Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino

lingerie, whose strong hints of unbridled fetishism will surely renovate the slightly faded glamour of ChiChi Van de Conte, justly notorious for his “Tiny Tits” swimsuits for serious dieters; although famed abstract painter Andy Warhol has been, by rag-trade consensus, “fucking worn out already,” his mythical Campbell and Brillo forms, seen through the immaculate eyes of Alameda de Las Pulgas, become brilliant motifs for her line of lushly tinted boxer shorts and T-shirts, which permit us to “like question the nature of art and talent anew,” and “ditto,” says Ms. de Las Pulgas, for famed abstract painter Pablo Picasso, and his masturbatory obsessions; and, finally, there is what can only be called the stone-bitchin’ hottest of the spring shoe stylings, the Guston Klunkers, as Sueda Vochsse, marketing director for Bruttafigura of Milano, has slyly dubbed them. “We’re virtually certain that these shoes, boldly based on forms first developed by famed abstract painter Philip Guston, will be the most sought-after fashion statement of the season. It’s quite humbling to realize that craftsmen bootmakers, like those at Bruttafigura, can make great, inspired art even greater and more inspired by means of vision and world-class craft and persistence and Old World devotion to excellence, all linked to a first-class marketing campaign and a few blow jobs in the right place and at the right time—only kidding!” The Klunkers will be suitable for walking, sitting around, and power napping, Ms. Vochsse notes.

SEA OF CLOUDS
    Black-light lamps, placed carefully around the room, and selected, as you surely know, with the sneer that passes for witty irony in this sophisticated time of the businessman-comedian-writer-host-actor, illuminate found objects—salutes to the gauche past—that clutter the place: Regrets and mercies, taxes and napalm, sex and marriage, installment plans and out-of-tune pianos and cauliflower, the end of the road, the end of the game, the end of the party, and four o’clock in the rainy morning; gravestones in Brooklyn, bitter-cold funerals, wet black trees, rubber soles in hospital corridors, oxygen tents; the sun on the beach and on that beach and on the other beach; the smell of clean hair, awed love, thighs and bathing suits, dumb lust; whatnots, snots and sneezes and coughs and dark-brown blood; c-rations, lustrous carbines smelling of gun oil, combat boots and smudged brass and the snap and whine of 0.50 caliber slugs overhead, canned fruit salad on the mashed potatoes; old photos, yellowed lace, a black mantilla, spatulas, cooking spoons, wood-handled forks, cast-iron skillets with black silken innards; cannoli, cassata, oil and garlic on the fusilli and a bright drift of parsley; gas refrigerators, wooden potato mashers, long dark hallways and musty hampers, leg of lamb, string beans, boiled potatoes, green mint green jelly green, a two-way stretch girdle and Evening in Paris; the sun on Sheepshead Bay; lanolin wild root brylcreem vitalis vaseline and torn underwear, smiling mouths, straw boaters, creamy vests, Packards, DeSotos, Hudsons, LaSalles, and flat packs of English Ovals; whiteness of Twenty Grands, Sweet Caporals, Wings, Herbert Tareytons, Virginia Rounds, not to mention heartbreak loneliness and despair; lies and self-pity, questions and sobs and wails and regrets and death; flowers, recriminations; priests in black and gold and crepuscular churches, candles and incense and the gleaming monstrance, censers and Jesus Christ Almighty and Sister Veronica; sweet perfume and sweat, sweet odor of thighs and breasts, of young women in flat straw hats and spring coats, of virginity; the wind come up off the Narrows, fish and salt, clean, remote, sound of buoys distant, and the bridge, a drawing in the haze and fog, and the barely recalled laughter of dead women. “Don’t see nothin’ too goddamn funny here.”

SEA OF COLD
    Death loves a mystery. Death can’t get started. Death