At the same time, he drives a used Saab, wears worn oxford cloth shirts and putters about like a man out of a Loudon Wainwright III song. He deploys phrases like “causative locus,” “irremediable panniculus” and “cigar-chomping hemorrhoidal bigot.” The anti-abortion billboards in Alabama make him want to throw himself under a bus. He is interestingly ambiguous.

For Sven, the biological now includes creatures such as Furbies, whose “insides” stay “all in the same place” when their skin is removed.

There’s no vacuum here, no phantasm, no backfiring, but a fluid objectivity, a nonlinear, orbital, and flawless writing. 

Though the sequel features far more footage of the giant beasts, including a spectacular nighttime scene in which one of the bioluminescent creatures ejects phosphorescent spores into the desert sky, the story remains stubbornly focused on relatively uninteresting human concerns.

Christian writer Thomas Hibbs, for example, linked the USA’s love of The Simpsons to Nietzsche, nihilism and ‘demonic anti-providence’, calling the nation at the century’s end a 'semiotic hell’.

Nevertheless, Bridle hopes that his exhibition triggers some debate about how to change Glomar response culture.

Anyone who looks with care into the good books shall find in them fine sentences of every length, on every imaginable subject, expressing the entire range of thoughts and feelings possible, in styles both as unified and various as the colors of the spectrum; and sentences that take such notice of the world that the world seems visible in their pages, palpable, too, so a reader might fear to touch those paragraphs concerned with conflagrations or disease or chicanery lest they be victimized, infected, or burned; yet such sentences as make the taste of sweet earth and fresh air—things that seem ordinarily without an odor or at all attractive to the tongue—as desirable as wine to sip or lip to kiss or bloom to smell; for instance this observation from a poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s: “Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood, each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette butt”—well, she’s right; go look—or this simile for style, composed by Marianne Moore: “It is as though the equidistant three tiny arcs of seeds in a banana had been conjoined by Palestrina”—peel the fruit, make the cut, scan the score, hear the harpsichord transform these seeds into music (you can eat the banana later); yet also, as you read these innumerable compositions, to find there lines that take such flight from the world that the sight of it is wholly lost, and, as Plato and Plotinus urge, that reach a height where only the features of the spirit, of mind and its dreams, the pure formations of an algebraic absolute, can be made out; for the o’s in the phrase “good books” are like owl’s eyes, watchful and piercing and wise.

“Sentimentality should be one of the deadly sins,” I said to no one in particular, still stuck in my fatuous phase.

Whitehead once remarked that the type of modern man who would feel most at home in ancient Greece is the average professional heavyweight boxer; but even an American businessman, for all he would miss in Periclean Athens, would have got along far better there than the ordinary classical scholar.

Hegel is absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.