Dear Martha,

You're still in bed as I write this, and I hope my cat-feeding, coffee-grinding, newspaper-snapping travels around the house haven't roused you. You're flying to Denver today for more Buddha-boosting, so you need the rest. 

The big headlines from the weekend are stunningly unmagnetic ("Semi-Successful Summit in Moscow!" trumpeted one of the network newscasts last night, with a straight face), and I'm up here in my office thinking pretty much exclusively about nude people and art. Remember before we went to sleep I told you the Drudge Report had a link to a funny item in the Washington Post headlined, "Mass Nude Photo Shoot in New York City!"? It featured a color photo of a bunch of naked citizens lying in a Brooklyn street at dawn yesterday while an art photographer named Spencer Tunick shot them for his latest work. Tunick found 150 people willing to get up early and strip for him, and there was a court fight about whether society was OK with this----a public morals issue, blah blah. But for me what was really interesting was how the bodies looked in the photo Drudge linked to. They were posed on their bellies, arms at their sides, faces down, filthy soles up, all facing the same direction and looking for all the world like a sad bunch of helpless, beached sea creatures.

I guess I'm still thinking about that strange, hyperventilating Discovery Channel show we watched with Liam last night, Quest for the Giant Squid, about half of which was taken up with scenes of a scientist standing over a dead giant squid on a lab table, probing its various cavities and appendages as he talked about this mysterious, huge creature ("eyes as large as a human head!" intoned the promo that pulled us in) that supposedly no human being has ever seen alive. I know Discovery was trying to hype us into caring, but up close and lifeless that squid looked like so much rotting calamari. Humble and ugly and just pathetic. Even Liam, who has a major squid obsession acquired from all those viewings of The Little Mermaid, got bored after a while and started doing his trampoline tricks on our bed.

I have the same reaction to those New York nudes, which also appear deep inside the A section of today's Times, if you want a peek. They couldn't be less arousing, and I have to guess that the sexual charmlessness of a mass of bare human flesh is one of the ideas Tunick is exploring. Anyway, I think the street-nudes story is a nice emblem of this age. You know times are pretty damned good when this is what we spend our time pondering.

I hear you stirring now. Come, consider nudity with me.