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Aldrich's befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings makes for obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because Aldrich doesn't necessarily venerate the histories that are painting cannon, and so which attaching almonds to a painting is not only a thing to do but becomes naturalized as a term of painting - possibly - as all the talk of flatness once was, to be premised as a deduction of the ontological structure of painting rather than some rhetorical hubris, and the distance between the hypothesized normative frame of, say, almonds versus accepted flatness/expression/etc. as premise for painting, and the continual and spiraling versions as potentially acceptable fundamentals of painting and the ones in the book and the distance between these things.