ellauri052.html on line 108: I heard Bellow deliver the PEN speech on “American Writers and Their Public” to a packed hall in London on March 22, 1986. He had just suffered the death of his brothers and agonising break with Alexandra. Exhausted by jet-lag, stiff-gaited and parchment-skinned, he seemed terribly old and shattered. His talk ranged widely and wildly but, rambling and unfocused, he could not — like Ezra Pound in the Cantos — make it cohere.
ellauri052.html on line 881: I heard Bellow deliver the PEN speech on “American Writers and Their Public” to a packed hall in London on March 22, 1986. He had just suffered the death of his brothers and agonising break with Alexandra. Exhausted by jet-lag, stiff-gaited and parchment-skinned, he seemed terribly old and shattered. His talk ranged widely and wildly but, rambling and unfocused, he could not — like Ezra Pound in the Cantos — make it cohere.
ellauri106.html on line 529: Without the sure theoretical footing that orthodox Marxism provided those of Benjamin’s generation, Roth, like many who used to kinda identify themselves with the late-20th century left, has been set adrift amid the wreckage of multinational capital, techno-militarism, and the information and cultural revolutions. In his trilogy, Roth offers a complex and beautifully-rendered document of the final decades of the “American Century,” but it is one that, like its narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, ultimately throws up its hands in despair, surrendering the complexities of life and the possibility of positive change en lieu of aesthetic and ascetic remove.
ellauri106.html on line 539: Puritan work ethic is what Roth, through his frequent allusions to New England’s storied past, points to as the source of America’s greatest triumphs—universal education, economic improvement, and those old standbys, rugged individualism and the “American Dream”.
ellauri210.html on line 373: By the time Johnson arrived in Paris, Cravan had carved out a reputation as a boxer himself, a discipline he first picked up while traveling across the USA. He was also known as an ardent proponent of the “American” attitude toward life, by which he meant living according to desire and instinct, and telling so-called civilized society to take a running jump. In an essay titled “To Be or Not To Be … American,” he wrote that, thanks to the influence of cakewalk dancers, track athletes, and boxers such as Joe Jeanette, the whole of Paris had turned American. “Overnight,” Cravan said, “everyone began to spit and swear” and “floated around in clothes two sizes too big for them.” He finished the piece with a crib sheet for how to pass as American: “Chew … never speak … always look busy … and, above all else, crown yourself with arrogance.” It was advice he followed assiduously. How right, how true, to this day.
ellauri248.html on line 347: There was also an allotment process starting in the Dawes Act of 1887 until 1934. This was to force more land from Native people. The ostensible reason was to make them individual landholders and thus “Americanized” members of a capitalist system. It was felt this would “solve” the “Indian problem”. In short that it would make them no longer part of the ethnic communities they were members of. However the main push to “solve” the “problem” was by Anglo-Americans who wanted to take that land. Thus land was distributed to tribal members and the “surplus” was given or sold at a cut rate to White Americans or turned into National Forests and Parks or military bases. Land owned by Native Americans decreased from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres in 1934. They lost 2/3s of their treaty land base. About 90,000 Native Americans were made landless.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 465: “American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis tore into the late author of the critically acclaimed “Infinite Jest” and “The Pale King” on Twitter last week, and in true Ellis fashion, he didn’t hold back.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 474: A few years later, Wallace laid into “American Psycho” in an interview with Larry McCaffery, saying it “panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader itself… You can defend ‘Psycho’ as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.”
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