ellauri042.html on line 804: Euclid’s fifth proposition in the first book of his Elements (that the base angles in an isosceles triangle are equal) may have been named the Bridge of Asses (Latin: Pons Asinorum) for medieval students who, clearly not destined to cross over into more abstract mathematics, had difficulty understanding the proof—or even the need for the proof. An alternative name for this famous theorem was Elefuga, which Roger Bacon, writing circa ad 1250, derived from Greek words indicating “escape from misery.” Medieval schoolboys did not usually go beyond the Bridge of Asses, which thus marked their last obstruction before liberation from the Elements.
ellauri060.html on line 470: This song may be of quite recent origin, since almost half of the known examples are sound recordings, and there's only one broadside printing. On the other hand, there's an older and widely printed broadside Jimmy and his True Love, which might well be an earlier version—or it may just be a song with universal appeal and a good chorus that people still enjoy singing. Of the 40 or so instances in Roud, most are from the south west of England or East Anglia—though Gavin Greig collected a dozen examples in Scotland in the early years of last century. No other Sussex version has been collected.
ellauri107.html on line 515: “Oh punk. I don't see what's the use of law-school—or even finishing high school. I don't want to go to college 'specially. Honest, there's lot of fellows that have graduated from colleges that don't begin to make as much money as fellows that went to work early. Old Shimmy Peters, that teaches Latin in the High, he's a what-is-it from Columbia and he sits up all night reading a lot of greasy books and he's always spieling about the 'value of languages,' and the poor soak doesn't make but eighteen hundred a year, and no traveling salesman would think of working for that. I know what I'd like to do. I'd like to be an aviator, or own a corking big garage, or else—a fellow was telling me about it yesterday—I'd like to be one of these fellows that the Standard Oil
ellauri109.html on line 507: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.” Roth turned self-obsession into art. He was a consummate bullshit artist.
ellauri110.html on line 351: Pepys may also have dallied with a leading actress of the Restoration period, Mary Knep. "Mrs Knep was the wife of a Smithfield horsedealer, and the mistress of Pepys"—or at least "she granted him a share of her favours". He called her husband "an ill, melancholy, jealous-looking fellow" and suspected him of abusing his wife. Knep provided Pepys with backstage access and was a conduit for theatrical and social gossip. When they wrote notes to each other, Pepys signed himself "Dapper Dickey", while Knep was "Barbry Allen" (a popular song that was an item in her musical repertory).
ellauri111.html on line 265: “I’m sorry,” he said, taking a breath (or what seemed like a breath). “As I say, even here there are times when I could wish for a cigarette—or even a good whisky”, he added with a smile, nodding reassuringly at me.
ellauri111.html on line 271: “Not ‘just’ like that. No. If you’d read my Diary” (not said reproachfully, but matter of factly) “you’d have read how I imagined the judge speaking to such a person. He makes it clear that it’s not a matter of going home and forgetting about it, going back to the way things were before. No. There has to be change. In my time, the father was the authority figure in the family, but, as I—or my imaginary judge—pointed out, even fathers sometimes need to be re-educated by their children until they learn to listen to their children’s needs. I know that families are very different in your time, but, yes, parents, whoever they are, must learn to be parents to their children. I disagree with much that the prosecutor said about the Karamazov family, but he was right on one point: parents can’t just be parents by virtue of procreation, they have to become parents. And when they abuse their position and their power, they cannot hide behind their rights as parents—they have to own up. The guilty have to know that they are guilty.”
ellauri155.html on line 1043: Dear Sir [—or Dear Lord Russell]—
ellauri155.html on line 1045: for $2,500 [—or $5000 ]— contributed by a person who wishes to remain anony -
ellauri155.html on line 1049: [—or every year ]— during three or four years, or until circumstances render it
ellauri206.html on line 79: In his Poetics, the unknown Greek philosopher Aristotle argues that kinds of "poetry" (the term includes drama, flute music, and lyre music for Aristotle) may be differentiated in three ways: according to their medium, according to their objects, and according to their mode or "manner" (section I); "For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us" (section III).
ellauri244.html on line 461: Author: Jessica Hines | Posted in Critical Essays: Few witches in literary history have been as influential—or as maligned—as Morgan le Fay. By turns either the healer-ruler of the mystical island of Avalon or the arch-villainess of Arthurian legend, for more than nine hundred years Morgan has shaped popular perceptions of witchcraft.
ellauri420.html on line 309: It’s true, frustratingly and consistently true. We do not wrestle with flesh and blood in either of these matters: sexual lust, acedia—or for that matter a whole raft of other temptations. Ultimately this whole struggle is a spiritual battle, beyond the range of our puny intellect and feeble willpower to curtail. The mean black snake is just way stronger than us.
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 1051: don't know what is. Arresting, as well as disgusting, to suddenly notice that Lolita (who died giving birth to a stillborn girl, for Christ's sake) would have been 86 this year. … the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force d'age; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 428: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.” Over time, he took on vast themes—love, lust, loneliness, marriage, masculinity, ambition, community, solitude, loyalty, betrayal, patriotism, rebellion, piety, disgrace, the body, the imagination, American history, mortality, the relentless mistakes of life—and he did so in a variety of forms: comedy, parody, romance, conventional narrative, postmodernism, autofiction. In each performance of a self, Roth captured the same sound and consciousness. in nearly fifty years of reading him I’ve never been more bored. I got to know Roth in the nineteen-nineties, when I interviewed him for this magazine around the time he published “The Human Stain.” To be in his presence was an exhilarating, though hardly relaxing, experience. He was unnervingly present, a condor on a branch, unblinking, alive to everything: the best detail in your story, the slackest points in your argument. His intelligence was immense, his performances and imitations mildly funny. “He who is loved by his parents is a conquistador,” Roth used to say, and he was adored by his parents, though both could be daunting to the young Philip. Herman Roth sold insurance; Bess ruled the family’s modest house, on Summit Avenue, in a neighborhood of European Jewish immigrants, their children and grandchildren. There was little money, very few books. Roth was not an academic prodigy; his teachers sensed his street intelligence but they were not overawed by his classroom performance. Roth learned to write through imitation. His first published story, “The Day It Snowed,” was so thoroughly Truman Capote that, he later remarked, he made “Capote look like a longshoreman.”
xxx/ellauri134.html on line 310: Fear: being duped, misled—or ignorance.
xxx/ellauri215.html on line 127: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.”
xxx/ellauri261.html on line 662: I am here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
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