"I blame it all on lip gloss."

Writes Daphne Merkin:

I believe there is something irrevocably ruinous about a culture in which women are expected to go around with their lips in a permanent state of shiny readiness, a perennial Marilyn Monroe moue of glistening sexual receptivity, hinting at the possibility that they, like Monroe, sleep fetchingly in the nude.

Click on the link at your own risk. It's long, name-dropping, and philosophicalish.

Is "philosophicalish" a word? You might well ask, as, indeed, I did. And in this wonderful world that contains Google, I found 421 uses of the word, including one by D.H. Lawrence, describing his own writing in "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays":

This volume contains what Lawrence himself called "philosophicalish" essays written in the decade 1915-25. The topics range from politics to nature, from religion to education; the tone from lighthearted humor to mordant wit, to spiritual meditation. For all these contrasts, however, the essays share many of the underlying themes of the mature Lawrence: "Be thyself" could be the volume's motto. As far as possible, this edition restores what Lawrence wrote before typists, editors, and compositors made the extensive alterations that have been followed in all previous editions of the texts--on occasion entire passages removed by mistake or for reasons of censorship have been recovered.

Required observation: Lawrence was a blogger!

Irresistible chance connection: The same issue of the NYT that contains the Merkin essay that led me to talk about D.H. Lawrence, also has this piece about D.H. Lawrence's bohemian New Mexico, which leapt immediately to mind because I had looked longingly at this photo of his desk in front of a window:



I need to move my desk in front of a window, you're thinking. Aren't you?

Or are you thinking: What exactly is a "merkin"? Or:



Did you steal my lip gloss???