My learned and literate readers, drinkers deep from the well of great literature, certainly remember Herman Melville’s “A Story of Wall-Street” and the melancholy figure of Bartleby, the castoff clerk of the Dead-Letter Office in Washington, Delta Charlie.

Who can forget Melville’s pathetic peroration, “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames?”

Well, try reading Tax Court orders, all 150 of them, on a day when no opinions or designated hitters are to be found, when Judge David Gustafson fails or refuses to oblige, and Judge Mark V. Holmes neither stirs silt nor yet again disrespects the partitive genitive.

Judge Goeke does have an off-the-bencher, but after an unreasonably prolonged closing in colorful downtown Levittown, I can’t get up much enthusiasm for Phuongtruc Cao Nguyen, Docket No. 4556-16, filed 11/13/17.

Valuing Ms. Nguyen’s Chanel bags, Prada bags, a watch and other handbags may suit an honors graduate of the University of KY Law School and former Senior Trial Attorney in Chief Counsel’s Office, but I would prefer not to.