But if we can read modernity’s soul at all, surely it is through the stigmata of the moment: proliferating tattoos. Tattoos are everywhere on the bodies of Americans; all of us know someone who keeps imprinting and imprinting his flesh in an endless gesture of self-expression.

Flannery O’Connor’s 1965 short story, “Parker’s Back,” describes an obsessive body-imprinter:

[Parker’s] dissatisfaction [was] acute, and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents and the eagles and the hawks [on his skin] had penetrated his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare … Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo… With the aid of mirrors [an] artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl.

Parker’s pièce de résistance is a huge image, on his back, of the “haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.”

O’Connor’s observation that Parker’s tattoos seemed to have “penetrated his skin and lived inside him” prefigures, in an intriguing way, the recent much-discussed scientific study which finds that tattoos are “associated with an increased risk of malignant lymphoma.”

This conclusion, which surprised UD not at all (“[W]hen the tattoo ink is injected into the skin, the body interprets this as something foreign that should not be there and the immune system is activated. A large part of the ink is transported away from the skin, to the lymph nodes where it is deposited.”), has upset and shocked people; and indeed when close to 35% of your population has tattoos, you can expect this result.

But of course tattoos have long been known to predispose people toward infections, allergies, MRI problems, etc. The study’s authors next intend to examine links between tattoos and “other forms of cancer and inflammatory diseases.”

Many people covered with this deeply penetrative ink seem unconcerned, and that is possibly because the dark business of engaging in activities you know to be harmful (see also vaping) is your self-expression. That is your far and soulful country — the vampire God you bear on your back.

PGA Tour Golfer Committed Suicide by

Using his Land Rover to Pump $800,000

Florida Townhouse Full of Carbon Monoxide

The headline combines the one in the Daily Mail with the one in Radar. Radar made a point of mentioning the price tag of the place the player filled with gas.

Dedicated readers know the DeLillo headline (examples here) must include at least three wealth-markers — here, PGA, Land Rover, $800,000 house.

From UD‘s garden.

… during their visit yesterday to the Philadelphia Museum. With its dark lighting and massive interior columns, the building seemed to UD pretty oppressive.

And as for the Cassatt exhibit: The commentary kept telling us her mother/baby stuff is not not not sentimental.

Okay….

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

She may not look it, but UD’s quite sentimental, and she found herself choking up as she read this beautiful evocation of her hometown.

[The] red-brick mansion, [on the market for $23.5 million,] sits on [a] gated two-acre property, which [has] six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and three half-baths. Inside are six fireplaces, a library, a wine cellar, a recreation room, a fitness center, a billiards room, … a guest suite [,] an infinity pool and hot tub, an English garden, and a two-car garage… [The current owner] used the residence for entertaining and only spent a few nights there.

[Jason] Keys and his wife, Charae Williams Keys, were getting into their car after a Father’s Day visit in 2021 with her grandparents in a leafy neighborhood near Walnut Hill Park in Columbus, Ohio. A 72-year-old neighbor carrying a rifle accosted them in the belief, he later told the police, that Mr. Keys had let the air out of his daughter’s tires and poisoned his lawn.

Mr. Keys, who was carrying a pistol in his waistband, and his father-in-law tried to disarm the man, knocking him to the ground, while another relative ran back inside to get a .22 rifle. While Ms. Keys ducked behind the car to call 911, she heard multiple gunshots. She emerged to find her husband mortally wounded.

It took a moment for everyone to realize that the shots had come from a fourth gun across the street. Elias Smith, a 24-year-old ex-Marine, had stepped to his front door with a so-called ghost gun, an AR-style rifle that Mr. Smith had assembled from parts ordered online. Within seconds, he opened fire, hitting Mr. Keys five times.

“What are you shooting for?” a relative of Mr. Keys can be heard asking on surveillance video that captured parts of the incident.

Mr. Smith answered, “I don’t know.”

Where oh where can he be? An American with a gun… Hm… hmmm….

Mindless evangelical fervor and a world of guns: This witches’ brew placed Bob Baker’s daughter and son-in-law in Haiti, where both were just slaughtered.

How does any father allow his 21 year old daughter to do that? To go to one of the most dangerous, gun-ridden countries in the world? Did he at least try to dissuade the idiot, or did he love the image of her as a Christian martyr in a world of weapons and anarchy?

And UD’s little beachstone collection. Breakfast on the balcony – from the iconic Papillon! – as a thunderstorm readies itself.

… UD‘s evil parents kept in their house for the moral undoing of their children the songs of Tom Lehrer.

From the age of nine onward, UD has been singing nonstop his greatest hits, so she’s intrigued by a new British play about him, Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. The playwright pens a fine appreciation of Lehrer here, featuring Lehrer’s comment on his artistic output:  “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”

… story, a story with all the sordid absurdity of Waugh’s novel (which features a character named Trumpington!).

And what will the third Alito flag be? I’m gonna predict he keeps a little ancestral home somewhere in the old country which flies this:

lololololololol