aka Degenerintocracy is following the Gerontocracy, the Theocracy, the Plutocracy, the recent Kleptocracy of Trump-dumb and the generalized movement of cellular organisms to autocratic rule. Do you feel like Winston Smith seeking a sanctum sanctorum amidst the crushing juggernaut of deafening crypto-current noise pollution (Mar-A-Lago raining bitcoins)?

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 Temptation to Exist

 

Emil Cioran

I and Thou (Ich und du, Either/Or)—what about a philosophical tome Same Different? One wants everything to be the same, to get up, go to work, come home to find the world intact. On the other hand, boredom and the unchanging mess of life are a problem for Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s character even resulted in the coining of a word, Bovarysm. The romantic agony is predicated on the desire for transcendence.  Yet the waves continue to come. There is a hypnotic and reassuring peace in their infinity. They precede and are left for posterity,  without the need for a subjective observer. You read about lives populated with events, the heartthrob with all the lovers. Thrilling existences have an allure, but the free soloist is deprived of serenity. Adrenalin ironically is the antidote for priapism. Anxiety and lovemaking are estranged bedfellows.

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"

Fantasy

 

What is your dirty fantasy? Pornography is a "daydream" according to Robert J. Stoller author of Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred. No matter how much of an exhibitionist, no matter how liberated you are there are certain kinks (do they qualify as "desires?") you won't reveal anyone. Shame is in fact what fuels the arousal. Liberation on other hand is lame. You do the deed, but there is no after party, nothing to butt ones head against. When you transgress, you cross a line. It’s like having a record or rap sheet. Once a pickle no longer a cucumber. Samizdat made poetry precious and desirable.  Caveat emptor. So what is your forbidden thought? What do you try to push down and repress—for fear of being labeled and ostracized? There is a delicious adrenaline rush at the prospect of being caught—but, in your case, doing what?

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