ellauri107.html on line 412: Maureenin boheemit viisikymppiset kaverit Bleecker Streetin vintiltä sanovat sattuvasti, että Phil Roth on babitti. Se tais jäädä närästämään Peppua, sillä Babbitt putkahtaa esiin vielä Apinan fläkissä.
ellauri107.html on line 414: Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis, is a satirical novel about American culture and society that critiques the vacuity of middle class life and the social pressure toward conformity. The controversy provoked by Babbitt was influential in the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Lewis in 1930.
ellauri107.html on line 416: The word "Babbitt" entered the English language as a "person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards".
ellauri107.html on line 418: In Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis created a living and breathing man with recognizable hopes and dreams, not a caricature. To his publisher, Lewis wrote: “He is all of us Americans at 46, prosperous, but worried, wanting — passionately — to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late.” George F. Babbitt's mediocrity is central to his realism; Lewis believed that the fatal flaw of previous literary representations of the American businessman was in portraying him as “an exceptional man.”
ellauri107.html on line 420: The social critic and satirist Pete Mencken, ardent supporter of Sinclair Lewis, called himself “an old professor of Babbitry” and said that Babbitt was a stunning work of literary realism about American society.
ellauri107.html on line 422: George F. Babbitt was an archetype of the American city dwellers who touted the virtues of Republicanism, Presbyterianism, and absolute conformity because "it is not what he feels and aspires that moves him primarily; it is what the folks about him will think of him. His politics is communal politics, mob politics, herd politics; his religion is a public rite wholly without subjective significance." Mencken said that Babbitt was the literary embodiment of everything wrong with American society.
ellauri107.html on line 424: In the cultural climate of the early 20th century, like-minded critics and Mencken's followers were known as "Babbitt-baiters".
ellauri107.html on line 425: Babbitt-baiting became an irritant to American businessmen, Rotarians, and the like, who began defending the Babbitts of the U.S. by way of radio and magazine journalism. They emphasized the virtues of community organizations and the positive contributions that industrial cities have made to American society.
ellauri107.html on line 427: 1937 English author J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit; the title and the originally somewhat complacent and bourgeois character of Bilbo and hobbits in general were influenced by Babbitt.
ellauri107.html on line 434: Nyt puhuu George F. Babbitt
ellauri107.html on line 436: His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
ellauri107.html on line 438: Myra Babbitt—Mrs. George F. Babbitt—was definitely mature. She had creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now, and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets. She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.
ellauri107.html on line 450: “That's so,” said Mrs. Babbitt.
ellauri107.html on line 461: Ei muuta kun lisää Babbittia tähän perään. Tää on ihan ajankohtasta, mikään ei ole muuttunut jootan vertaa sadassa vuodessa.
ellauri107.html on line 466: He serenely believed that the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligation to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the asking-price.
ellauri107.html on line 473: But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practise, the prohibition of alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the laws against motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the church, the Red Cross, and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his clan and cheated only as it was sanctified by precedent; and he never descended to trickery—though, as he explained to Paul Riesling:
ellauri107.html on line 477: The Athletic Club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with glassy roof-garden above and portico of huge limestone columns below. The lobby, with its thick pillars of porous Caen stone, its pointed vaulting, and a brown glazed-tile floor like well-baked bread-crust, is a combination of cathedral-crypt and rathskeller. The members rush into the lobby as though they were shopping and hadn't much time for it. Thus did Babbitt enter, and to the group standing by the cigar-counter he whooped, “How's the boys? How's the boys? Well, well, fine day!”
ellauri107.html on line 478: Jovially they whooped back—Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, Sidney Finkelstein, the ladies'-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein's department-store, and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway Business College and instructor in Public Speaking, Business English, Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law. Though Babbitt admired this savant, and appreciated Sidney Finkelstein as “a mighty smart buyer and a good liberal spender,” it was to Vergil Gunch that he turned with enthusiasm. Mr. Gunch was president of the Boosters' Club, a weekly lunch-club, local chapter of a national organization which promoted sound business and friendliness among Regular Fellows. He was also no less an official than Esteemed Leading Knight in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and it was rumored that at the next election he would be a candidate for Exalted Ruler. He was a jolly man, given to oratory and to chumminess with the arts.
ellauri107.html on line 481: Say, Sid,” Babbitt turned to Finkelstein, the buyer, “got something wanta ask you about. I went out and bought me an electric cigar-lighter for the car, this noon, and—”
ellauri107.html on line 493: Babbitt snorted, “What do you expect? Think we were sent into the world to have a soft time and—what is it?—'float on flowery beds of ease'? Think Man was just made to be happy?”
ellauri107.html on line 501: “Look here, Stan; let's get this clear. You've got an idea somehow that it's you that do all the selling. Where d' you get that stuff? Where d' you think you'd be if it wasn't for our capital behind you, and our lists of properties, and all the prospects we find for you? All you got to do is follow up our tips and close the deal. The hall-porter could sell Babbitt-Thompson listings! You say you're engaged to a girl, but have to put in your evenings chasing after buyers. Well, why the devil shouldn't you? What do you want to do? Sit around holding her hand? Let me tell you, Stan, if your girl is worth her salt, she'll be glad to know you're out hustling, making some money to furnish the home-nest, instead of doing the lovey-dovey. The kind of fellow that kicks about working overtime, that wants to spend his evenings reading trashy novels or spooning and exchanging a lot of nonsense and foolishness with some girl, he ain't the kind of upstanding, energetic young man, with a future—and with Vision!—that we want here. How about it? What's your Ideal, anyway? Do you want to make money and be a responsible member of the community, or do you want to be a loafer, with no Inspiration or Pep?”
ellauri107.html on line 504: Whenever Thompson twanged, “Put your John Hancock on that line,” Babbitt was as much amused by the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any American. He knew himself to be of a breeding altogether more esthetic and sensitive than Thompson's. He was a college graduate, he played golf, he often smoked cigarettes instead of cigars, and when he went to Chicago he took a room with a private bath. “The whole thing is,” he explained to Paul Riesling, “these old codgers lack the subtlety that you got to have to-day.”
ellauri107.html on line 505: This advance in civilization could be carried too far, Babbitt perceived. Noel Ryland, sales-manager of the Zeeco, was a frivolous graduate of Princeton, while Babbitt was a sound and standard ware from that great department-store, the State University. Ryland wore spats, he wrote long letters about City Planning and Community Singing, and, though he was a Booster, he was known to carry in his pocket small volumes of poetry in a foreign language. All this was going too far. Henry Thompson was the extreme of insularity, and Noel Ryland the extreme of frogginess, while between them, supporting the state, defending the evangelical churches and domestic brightness and sound business, were Babbitt and his friends.
ellauri107.html on line 512: Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, “Yes, I wonder why. Of course I don't want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do think there's things in Shakespeare—not that I read him much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren't, really, they weren't at all nice.”
ellauri107.html on line 513: Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion. But even at risk of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open controversy.
ellauri142.html on line 100: “George Washington was a Mason, along with 13 other presidents and numerous Supreme Court Justices. Benjamin Franklin published a book about Freemasonry on his own printing press. Nine signers of the Declaration of Independence were Freemasons, including the man with way the biggest signature of all: John Hancock.” Put your Hancock right here on the line if it fits, like Babbitt said.
ellauri248.html on line 323: LEWIS, Sinclair, Babbitt : tarina amerikkalaismiehestä, hänen perheestään ja ainoasta hartaasta ystävyydestään. WSOY, 1976 - CHECK
xxx/ellauri138.html on line 195: Ei vaan niinkö Marxia tai Freudia tai Darwinia tai Stalinia tai Hitleriä tai Maoa ei olis ollut olemassa - jopa niinkö ettei Sinclair Lewisia ois ollut olemassa. Ihan niin kun Babbittia olisi koskaan kirjoitettu, Coleman Peppu ajatteli. Ihan niin kuin edes tuota kaikkein yksinkertaisinta fiktiota ei olisi päästetty
xxx/ellauri138.html on line 196: Detroitiin aiheuttamaan pienen pientä hämminkiä. (Mitä vittua se paasaa nyt, Babbitthan on Peppu ize (kz. albumi 107, aatteellisesti prikulleen samanlainen me-first kakka antikommunisti.)
xxx/ellauri138.html on line 198: Tuhon vuosisata (20. siis) joka kiertelee ja tuhoaa jutkurottia enemmän kuin mikään aiempi - miljoonat ja taas miljoonat tavalliset koukkunokat joutuvat kärsimään menetyksen toisensa perästä, julmuuden toisensa perästä, pahuuden toisensa perästä. Enemmän kuin puoli maailmaa joutui alistumaan patologiselle sadismille (ml kommunismille) yhteiskuntakäsitteenä, julman verovainon pelko säätelee ja kahlehtii kokonaisia yrittäjäyhteisöjä, yrittäjäyksilön elämän alennustila organisoidaan ja viedaan läpitte historiassa aikaisemmin tuntemattomassa mittakaavassa, vasemmiston aaterikolliset hajottavat ja orjuuttavat kansakuntia ja riistävät niltä kaiken kaiken, väestö demoralisoituu niin että se aamuisin sängystä noustessaan on kuin Babbitt: ei tunne pienintäkään halua kohdata uutta päivää, valkoinen nymfetti olikin vaan unta ja tytär käyttää väärää pahanhajuista hammastahnaa, kaikki tämän vuosisadan kammottavat koetinkivet!
xxx/ellauri169.html on line 154: As Walt became more successful, he lost touch with his overworked and undercompensated employees, who eventually started to rebel against him. Even Art Babbitt—one of Walt's closest friends and allies and the man who drew Goofy—stood up to Walt. But Walt didn't want to hear the criticism, and he fired Babbitt. Matters only got worse, when in 1941, 200 of Walt's employees picketed outside the studio.
xxx/ellauri298.html on line 639: Campbell attended a Grateful Dead concert in 1986, and marveled that "Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!" Campbell died at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii, on October 30, 1987, from complications of esophageal cancer. The works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had a profound effect on Campbell's thinking; he quoted their writing frequently. Sinclair's Babbitt did not follow his (Joe's) bliss, while Schopenhauer ans Nietzsche did, enviously watching Joseph hump his best friend's wife. Jung's insights into archetypes were heavily influenced by the Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, an interesting tidbit on the side).
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