When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.

Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.

I sweet potato what I sweet potato.

It was autumn, the springtime of death.

It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful.

O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate