A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

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

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.

You could say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it—this seduction, a fantasy-for-money transaction, is a commercial movie’s basic point.

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.

The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose.

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 kale

Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. In this respect, television resembles certain other things one might call Special Treats (e.g. candy, liquor), i.e. treats that are basically fine and fun in small amounts but bad for us in large amo

And at this tournament you can (U.S. readers may want to sit down for this part) actually buy du Maurier-brand cigarettes—by the carton or broad flat Europack—from a special red and black booth right outside the main entrance to the Stadium Court. 57 People in Quebec smoke—heavily—and this booth does serious business. No part of Stade Jarry is nons