In cinema there are erotic thrillers — think “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Eyes Wide Shut” — in which men are the playboys and women the collateral damage.

Waitressing is beneath her, the adjoining erotic circus is too low-class and, as for the Rockettes, she finds all that kicking “very redundant.”

In her epochal essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag concluded with a memorable flourish: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

Sir Elton cheered as it was announced that US musician Trent Reznor and English composer Atticus Ross won the award for the musical score for erotic tennis film challengers.

Memories rose up — sometimes poignant, sometimes erotic and piercing — and they held and possessed me as they never could when I was driving along the freeway, preoccupied with my next appointment.