King Kaufman's Sports Daily - All Salon

Boom. Baseball's latest steroid bombshell means we might know more soon. And that's about all. Plus: Warriors go up 3-1 on Mavs.

A former New York Mets batboy and clubhouse attendant named Kirk Radomski may have become one of the most important figures in baseball history April 27 when he pleaded guilty to distributing illegal drugs to major league players from the time he left the Mets’ employ in 1995 to the day federal investigators raided his Long Island, N.Y., house in 2005.

Radomski, 37, is naming names and must now cooperate with baseball’s internal investigation into illegal drug use. It’s possible that in the not-distant future, the relatively few steroid revelations so far are going to look like the calm before the storm.

And if Radomski is the only former or current clubhouse kid who was using his vast network of millionaire athlete contacts to run a performance-enhancing-drug ring, then baseball clubhouse kids are the most unambitious, unimaginative group in the history of forever.

Or the most honest and law-abiding.

What the storm will accomplish is anybody’s guess. Ridding baseball of its drug problem is almost certainly not among the possibilities, but the more we know about any problem the better, and Radomski could lead to a whole lot of knowledge.

Radomski, who pleaded guilty to one count each of distribution of a controlled substance and money laundering in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, began cooperating with agents immediately upon the December 2005 raid, and as part of his agreement will continue to cooperate with law enforcement and with former Sen. George Mitchell, who is conducting a toothless internal investigation into drug use in baseball.

Mitchell has no subpoena power, and thus no power, but at least now he has Radomski, who can give him the names of some guys who will continue to refuse to talk to him.

Radomski became a gym trainer after leaving the Mets. He admitted to having sold steroids, human growth hormone and amphetamines to “dozens of current and former Major League Baseball players and associates [on teams throughout Major League Baseball] and their associates,” according to the plea. He could face a long prison term.

Though Radomski isn’t connected with the BALCO case, he was nabbed by the same investigation. IRS agent Jeff Novitzky turned his attention to Radomski after the raid on pitcher Jason Grimsley’s house in 2005. Novitzky had heard about Radomski from the FBI, which had learned of him from an informant, according to a story by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle, the reporters who broke the BALCO story and wrote the book “Game of Shadows.”

Players union officials reportedly spent the weekend calling current and former players, warning them that Radomski might have sung or might still sing their names. A number of names were redacted from a search warrant in the case. The warrant quotes an informant as saying Radomski became a PED go-to guy in the wake of BALCO, that he “took over after the BALCO Laboratories individuals were taken down” in 2003.

And here we all thought BALCO scared everybody straight.

Actually, we didn’t think that. What I thought is that BALCO provided inspiration and an open playing field for BALCO’s successor as the maker and supplier of secret designer performance enhancers that investigators don’t even know exist, never mind have a test for.

That may have been the case, and that lab might be doing a land-office business even as you slack from your job and read this.

Then again, maybe I underestimated the stupidity of baseball’s criminal element. Among the key evidence reportedly seized by agents in the raid on Radomski: Evidence of personal checks from major league players to Radomski in amounts ranging from $200 to $3,500, written between 2003 and 2005.

Checks? These guys are buying drugs with checks? A group of people with an average income of more than $2.6 million a year and a minimum wage of more than $300,000, and, with that livelihood potentially on the line, they’re writing personal checks to their drug dealers?

I’ve got to stop watching TV. The bad guys are always so smart. It’s a fantasy.

We like to tell ourselves when these big breaks happen in the war on drugs that we’ve gotten closer to eliminating the problem, cleaning things up. I’ve been watching cops pose for the news cameras with massive caches of seized dope since I was a little boy, and all I ever hear about our country’s drug problem is that it’s still a problem.

What really happens in these big busts is we learn some things. It’s possible that the Radomski plea will eventually lead to us knowing the names of a whole bunch of big-league players who bought drugs from this one dealer.

OK, more light. That might change the way we think about, say, Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire. If they look less like outlaws and more like a couple of guys operating well within the mainstream of their business, perhaps all of us — me included — will go a little easier on them, take the pariah label off. Maybe not.

In the meantime I’ll be over here shaking my head. They wrote checks!

Every time I hear something about the bad guys, in this and many other criminal cases, it’s jarring to me how stupid they are. And yet they’re mostly ahead of the cops. The cops aren’t necessarily stupid. They’re just waving brooms at the tide.

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Warriors go up 3-1 on Mavs [PERMALINK]

Still not ready to jump on that Golden State Warriors bandwagon, even as the W’s have played terrific, exciting basketball to take a 3-1 lead over the Dallas Mavericks, who seem determined to hand over the series.

The Warriors won a barnburner in Oakland April 29, 103-99. In the other playoff games Sunday, the Chicago Bulls completed their sweep of the champion Miami Heat, and the Phoenix Suns and New Jersey Nets each took 3-1 leads with routs, over the Los Angeles Lakers and Toronto Raptors, respectively.

The Mavs continue to refuse to play an inside game to take advantage of their size, and the Warriors continue to make them pay and pay. It’s great. It has turned what should have been an easy first-round win for the top seed into a thrilling upset in the making. Dallas has to win three in a row, which frankly doesn’t look possible, never mind likely.

If the Warriors win one more, they’ll become the third No. 8 seed in NBA history to knock off a No. 1. In 48 tries. And they’re doing it with about the most entertaining brand of basketball around.

In that now-likely event, the Mavs will have to go home and think about the fact that while you don’t need much inside presence to win big in the 82-game NBA preseason, when the real season starts in April, you need it big.

Every team doesn’t need a Shaquille O’Neal or Tim Duncan, though of course having a Shaquille O’Neal or Tim Duncan is very helpful indeed. But if DeSagana Diop weren’t the loneliest man in America every time he stood on painted hardwood in Mavericks pajamas, the Mavericks would be a lot closer to winning a title.

It would also help if Dirk Nowitzki, great as he is, were the No. 2 guy, the Scottie Pippen. He’s gotten tougher during his career and played grittier, more playoff-friendly basketball at times, especially during last year’s run to the Finals. But he’ll always be Dirk Nowitzki. When the money’s in the pot, he’s jacking up a jumper. He’s great. But he’s not That Guy.

If he were, the Mavs would be up 3-1 now, and we’d all be talking about how Nowitzki has been dominating in the paint. He’s good enough to have done that. He’s never going to.

What’s next for the Warriors if they win? Probably losing to Utah or Houston. Styles make fights.

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Charles Barkley line of the night [PERMALINK]

An occasional feature.

On seeing a shot of Jessica Alba in the stands before the Warriors-Mavericks game in Oakland, Sir Charles interrupted what he was already saying and blurted out: “Is that Jessica Alba? Oh my God. Golden State’s got good-looking celebrity fans now? What the hell is the world coming to?”

I know the feeling. I had it last year about the Los Angeles Clippers.

Later, with TNT host Ernie Johnson trying to defend the Bay Area from Barkley’s constant dissing, came this exchange:

Johnson: How do you feel about Sausalito?
Barkley: Ohio?
Johnson: Sausalito, California. Right over across the —
Barkley: [Dismissive] I never been to Sausalito.
Johnson: It’s beautiful, right over across the Golden Gate.
Barkley: They got a team over there?
Johnson: Oh, my.
Barkley: What were you doing in Sausalito anyway, Ernie?
Johnson: I was on vacation a few years ago. My wife and I were out there. Beautiful place.
Barkley: You know, most people go to vacation to islands and foreign countries. Who ever says, “Hey, let’s go to Sausalito”?
Johnson: Believe me. You don’t know what you’re missing.
Barkley: Cheap. You’re just cheap, Ernie. Just admit it.
Johnson: Oh, Charles.
Barkley: [Incredulous, laughing] You took your wife to Sausalito?
Johnson: We were in San Francisco, went to Sausalito. Beautiful.
Barkley: Are you kiddin’ me?
Johnson: Yeah. I’m not kiddin’ ya.
Kenny Smith: He’s not kiddin’.
Johnson: Not kiddin’.
Barkley: Cheap.

Comedy gold. Love Kenny Smith in the Bill Daily role.

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The CNN host speaks on the "frightening" Iranian threat in ways that have to be seen to be believed

VIDEO

By Glenn Greenwald

I’m finishing up a long investigative article that will be posted later this morning, but I just could not let go unnoted this commentary on The Iranian Threat by CNN’s Erin Burnett (“frightening,” she observed). I barely know what to say about it — the critiques of media fear-mongering I wrote the last two days apply in spades to this — but it really just mocks itself. It’s the sort of thing you would produce if you set out to create a mean-spirited parody of mindless, war-hungry, fear-mongering media stars, but you wouldn’t dare go this far because you’d want the parody to have a feel of realism to it, and this would be way too extreme to be believable. She really hauled it all out: WMDs! Terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. controlled by Tehran! Iran’s long-range nuclear missiles reaching our homeland!!!! She almost made the anti-Muslim war-mongering fanatic she brought on to interview, Rep. Peter King, appear sober and reasonable by comparison.

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald

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Two Parsons professors discuss their best students' work and their favorite classic color theorists

By Jude Stewart, Imprint

Bezold Effect study (Credit: Liz Marshall)

Topics:Imprint, Design

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Welcome back to an ongoing, freewheeling conversation on color with Thomas Bosket and Langdon Graves, who both teach color theory at Parsons the New School for Design. (Read part 1 to catch up.)

Do you have any knockout students in your color theory classes right now?

Thomas Bosket: I haven’t taught color this past year, so here are some students from previous years: one work by Liz Marshall exhibited the Bezold effect and the economic use of color. [Ed note: the Bezold effect is an optical illusion in which two colors, juxtaposed in small doses, distort the impression of each color’s shade, just by proximity to another hue.] The other, by Stephanie Luk, offers a redesign of Parsons’ very narrow hallways.

Bezold Effect study by Liz Marshall

Colour of Space assignment for Parsons’ narrow hallways, by Stephanie Luk

Langdon Graves: I had a terrific class last fall because of how dedicated the students were. Early each semester, I assign a Creative Color Chart — a spin on the traditional color wheel — for which the students create their own progressive designs featuring 12 hues, tints and shades. One student, Christine Gurtler, designed a chart inspired by the grid of a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan:

That’s all acrylic paint and paper. Obviously, she went beyond 12.

Two semesters ago I gave the assignment to design an infographic to represent a personal experience, using color in a significant way. A student named Vaishnavi Mahendran charted the progression of her taste in music and fashion from childhood to adulthood, assigning an increasingly darker, more sophisticated hue of pink to each phase of her life (interrupted by an amusing black/metal phase). It’s such a clever and attractive design, I love sharing it:

Detail from infographic by Vaishnavi Mahendran

Lightning-round: Whom would you rather have as a roomie on a desert island, Josef Albers or Johannes Itten? [Note: both men are Bauhaus artists noted for their contributions to “classic” color theory.]

From Homage to the Square color-interaction series, by Josef Albers

TB: Itten. He was trying to understand color and contextualize it. Albers feels too esoteric (in an uninteresting and exclusive manner — we have history, Albers and I … grad school!) and his work has been turned into “rules,” no fault of his, but I could just see hours and hours of argument about the color of the sunsets.

Horizontal Vertical, by Johannes Itten

LG: I know I should say Itten because he was such a master and without him, we certainly wouldn’t have as much to learn from Albers. But I think I would choose Albers because of how much he attributed his appreciation for color to his experiences with his students.

This is how I continue to learn about color, myself: by interacting with other people and learning as much from them as they do from me. I also like the thought of sitting around on a desert island with Albers, creating simultaneous contrast collages of found mango leaves.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

: More Jude Stewart

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She used to find it hard to climax, but suddenly, inexplicably, it became quick and easy. What happened?

By Tracy Clark-Flory

(Credit: iStockphoto/pascalgenest)

Topics:Salon -- After Dark, Am I Normal?

For the longest time, I found it really difficult to orgasm. Even with the most sensitive partner, it would often take a long while, if at all. I would often resort to faking it because I was taking too long. Even while masturbating, it sometimes took me up to an hour, despite being really turned on.

Then I started seeing someone new, stopped faking orgasms and tried to worry less. I started coming, and it became easier and more reliable. Now it happens every time, sometimes multiple times. While masturbating, I can orgasm within seconds, which was never, ever possible before. What’s going on here?

“I wish I knew.” That’s Barry Komisaruk’s matter-of-fact answer, and he’s the leading expert on the science behind the female orgasm.

His lab at Rutgers University was the first to produce a video of the brain during climax in women — just last November. “We’re in the embryonic stage of understanding,” he says. “It’s not even in its infancy.” That’s in large part because it’s tremendously difficult to get funding for sex research — but that’s a story for another day (and you can bet I will be telling it someday soon).

Komisaruk, whom I’ve interviewed before, and his team have made huge strides, but still, he says nobody fully understands the mechanism at work here. Just to give a sense of the range of scenarios, Komisaruk explains, “What about people who used to have orgasms but now they’re on antidepressants or antipsychotics and they no longer can have orgasms? The blockage could occur in a part of the brain that’s different from people who, say, have had a traumatic psychological event like sexual abuse and no longer can have an orgasm.” There is no one thing that makes it difficult, or impossible, for women to orgasm.

It’s not unusual for a new partner to come with a change in your orgasmic experience. Recently, a woman who had never orgasmed called Komisaruk and volunteered to do a brain scan for his research. “I set it up and then a couple days before the scan was scheduled, she called me up and said she just got a new boyfriend and she had her first orgasm,” he says. “So, bummer — for me, not for her!”

What’s most interesting in your case, is that your experience of orgasm even during masturbation changed profoundly and, it sounds like, without a dramatic adjustment in technique. “It seems like it’s more of a psychological factor,” he says. “If somebody can suddenly start having orgasms, there could be attitudinal changes. It seems more likely that it would be an attitudinal change rather than a physiological change.” There’s also the annoying irony of getting what you want when you stop trying.

An important part of what’s going on here is that by no longer preempting your orgasm with fakes one, you were able to begin experiencing legitimate climaxes with your partner. I asked Komisaruk if it’s possible that you experienced a snowball effect: The more orgasms you had, the easier it became to come in the first place. In my supreme scientific in-expertise, I suggested: Maybe she, like, burnt new neural pathways? He responded: “We don’t really know; it’s possible.”

You see, there are many possible explanations. What’s important is that you’ve got ahold of your orgasm. Enjoy it, treat it well and don’t let it go!

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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Pick of the week: Inside the creepy groupthink of the Russian president's proto-fascist youth movement

By Andrew O'Hehir

Topics:Our Picks, Our Picks: Movies, Documentaries, Russia

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president turned prime minister (turned president again, probably) likes to say that his country has developed a “special democracy” or “sovereign democracy” in the 21st century. As an opposition politician observes in Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s film “Putin’s Kiss,” that’s a little like a store owner claiming to sell somewhat fresh fish. It either is or it isn’t, and Russia’s version of democracy doesn’t pass the smell test. (Please note, foreign readers, that I’m not holding my own country’s political system up as some shining example. But it’s still true that I can write what I want to about Obama or Romney or anybody else without being beaten half to death.)

For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

: More Andrew O'Hehir

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The final installment delves into the psyche of a troubled, alcohol protagonist after his mother's death

By Katherine A. Powers, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Fiction, Books

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

The first thing you will want to know about “At Last,” the final volume in Edward St. Aubyn’s five-novel cycle starring Patrick Melrose, is that, yes, you really do have to read the preceding four if you want to appreciate it fully. The second is that if reading about wealthy, conceited, selfish, dissipated, cruel, monstrously awful people is not for you, then, alas, neither are these novels. The third is that the books are brilliant. They are also highly idiosyncratic: Each installment is both a comedy of manners and a wrenching psychological investigation; each oscillates between satire and tragedy, and all are written with flash and brio, ornamented by inspired simile, and spangled with mordant, Wildean wit.

The first four novels have just been published in one paperback volume, beginning with “Never Mind,” a title of apt and dismal pathos. Here we meet Patrick Melrose, five years old and living in a château in Provence with his parents. His alcoholic, drug-befuddled mother, Eleanor, is an American heiress to some part of a dry-cleaning fortune, and it was that attribute that had captivated Patrick’s sadistic English father, David. Trained as a doctor, he abandoned his practice upon marriage — though, we are told, “there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.”

The novel takes place over one terrible day and night, during which — and I must reveal this, as it is pivotal to the entire series — Patrick is raped by his father. While it is happening, the boy manages to disassociate himself from the event, seeing himself perched above the scene, mentally escaping his body. This split — between being there and not being there, between immediacy of experience and fending it off — bedevils Patrick from then on in every area of existence. That breach and his efforts to repair or at least bridge it, through drugs, alcohol, sex and tormented self-examination, make up the cycle’s shattering theme.

As for Patrick’s mother, Eleanor: she is unmindful of everything but pills and booze, charitable causes, and the sure prospect that her husband will humiliate her, publicly if possible, at every opportunity. Absent from home the morning Patrick was attacked and oblivious to it, she later pauses, while writing a check to the Save the Children Fund, to consider Patrick’s subdued demeanor, marveling “at how well her son had turned out. Perhaps people were just born one way or another and the main thing was not to interfere too much.” Patrick’s fear and confusion, Eleanor’s obtuseness and self-involvement, and David’s viciousness and “nimbus of insanity” provide the atmosphere amid which a dinner party is staged. The guests, characters we will meet again in following volumes, introduce us to the first principle of the decadent British upper caste: Nothing is so insufferable as a bore.

In this view, or, rather, under this obsession, a bore is a person who is genuinely tedious — and there are some terrifically funny representatives of that species in these novels — but a bore is also a person who cares about things. The surest defense against being branded a bore is to avoid the appearance of sincerity or compassion and to display a certain outrageousness. As David contemplates his violation of his son at this novel’s conclusion, he reflects, “He must try not to do it again, that really would be tempting fate. David could not help smiling at his own audacity.”

“Bad News,” the second novel, is not exactly a breath of fresh air. Patrick is now 22 and a heroin addict (with a sideline in Quaaludes, amphetamines, cocaine, and alcohol). He is in New York, having received news that his father has died there. Eleanor, now divorced from her tormenter and even more devoted to charitable works, is not on the scene. Patrick has to deal with the body’s cremation and, more pressingly, with replenishing his drug supply. He is a mess: needle-scarred and bruised, his psyche a tangle of anxiety, hatred and self-loathing. The pain is excruciating, the comedy ghoulish: Storming down the street carrying his father’s ashes, he realizes that “it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit, or insulted.”

“Some Hope” brings us Patrick at 30, his past lying “before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.” He lives in London, free of drugs and drink but more than ever engaged in an interior battle with the demons of the past: with his father, and, to an extent, with his mother, who, for all her ceaseless do-gooding, failed to protect her own son. The novel was meant to complete an intended trilogy, and it does end with Patrick finding a certain amount of peace — and some hope. Aside from that, it is enormously funny, the story organized around an elaborate, snob-infested country house party, a scene of social striving and mortification — the guests, among them Princess Margaret, are described with glorious malice.

With “Mother’s Milk,” Patrick Melrose breaks free of the trilogy and emerges as a married man with two children, though — need it be said? — he is back in a state of “agitated despair.” He is drinking again, can’t sleep, and has a slight problem with Tamazepam, “namely that it wasn’t strong enough. The side effects, the memory loss, the dehydration, the hangover, the menace of nightmarish withdrawals, all that worked beautifully. It was just the sleep that was missing.” His troubles are further compounded by the fear that he will pass on his dark and riven consciousness to his children, just as his parents passed on their own sickness of soul. Meanwhile, Eleanor, who, we learn, may not have been entirely ignorant of Patrick’s father’s abuse, is in the process of disinheriting her son. She is handing over her estate in Provence to a New Age charlatan, a smarmy back rubber and would-be shaman who has set up a “Transpersonal Foundation” on the premises.

Profiting from the three-book foundation upon which it is built, “Mother’s Milk” is a triumph, once again both gruesome and funny. There are wonderful comic set pieces, including a dreadful family vacation in New York City. But the grim work of psychological excavation also continues, this time with Eleanor as its chief object, as Patrick considers the machinations by which the weak exercise their grotesque tyranny. But something new has entered the picture: the children, two little boys, bringing with them an element of sweetness and genuine love.

And so we come to “At Last:” Patrick is 45, and his mother has died: With both parents gone, he feels that he has “been waiting all his life for this sense of completeness.” But even as he pats his mother’s coffin “as an owner might pat a winning race horse,” we see that things are not splendid. He has given up drink but is also separated from his wife and children — and he is also still mystified and tormented by the chaos of his psyche.

How, I sense you wondering, can this still be interesting? It really is: Not only because St. Aubyn is so entertaining a writer but because of the increasing philosophical depth he brings to the story. As Patrick delves deeper and deeper into the mystery of memory and identity, we wonder with him if they are, in fact, the same thing. And if so, the urge to escape is, in his case at least, irresistible — if not through drugs and drink, then through irony: “Forget heroin,” he tells a former mistress. “Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

And yet Patrick’s unwinding story never really loses this double nature, its devotion to pain and the comedy that only partly holds it at bay. St. Aubyn’s own experiences inform these novels, and his unhappy circumstance no doubt endows Patrick’s with its sense of urgency and anguished intensity. But whatever the author’s actual state of mind has been or is now, its expression in art is a complete success.