It will give them something to do, dear

       Of all the considerations our

       betters tend to extend to us,

       in our years of their parent-

       ing, the providing of a lake

       house is possibly the shrewd-

       est solution for that riddle. 

Analytics tell of bots

red mug, blue linen, a blog

you are reading, is enjoying

another siege of aggressive

bots, splattering this week,

as sometimes happens in this

mode of communication, wheth-

er or not the news be merry.

I don't particularly object 

to this, apart from a tran-

sitory suppression of real-

time distribution to loyal

readership markets, because

the blog is both a vehicle

of recurring greeting, and

a semi-permanent database.

These surfs tend to subside;

as I suggested, this is not

the first. Then the patterns

of stable readership return;

thus, this is a posting less

of umbrage than of gratitude.

All day permanent red

 If this were a real world, the White
 House would have taken on the profile
 of the ramparts of Troy by now, and
 our immersion in all day permanent red
 would be understood as linking mortals
 in a 24 hour aggression emerging from
 its Fox News-scripted forays against
 Humanist disbelief. What began life as
 a campaign for a Revlon lipstick, and
 migrated to the Iliad on the inspired
 arm of Christopher Logue's translation,
 has fetched its fangs into the neck of
 NATO yet again, this time in the win-
 some hypothesis of the stooge Tucker
 Carlson, of having to come to the aid
 of Montenegro. All day permanent red's
 fronts were many yesterday, in its un-
 deviating tactic of spilling too much
 effluent to congeal in a single spot, 
 with a hectoring Press Secretary's de-
 nials that "No" means what it sounds
 like, and her Boss's assurance that 
 support from a hostile state for the
 tactics he adopted to come to power 
 was, lest we'd forgotten, documented, 
 yet magically unbelievable, and even
 comparatively innocuous, to boot.

 The poet Anne Carson, often cited here
 for an exemplary rapport with thinking,
 has admitted, Sometimes I dream a sen-
 tence and write it down. It's usually
 nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key
 to another world. It helps one to sur-
 mount the shock of all day permanent red
 nonsense from the White House, to recog-
 nize its impeachable, if human quality.

 We see a cloistered, indignant people,
 spellbound in another world, and a host
 determined to cast the broadest pool of
 of martyrdom, with rapture's nonsense.
 Troy had its Priam. It didn't go well.

i    Doug Inglish, photo
ii   Farce, Fox News
iii  Witness, The New York Times

Origins of Wednesday lxxiii: Alibi of Broadway

   Surely, we remember, the knock
   on the door from the Execution-
   er, to console the widow for a
   natural mistake. Instead of or-
   dering, "Fire," he says he did
   say, "Fire is not what I ask."

   Innocently, explicably, circum-
   stances intervened to suppress
   any sound of such distinctions.
   Truly, he is a man of his word.

Ansel Adams
untitled 
Portfolio V
1944
Coll. Laurent
1970

Russian denial we have known

     Non, je ne pense pas,

     mais . .

Benjamin Pavard

Moscow

2018

Baguettier insouciant, parlez-vous?

I wouldn't go so far as to say,

nominations are closed, to des-

ignate proof of country of ori-

gin, for the couple in apparent

flight, in this hundredth or so

viewing of their progress. That

said, I don't think the dubious

pedaling technique could satis-

fy demand for "Papers, please."

In Saturday's entry, a distinc-

tion was suggested, between pol-

itical taxonomy and existential

or anthropological citizenship.

I suggest it again, but rather,

this picture does: if one seeks

something to celebrate in the

one, you get papers. In the oth-

er, aromas. An almost unobtain-

able North Carolinian voter ID

card, or a ubiquitous baguette, 

for the republic of freshness.

Nice work - if you can get it.

Elliott Erwitt

Provence

1955©

George Gershwin

Ira Gershwin

Nice Work if You 

  Can Get It

1937©