John Brown's Notes and Essays

This blog is dedicated to D. Trump,  "You're Fired" business con of the "art of the steal" -- and now Kommander in thief of the USA  Due an unfortunate (if not farcical) injury to his little toe (left, not right, leg; no relation to D. Trump's hand [pictured above]), your blogger has had to reorient his near daily constitutional, which included picking up (and disposing of) plastic water bottles, in public waste disposal bins. Don't worry: Your scribbler won't harp on the kind of trash he's picked up in the recent past, which includes (of all waste!) used prophylactics, removed by him from the public space with the help of a branch, easily found in his tree-filled neighborhood. So ... for now  your communicator (YC, for short) has reduced his "constitutional" to a walk (not a jog as in the past) up and down a segment of Connecticut Avenue (Porter Street to UDC), in his Cleveland Park neighborhood, a stroll which

( see , for entries on other dates; for full description of trash picked up,  see ; on Stakhanovite  see ) 10/22 for 10/13-16, 10/17, 10/19. 10/20, 10/21-22 see below This blog is dedicated to D. Trump, "You're Fired" vulgar entertainer/so-called business master of the "art of the steal" -- and now Commander in thief of the USA  *** 10/12 Entries on this blog, initiated a few months ago, are based on a near-daily jog/stroll by your scribbler in his neighborhood, located in the Cleveland Park area (where part of the magical  Rock Creek Park  is located) in the northwest quadrant of the Imperial Capital, Washington, D.C. During his near-daily open-air peregrinations, your blogger picks up in the morning -- with the help of a  trash picker  recently donated to him by a local janitor -- plastic water bottles [PWBs], among other s--t, and disposes of them in what he hopes are appropriate public waste receptacles. ***

Jonathan Lethem, The New York Review of Books (October 24, 2019) [JB note: ( I won't say a "hip") review, which extensively quotes the book it reviews intelligently (unlike by reviewers citing  their books under review  who use quotations to fill up space without providing thought/criticism); the review harmonizes the personal (but not egocentric) view of the review's author re the Snowden book, "like" Snowden or the review author -- or not; if you'll allow me to speculate, however, that the co-author of the book may have had a subtle non-computerized "sensibility" that Snowden may not have/had, but that does make its way, unintentionally (?), into an arguably important Americana book. ] Permanent Record Jonathan Lethem, The New York Review of Books (October 24, 2019) Permanent Record by Edward Snowden Metropolitan, 339 pp., $30.00  Jonathan Lethem, The New York Review of Books, (October 24, 2019) [JB note: a noteworthy ( I won