For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.

My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.