Knowing ours to be a talky sort of page

It hasn't been unheard of, for readers to send in a photo relic for commentary or interpretation, knowing how we do go on from time to time. Early on, and more than once, the appeal to put on a pretty record was heard, to extenuate conjecture on the self-incrimination clause, or the eschatology of clavicles. A bafflement we owned, with some of this charity, was with the context of its application. But now, more usually, we find this same befuddlement to have prompted our correspondent, to demand a clue as to the thing's provenance, as if we were some boardwalk apppraisal stand for beachcombers.

I give you the beachdrinker, as the perfect example. Is he a kind of tautology in some Star Chamber narrative, in the history of the Fifth Amendment, or a kind of self-calumnising species of entrapment, striding along in surreptitious good cop/bad cop boardwalk interrogation? Anything you say can and will .. And where now are our paranoids, when we really need them? Or does this effigy descend from the clavically savvy discussions in Homer, showing the practicality of that apparatus for hoisting a rider by the tip of a lance, in even-Steven contest? All we can infer, is that it's not a telephone self-portrait, and that's not a Glock in his pocket.

As you might suppose, in eleven months quite a lot of this stuff can pile up, and we are sorely tempted to come up with a form letter of acknowledgment, or to publish our response, wholesale. Yet we haven't decided whether to disclaim expertise or to patronise everything with a treacly compliment. Still young, or passably so, in our own little project, we wonder if there mightn't be a creative - dare we say, in the opiate of the App Era, inter-active - mode of processing these inquiries, while giving offense to the smallest number? Might the genius of our readers not be rallied to explain the deconstructed sweater, the style of stone best suited to a piercing?

Now that you mention it, who among us can not recall those days, when a well-knitted ratatouille might depend upon a parity of freshness in its constituents, perhaps a lighter hand in their assemblage in woven stages, responsive to their texture yet integral to a general whole? Now, is it possible, anywhere, not to dine out on deconstructions of this heretofore coherent collation, as if to say, now you must extract the essence of this delt, and here this pec, while at any moment a morsel of some papillae might draw its own balsamic intervention, exquis-itised for context to be crushed?

And were we, for our part, not more stout in our resistance to entreaties of that trade, the restaurants of our time might well entail a tasting note to publish on the spot, provided enough exotica in their offerings or remoteness in their locale, as to cover any blemish of our palate, or arcana of conceit.

But we stray. We see the flow of images submitted for our testing as a gathering flock of fantasies, focused in their plumage on a flattering presumption of some solution we possess for their dispatch. On the contrary. Living in the country, we see our share of birds, but less of restaurants than you'd think, and are therefore quite out of touch with the latest degradation of taste. We shouldn't wonder if a perturbation in one's healthy vasculation were the price of tasting so capriciously, where any thumb could play the sum of what is missing so deliciously. We're reluctant to speculate in complications of what an image is.