As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always “Sincerity, with a motive.”

Sun erumpent, mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.

The lecture’s audience consists of bald solid thick-wristed men over 50 who all look like the kind of guy who rises to CEO a company out of that company’s engineering dept. instead of some fancy MBA program.

An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging

Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works.

I normally have a firm and neurologically imperative one-cup limit on coffee, but the Windsurf’s coffee is so good, 117 and the job of deciphering the big yellow Rorschachian blobs of my Navigation Lecture notes so taxing, that on this day I exceed my limit, by rather a lot, which may help explain why the next few hours of this log get kind of

I’ve never before realized that “cacophony” was onomatopoeic: the noise of the Poultry Bldg. is cacophonous and scrotum-tightening and totally horrible. I think it’s what insanity must sound like. No wonder madmen clutch their heads and scream. There’s also a thin stink, and lots of bits of feather are floating all over. And this is outside the

U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging.