From its very inception, which was coeval with this country’s inception, the American circus has been the imaginative grounds of American politics

Also “appearance,” as in Barnum’s nostrum: “Put on the appearance of business, and generally the reality will follow.”

dwell instead amid the empyrean of the unmentionable

a descriptor that the Nazis, to say nothing of coeval Poles, would have disputed

To date, Sanders’s most public, but also most parlous, statements on his own Semitism occurred in the first two of his two-person debates with Hillary

What would redeem this self-hating morass of identity synecdoche and self-eradicating metonymy was America, a country ripe for personal or racial or religious reinvention

Fiction has long been described in the terms of a coeval technology, at least since the fade of the vacuum tube, but it was the genius of the systems novelists to produce fiction expressly along the same schematics

Since the originals of Carver’s stories are often two or three times longer than the canonical versions, what Lish did to them (and gloated about doing to them) requires another verb. Not “edit” but “traduce,” “violate,” “molest.”

“The Star-Spangled Banner,” by contrast, is bombastic anacreontic macaronic pseudomartial beer hall music.

Maybe Leopardi’s point is that for some things, for some dimidiate things, “happiness” is plain “living”?