Ward (2015) examines dudesex, a type of male-male sex that white, masculine, straight men in urban or military contexts frame as a way to bond and build masculinity with other, similar “bros.”

Morally everything done before was done in a fog and once you look at things through the eyes of Maximal Operators and Decreasing Rearrangements, you will be totally hooked, drums will beat, whistles will blow and the devine light from above will shine upon you.

Three scholars who used scientific ideas in their analyses were denounced as “protofascists” at a prominent academic meeting for literary scholars in the 1990s by a critic who admitted he hadn’t read their work.

In the present day – when places called cafés are springing up everywhere, drawing in thousands of idle people with money to squander, when male and female students behave so shockingly in streetcars that it has become necessary to segregate them – men have lost all trace of that fervor that drove their ancestors to accept the most frightening challenges.

Dr. Rainville planted the MRI scan of my spine on a lighted box on the wall and systematically inspected the film, vertebra by vertebra. Seemingly satisfied that he had reviewed all the relevant data, he turned and stood before me.

“You are worshiping the volcano god of pain,” he declared. “The volcano god of pain is your master.”

Chapter 2 is the ‘bad news’, Chapter 3 the ‘worse news’ and one or more of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 (depending on one’s views) contains the ‘worst news’.

And isn’t an author entitled to applause and gratitude for daring to work not in dreary Zolaesque dredging of a swampy “external world” as hallucinatory as the next but along the living rainbow edge where writer’s mind meets reader’s in the mist of the retreating thunderstorms of “traditional” novels, a retreat most prettily signalled by the jovial iridescence of parody?

The real down-and-dirty work, however, revolves around shields, with projects under way to build Asteroid, Brain, Alien, Internet, Black Hole, and Antimatter shields.

It’s unlikely Kim Kardashian is an actual Communist; she’s just into ironic, overly expensive sweatshirts.

Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reever or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity; a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature, and, of course, poetry; a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favorite dish, beefsteak-and-kidney pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man.