The GTD movement quickly spread outside the confines of formal work and became a way to navigate the whole of existence: hence the popularity of websites such as Lifehacker that offer nerdy tips on rendering the messy business of everyday life more amenable to algorithmic improvement. If you can discover how best to organise the cables of your electronic equipment or “clean stubborn stains off your hands with shaving cream”, that, too, adds to your “productivity” – assuming that you will spend the time that is notionally saved on a sanctioned “task”, rather than flopping down exhausted on the sofa and waking groggily seven hours later from what you were sternly advised should have been a power nap of exactly 20 minutes. If you need such “downtime”, it must be rigorously scheduled.
…We all like to feel that we have done something useful, interesting or fun with our day, even (or especially) if it has not been part of our official work, and we might harmlessly express such satisfaction by saying that our day has been productive.
This ordinary usage encodes an ordinary wisdom: that mere quantity of activity – as implied by the get-more-done mania of the productivity cult – has nothing to do with its value. Economics does not know how to value Rainer Maria Rilke over a prolific poetaster in receipt of an official laureateship. (One can be confident that, while mooching around European castles and writing nothing for years on end, Rilke would never have worn a T-shirt that announced: “I’m doing work”.) And his life sounds like more fun than one recent Lifehacker article, which eagerly explained how to organise your baseball cap collection by hanging the headwear on shower-curtain hooks arrayed along a rail.
Perhaps I shouldn’t mock. All that time saved every morning by knowing the exact location of the baseball cap you want to wear will surely add up, earning you hours more freedom to hunt and hoard ever more productivity tips, until you are a purely theoretical master at doing nothing of value in the most efficient way imaginable.
December 2013
Stuck in the Middle with You
The guilty pleasure is a vestige of America’s disappearing middlebrow culture, of that anxious mediation between high and low, which at its best generated a desire to learn, to value cultural literacy and to accept some of the challenges it requires. General magazines once flourished because of it; even Ladies’ Home Journal, better known now as a chipper dispenser of service journalism and horoscopes, used to publish the likes of Edith Wharton and W. H. Auden. But the guilty pleasure seems to me the distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow—the condescension of the highbrow without the expenditure of effort, along with mass culture’s pleasure-seeking without the unequivocal enjoyment. If you want to listen to Rihanna while reading the latest from Dean Koontz, just go ahead and do it. Don’t try to suggest you know better. Forget the pretense and get over yourself. You have nothing to lose but your guilt.
I agree, but why repeat myself when I can just relink myself?
A Public Square and Little Else
Certainly, Liberal Puritans understand on some level that things like mass incarceration are bigger problems for African Americans than the way Ted Rall draws Obama’s nose. Rather than simply making that point, I want to discover why we have so many people who know and care far more about a faux pas on race by public figures than they know or care about the war on drugs. What is so appealing about combing through the public sphere, looking for something to be offended by? What I’m trying to identify is a kind of false morality. A morality which is driven by heavily adolescent impulses, like the desire to elevate oneself by tearing down others and setting parameters for a kind of coolness that allows you to be “in,” while excluding others.
…But what the Puritan really desires of their target is capitulation. For the witch to confess to having sex with the devil. For the racist witch to issue a maudlin apology. Jesus Christ, do we love apologies these days. There’s always a great emphasis on forcing the target to speak certain words, because this is a power trip. The target must allow the Puritans to control them. Even if only for a moment, the target must be their puppet. This is an even greater power rush for them than it might seem, because Puritans have faith in a world where saying is more important than doing. So to force a person to speak their words is a huge power boner.
…And what exactly is the fear, here? It seems like the Atlantic argument, which is the most reasonable of the anti-Rall stuff, begins and ends with, “these drawings superficially resemble racist drawings from 1930 and someone might conceivably find that unpleasant.” There’s no “and…” there. What is the bad thing that this is going to lead to, other than offending people who want to be offended?
Well, I guess the implied consequence is that Rall might accidentally revive the depiction of blacks as subhuman. Then a large number of people might revert to the views that those old caricatures represented. We might see a return to slavery.
But seriously…
Well, our mission is to understand here. And no, the Liberal Puritan doesn’t think slavery will return any more than they think we might see a bunch of holocaust denying history professors at universities. However, we should understand that they live in the world of saying, not in the world of doing. They don’t really care about the prison industrial complex all that much. They’re passionate about whether or not Katy Perry conforms to their rules. These are people who live in and for the public square. They’re much less concerned about what happens in the home, the town hall or the battlefield.
All of this is multiplied on the internet, where what is said pretty much is all of reality. The prison industrial complex doesn’t really exist on the internet. Its victims are nowhere to be found. Katy Perry is all over the place. Also, remember that the underlying motivation for all of this is to feel powerful and important and to do so easily. Thinking about the prison industrial complex is depressing and makes you feel impotent and marginalized. Because even if you elect a black Democrat who rides a wave of populist liberalism, that sort of thing won’t change a bit.
So all of this stuff seems to be greatly magnified online.
Yeah, the internet is paradise for Puritans, liberal or otherwise. Some of the reasons we’ve already touched on.
It’s a world where all that exists, is what is said. It’s a town with a public square and little else.
Right, and this is the preferred mode of existence for the Puritan anyway. Gossip, accusations, naked assertions of their own moral superiority. Rules. Narratives about who is breaking the rules and who is obeying the rules. Stories about who is a hero (them) and who is a villain (whoever they say). Identifying and persecuting, or at least harassing people who defy the rules and refuse to accept the power of the Puritan group. Sitting in judgement as part of that group and feeling powerful and superior.
These activities can comprise the bulk of the existence of an online persona. If you want to, you can do nothing but accuse people of being racist witches without ever having to face them and rarely, if ever, facing any repercussions when you’re wrong. Which is great, since right and wrong aren’t the point.
Mobile ice sheds, piranhas, Puritans, combinations of all three — I haven’t seen such a Frankenstein’s monster of metaphors since this memorable instance. Nonetheless, I appreciate the points about implied consequences and the game show-like unreality of the twitosphere, where people sit around all day with their hand above a buzzer, ready to shout out Racist! or Misogynist! to earn useless Internet virtue points. Whoa, now my metaphors are running wild.
…Meant to say earlier: seeing the picture of Rall wearing a hammer-and-sickle t-shirt makes me think yeah, I see your point.
Gooble Gobble, One of Us
Initially after writing my book Doubt, I avoided the atheist label, saying only that I did not believe in God. After some reflection, I realized I needed to defend what I truly believe. I now call myself an “atheist,” and proudly. That choice has cost a number of brave people dearly, whether in readers or elections or friends, and I think it is both an honest step and a courageous one for those in public life. I hope the atheists now in Congress will take that step themselves—and this time, not wait until they’re safely out of office.
From this side of the Great Atheist Schism, it’s funny how outdated this concern sounds now. All I care about is that politicians are secular, which of course has nothing to do with whatever they privately believe.
Well, If I Don’t Say Nothing, You Say Now Tell Us What to Do
But Gray’s largest problem is that he offers nothing positive to hold onto, no reason why we should or shouldn’t act in any way, other than to avoid some of the excesses he scorns. He gives no insight into what he values or cherishes, or why. I can’t recall a person who has written so much about ideological commitment, and yet who draws no lesson beyond: look at the waste and tragedy.
His largest problem? Chotiner outlines several issues one could fairly have with Gray’s ideas, but this is absurd. This is a personal gripe, not a philosophical shortcoming. I know very well from experience that it can be annoying to hear incisive criticism of ideas for which you have a soft spot. If you hear such criticisms frequently from the same source, it’s all-too-human to want to personalize your annoyance, to wonder who the hell this arrogant fucker is who keeps talking about how this and that is misguided and mistaken, to want to ask: oh yeah, well, what would you do differently, smart guy? Luckily, I recognize such peevishness for what it is and concentrate on whether the ideas are true or useful, regardless of the possible personal shortcomings of the source. There is a long, rich tradition of wisdom being expressed “negatively”, where, like sculpting, the aim is to reveal by chipping away at the material. Some forms of teaching involve removing the perceptual and conceptual excess rather than adding more layers of it. Calling it “ideological” to refuse on principle to replace one ideology with another is just semantics. Like Arthur said about Nietzsche, those who want to become lawgivers end up setting themselves in stone along with their commandments; history will keep flowing and pass them by.
Vampire Weakened
The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.
The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.
…The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.
…While fluidity of identity, pluarity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip. Once the VC has mustered its witch-hunt, the victim (often from a working class background, and not schooled in the passive aggressive etiquette of the bourgeoisie) can reliably be goaded into losing their temper, further securing their position as pariah/ latest to be consumed in feeding frenzy.
…It might have been possible to ignore the Vampires’ Castle and the neo-anarchists if it weren’t for capitalist cyberspace. The VC’s pious moralising has been a feature of a certain ‘left’ for many years – but, if one wasn’t a member of this particular church, its sermons could be avoided. Social media means that this is no longer the case, and there is little protection from the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.
See, because these vampires are “weakened” by exposure to the clear, bright light of reason. And then there’s that indie rock band…ahh, fuck you, it is so funny. Anyway, yes, even a Marx-blinded squirrel can sometimes find a tasty nut. That first part sounds like the setup to a joke: “A priest, an academic-pedant and a hipster walk into a bar…”
And as long as I’m stealing material from Shetterly, yes, this Key and Peele skit was especially amusing.
The Stunting of the Snark
The sin of snark is rudeness, the anti-snarkers say. Snark is mean. And meanness and rudeness are the worst misdeeds in the world.
It’s a long article. The gist of it seems to be the contrast between the supposed polar opposites of snark and smarm, and apparently, while smarm is a tactic of the powerful and privileged, snark is the righteous weapon of the powerless who punch up against injustice and phoniness. Well, whatever. As far as I’m concerned, you fight shit with more shit, and everything just stinks all the more. Anyway, my issue with snark as popularly practiced isn’t rudeness or meanness per se, it’s that it often reeks of vacuous rudeness and meanness. As is so often the case with people who, rightly or wrongly, see themselves as marginalized and powerless, even a sip of a sensation of power — which snark cheaply provides — goes right to their head, and they proceed to make complete asses of themselves.
Snark relies on the illusion of symbolic capture — there’s a superficial symmetry, a neatness and tidiness in the way a snarky remark appears to cut straight to the heart of the matter while disdaining actual engagement. Many of Oscar Wilde’s famous quips had that quality about them — symmetry without substance. As with diacope, I suspect well-crafted snark has a similarly subliminal pull to it that helps us overlook its hollowness.
Also.
Freddie DeBoer, contributor to The New Inquiry, lost his muffin in its entirety; unable to confine himself to writing one zillion comments on the article itself, he wrote a blog post about it too. DeBoer claims that smarm vs. snark is “yet another cultural competition, elites like Scocca leveraging their cultural status to try to enforce their own take.” Cool kids, blah blah.
That’s pretty much what I meant about symbolic capture — “Oh, him. He’s just a loudmouth know-it-all who thinks everything in life is analogous to a high-school cafeteria. *Eyeroll*.” Acknowledgement without engagement, yet still posing as knowingness. Once that unspoken signal has been shared, there’s no allowable way to defend yourself against snarky dismissal. You talk too much. You argue too passionately. You’re too earnest, too boring. Whatever.
A Cat Amongst the Canaries
Oh Suarez has scored. Suarez? Really? How unpredictable. Sobs from matinee interval @ShakespeareBway #OTBC #NCFC
— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) December 4, 2013
Torture by Luis Suárez is routine for Norwich City but that does not diminish his capacity to astonish. The Liverpool striker continued his personal crusade against the men from Carrow Road with four goals and one assist as Anfield witnessed an individual masterclass, one Brendan Rodgers placed in the company of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. No one privileged to be present would disagree.
Suárez took his tally to 11 goals in his last four appearances against Norwich with one outrageous 40-yard strike, a superb piece of improvisation, a glorious half-volley and a 25-yard free-kick, becoming the Premier League’s leading goalscorer in the process – and to think his season only commenced on 25 September. He also found time to create the fifth for Raheem Sterling. The 26-year-old has 51 league goals in the red of Liverpool and 11 have come against Chris Hughton’s team. Quite what Norwich have done to warrant this relentless, ruthless punishment is unknown but even the Liverpool manager offered his sympathy.
…The hat-trick was Suárez’s third in four games against Norwich, ensuring he became the first player in Premier League history to score three trebles against the same team. “I wish Luis Suárez would just leave us alone,” tweeted Norwich’s Anthony Pilkington.
As far as mid-table teams go, I like Norwich. I hope they do well and avoid being caught up in a relegation scrap by season’s end (and I love Stephen Fry, too, so I want his team to be successful and bring him joy). But — not just speaking as a Liverpool fan either — damn, it sure is entertaining to see how they somehow bring the absolute best out of Suárez every time he plays them. Poor hapless bastards.
I’m a Man Without Conviction, I’m a Man Who Doesn’t Know How to Sell a Contradiction
Brian comments on the previous post:
Damian, by the time you are 40 I expect you will be patrolling your property with a shotgun muttering about the liberals and feminists and all those progressives.
He’s mostly kidding, of course, but still, this serves as a useful springboard to make a broader point, a sort of meta-musing about my ever-evolving worldview. My isolato manifesto, if you will. The implied question he poses is: am I morphing into a curmudgeonly conservative? The short answer is no, but the long answer is, as usual, more nuanced.
There’s a number of unspoken assumptions that inform the understanding of most people who read, write, and comment on sociopolitical issues in the blogosphere. The idea that we’re all, to some degree, political animals, and that a developed political awareness is the height of sophistication and maturity. The idea that all of us, whether we admit it or not, fall on one side or the other of the fundamental political divide, which in this country is understood as progressive/conservative, or Democrat/Republican. The idea that most such opinions should not be taken at face value, but rather interpreted in relation to this or that agenda, reduced to their supposed common denominator, examined for their hidden implications. The idea that we’re all speaking as if to the largest potential audience, with the intent of swaying or convincing as many as possible. The idea that heretical, offensive, or discomfiting opinions should be treated like outbreaks of contagion, to be quarantined and avoided for the sake of one’s mental health. Well. If these sorts of assumptions are the common coin of online discourse, perhaps my intent is actually to storm in, violently overturn the tables of those who trade in such counterfeit currency, and chase them away. (The megalomania implicit in that metaphor is entirely ironic and offered for amusement purposes only, I assure you.)
It is a fact: I am utterly insignificant and completely lacking in influence. This blog is a pure labor of love, a love of writing and foolosophizing for their own sake, which is a good thing, because I could probably count my regular readers on my fingers. To me, that represents freedom. If I have a role model here at all, it’s Montaigne — I am free to focus on whatever I want for however long I want, to follow my thoughts wherever they lead, with no concern for whether they advance or inhibit some arbitrary agenda, support or detract from some party line. And what the honest fuck do I know about anything anyway? My only responsibility is to tell the truth as I see it. The thing is, this medium, as far as I can see, offers that freedom to almost everyone. Not every blogger is as publicity-adverse as I am, and not every blogger is quite so invisible, but still, there is a lot of potential for experimentation within the blog format. And yet, so many of them hustle to their self-assigned seats and begin producing the same on-message content as everyone else. They couldn’t be more uniform and predictable if they were following orders from a drill sergeant. There are countless Jon Stewart-wannabes and countless amateur pundits covering the exact same viral stories. If I want to hear snark about the latest stupid thing uttered by a Christian/Republican, I’d watch the Daily Show. If I want to hear some yammering yob on WordPress pontificate as if the fucking President should hire his amazingly insightful ass to be the new Chief of Staff, I’d… well, I’d lie down with a cold compress on my head until I came to my senses, but still, the point is, such cardboard cutout opinions are ubiquitous and worthless. I am utterly baffled by the existence of so many people who can think of no more entertaining use of their thoughts and free time than to act as unpaid copywriters for the DNC. Eyes turned up toward the canopy, where all the important action is assumed to be taking place, they ignore all the potentially interesting growth taking place among the understory.
Over the last couple of years, especially following the appearance of the schism in online New Atheism, I’ve been more interested in things like the psychological roots of ideology than the irrelevant details of ideologies themselves. This has led to me writing more on topics like identity politics, campus-style radicalism and free speech, issues which, to a perspective that sorts everything through a political filter, tend to “code” as conservative, if not reactionary. This isn’t actually a new thing for me — my views haven’t really changed since the early days of this blog, when I was equally scornful of shallow progressive pieties. The only thing that has changed is that I’ve shrugged off any meaningful political identity and thus shed any inclinations to muffle such criticism for the sake of some broader loyalties. A lot of liberals/progressives would probably agree with me privately that the sort of lunatic feminists who populate Freethought Blogs, Tumblr and the like are ridiculous, but, so goes the thinking, at least they’re not Republicans. It’s the flip side of the lesser-evil strategy they employ during elections — as long as there’s a greater evil to fight, i.e. reactionary Republicans, it would be counterproductive and misguided to expend any serious effort on attacking people on “our side”. Well, this is a perfectly reasonable and valid perspective to hold, but I reject it nonetheless. I reject it because though it may be valid, it’s not the only valid perspective. I especially reject the dubious political calculus which pretends to know exactly which compromises need to be made for the sake of securing some vague greater good. There never will be a “convenient” time to have such battles. There never will be a time when reactionaries have been neatly and completely dispatched, allowing us to turn our full attention to our own lunatic fringe. Both types of malignant personalities will always be with us. Dishonest ideologues are dishonest ideologues regardless of which button they push in the booth on Election Day, and, not being a politician, I have no interest in trying to manipulate one set to my advantage.
If anything, I’ve just sidestepped the false binary of partisan political identity and returned to the Zen/Taoist sensibility I’ve been nurturing since adolescence. Zen taught me a lot about mental discipline and dispassionate objectivity; Taoism taught me that authoritarian busybodies are a perennial (and bipartisan) occurrence, and that the best response to them is mockery and a refusal to counter their harebrained dogmas by asserting your own. Topping that off is a genuine antisocial instinct, a mild misanthropy, which has me daydreaming about counterfactual histories where humans somehow evolved from a less-social species (orangutans, perhaps) to become much more solitary, instead of our current existence as meddlesome chimps obsessed with monitoring and regulating our neighbors’ behavior. And finally, to reiterate, I’m fully aware that none of this sound and fury is anything more than entertainment. Nothing written here (or indeed, most anywhere else in the blogosphere) is changing any minds or influencing any policy. It’s just something to skim over while killing time at work. There’s no need to read more than that into it.
Nullifidian
You might think that, if you have no religion, no one will bother you. After all, the rivalry is between Catholics and Protestants — surely you can simply rise above the controversy? There you would be wrong. The atheist is the enemy of all, being utterly godless and therefore outside the scope of Elizabethan morality. As Francis Bacon writes in his essay ‘On Atheism’: ‘they that deny God destroy a man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature’.
Not believing in God is like not believing in trees. Most people simply cannot conceive of a line dividing the metaphysical and the physical. To them the two are indivisibly linked. Creation cannot exist without its creator. However, from the middle of the century, certain people start to be labelled as ‘atheists’ by their enemies. Some even admit themselves to being nulla fidians, or ‘nothing believers’. Then, in 1583, Philip Stubbes writes his Anatomy of Abuses, which defines atheists as people who ‘deny there is any God’. Atheism as we know it is born.
Interesting. I went back and checked Jennifer Hecht’s book Doubt, but didn’t see any mention of Stubbes. My exhaustive scholarly research thus completed, I’m happy to take Mortimer’s word for it. Mainly, I was just glad for this passage reintroducing me to that wonderful word nullifidian, whose acquaintance I had first made over a decade ago, only for us to inexplicably lose touch with each other in recent years. Here, though, its description makes it sound like an assertive type of disbelief, similar to our conception of nihilism — “We believe in nothing, Lebowski, nothing.” But in my understanding, its modern usage indicates the mere absence of faith or religious belief. Yes, this would be the infamous “dictionary atheism”, condemned as insufficient by Peezus and his disciples and cast into the bottomless pit to be shut up with a seal placed upon it, so that it would deceive the nations no more. Perhaps, then, this term could be adopted by those wishing to differentiate themselves from the progressive atheist cult.
Recusant
The boast on the cover is, ‘How to turn the perfect English phrase’, and Forsyth admits that his book ‘is about one tiny, tiny aspect of rhetoric: the figures of speech’. Being able, like Peter Simple’s fantasy ‘apodosis turner in the conditional clause shed’, to produce a smooth example of epizeuxis or epistrophe will not, to be sure, make you Shakespeare (about whose use of figures we hear much to our advantage in this short book). But Forsyth’s chief and admirable ambition is to demolish ‘the bleak and imbecile idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible’.
Oh, snap! Whomever could that writerly whipcrack have been aimed at?
Using plain and clear language is not a moral virtue, as Orwell hoped. Things aren’t that simple. In fact, giving the impression of clarity and straightforwardness is often a strategic game. The way we speak and the way we write are both forms of dress. We can, linguistically, dress ourselves up any way we like. We can affect plainness and directness just as much as we can affect sophistication and complexity. We can try to mislead or to impress, in either mode. Or we can use either register honestly.
I’ve already made my sympathies clear on this question, but I’m also prejudiced in this particular case by the fact that I read both of Forsyth’s previous books this year and loved them. Loved them, I say. The preface to his Horologicon was so particularly enjoyable to me that I read it aloud to someone, proclaiming my own desire to write like that.
Looking for Context and Perspective, Looking for Some Kind of Distraction
Much social research shows that people prefer to receive information that they agree with instead of information that challenges their beliefs. This problem is compounded when social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like. This is the filter bubble—being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with.
…Today, Eduardo Graells-Garrido at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona as well as Mounia Lalmas and Daniel Quercia, both at Yahoo Labs, say they’ve hit on a way to burst the filter bubble. Their idea that although people may have opposing views on sensitive topics, they may also share interests in other areas. And they’ve built a recommendation engine that points these kinds of people towards each other based on their own preferences.
The result is that individuals are exposed to a much wider range of opinions, ideas and people than they would otherwise experience. And because this is done using their own interests, they end up being equally satisfied with the results (although not without a period of acclimitisation). “We nudge users to read content from people who may have opposite views, or high view gaps, in those issues, while still being relevant according to their preferences,” say Graells-Garrido and co.
See also: Internet Silos.
Winter’s Offerings
Crispy chimes of Autumn, spread out upon natures floor.
The falling greens of spring and summer, now taking on a brown-like decor.
Bare bodies stand naked, their bones clanging in the wind.
Hoping to soon be reclothed, by winter’s cool new offerings.
— Robert M. Hensel