Before Trudy succumbed to her injuries from the bomb that destroyed her car, she uttered the words “bread and butter. Monk tells us that whenever he and Trudy had to part ways, even if only briefly, she would say bread and butter.

And it probably contributed to the inedibility of my mashed potatoes.

This was so much the case in antient times that the floor of the dining room was generally covered with scobs or sawdust to absorb what Seneca calls the purgamenta et jactus cænantium, the “excretions and discharges of the guests." The scobs became at length a point of luxury. Heliogabalus ordered the portico to be strewed in lieu of scobs with gold and silver dust, and lamented that he could not find amber enough for that purpose.

Nor does she stop at the basically aesthetic sense in which a bank of garish skinmag covers is violent, or the propensity of pornography to (in her tellingly prim phrase) offend sensibility.