ellauri011.html on line 516: Though he wrote the book so quickly, it took it quite long to taste the first success of the book. Initially, only 900 copies of the book were published in Portuguese, which later went out of print. But he didn’t give up, went to a new publisher, added the beginning sentence “When you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you.” And, the icing on the cake was the 1993 release of its English version which took the novel to new heights. Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist.
ellauri014.html on line 76: We’d read all these things about leather and we didn’t have any leather but I had my oilskins and we had some polythene bags from somewhere. We all dressed up in them and wore them in bed. John stayed the night with us in the same bed. I don’t think anything very exciting happened and we all wondered what the fun was in being ‘kinky’.
ellauri038.html on line 147: When it comes right down to it I’d much rather have been a Basel professor than God; but I didn’t dare be selfish enough to forgo the creation of the world.
ellauri038.html on line 154: As for why this deserves to be called philosophy, it depends on how we define the term. There were philosophers at Athens besides Socrates and Plato, who didn’t oppose philosophy to rhetoric and for whom personal authority was essential to their teaching. Nietzsche aimed to bring that back, at least in his own case – which is the only one that really mattered to him.
ellauri042.html on line 937: John Donne is most commonly known for being part of the ‘metaphysical poets’, a group of poets who wrote about love and religion using complex metaphors called conceits. These poets didn’t know each other, and this name was given by literary critics some years later. Nevertheless, John Donne is considered to be one of the best metaphysical poets. John Donne converted to Anglicanism later in his life. By 1615 he became a priest because King James I ordered him to do so. Donne was a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614. He also spent a short time in prison because he married his wife, Anne More, without permission. They had twelve children and Anne died while extruding the XIIth.
ellauri052.html on line 857: Well into his career, Bellow combined the confessional with a mid-century notion of alienation, which meant, for Bellow, man’s inability to get outside his own head. (I use the masculine advisedly; Bellow didn’t go deep enough into women’s heads to need to get out of them.)
ellauri052.html on line 940: Greg had made a career out of his own childhood misery—a nasty dig given that Saul was as much the author of that misery as he was of his novels. Greg noted, with shrugging disapproval, that his father “felt a duty of truth to his readers that was stronger than to his family,” but indicated he still didn’t understand or accept this about his father. Perhaps he can’t be expected to. “All significant human business is transacted inside,” was Saul’s lesson to Greg, who doesn’t seem to have forgiven his father for it being true.
ellauri052.html on line 944: It may be helpful to note here that Bellow’s fame, already growing after The Adventures of Augie March, exploded after the publication of Herzog in 1964—the same year Daniel, his youngest son, was born. By the time the newly rich writer, urged by his third wife, moved into a fancy co-op on Lake Michigan, Greg already possessed enough of what he thought were his own opinions to dislike the white plush carpets, the 11 rooms “filled with fancy furniture and modern art.” Reminding the reader he was “raised by a frugal mother and a father who had no steady income,” Greg says that he “found the trappings of wealth in their new apartment so repellent that I complained bitterly to Saul,” who replied that he didn’t care about the new shiny things so long as he could still write—which he could. “As I always had, I accepted what he said about art at face value,” Greg admits, but he stopped visiting the new place. After the marriage deteriorated and Saul moved out, 3-year-old Daniel, in the words of ex-child-therapist Greg, “took to expressing his distress” by peeing on the carpets. “I have to admit that the yellow stains on them greatly pleased me,” Greg writes—for once showing off the Bellovian touch.
ellauri052.html on line 948: His good looks, exciting mind, sharp wit and exalted reputation were catnip to the ladies, whom he easily captured but could not control. Though not cut out for marriage, he had five wives and divorced the first four. One of his three sons explained, “He liked being taken care of. He liked beautiful, intelligent, spirited women. He didn’t like being bored.” Except in the arse.
ellauri063.html on line 47: Yes, Orwell was not exactly LGBTQ-friendly. He had a lot of opinions which now seem eccentric or objectionable. He had a lifelong tendency to make disparaging remarks about vegetarians, or people who wore sandals. I suspect that this came from the association in his mind of socialism with people who lived the early 20th century equivalent of an alternative lifestyle: it was very important to Orwell to show people that being socialist didn’t mean that you had to have to have a long beard, wear sandals or not eat meat, and that socialism was thoroughly British, manly and commonsensical.
ellauri063.html on line 319: “There is no contradiction between creation and destruction. I never thought music was a healing force of the universe. I didn’t agree with Mr. Albert Ayler. But we wanted to change things; we needed a new start. In Germany, we all grew up with the same thing: ‘Never again.’ But in the government, all the same old Nazis were still there. We were angry. We wanted to do something.” Like jazz.
ellauri064.html on line 524: “The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million: they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline. ”
ellauri069.html on line 42: Modern art didn’t abandon the world, but it made art-making part of the subject matter of art. When (in the second account) did a break occur? It happened when artists and intellectuals stopped respecting a bright-line distinction between high art and commercial culture. Modernist art and literature, in this version of the story, depended on that distinction to give its products critical authority. Modernism was formally difficult and intellectually challenging. Its thrills were not cheap. But there were cheap thrills out there, a vast and growing mass of products manufactured to stroke the senses and flatter the self-images of their consumers. This bubble-gum culture wasn’t just averse to the spirit of high art. It was high art’s reason for being.
ellauri070.html on line 384: "A penny saved is a penny earned" is a quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, however, he didn’t coin it. In his 1737 Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin delivered the line: “A penny saved is two pence clear.” And later, in the 1758 almanac, he wrote a version closer to the saying we know: "A penny saved is a penny got." He never used the word "earned."
ellauri072.html on line 178: “A lot of biographers didn’t want to go into that subject,” Hart said, shrugging. “Maybe they thought they would turn away readers.”
ellauri077.html on line 205: Capitalism has made it so there’s a perpetual tidal wave of American culture crashing down around the globe. When The Force Awakens was released last December, it didn’t just open coast to coast across North America—it appeared in over 30 countries across five continents within its first week. When Dan Brown’s novel Inferno was released in 2013, it didn’t just sell out in every Costco in these 50 states: a team of 11 translators were locked away in a garret somewhere so that the book could have a simultaneous worldwide release. By early 2014 it was available in over 20 different languages.
ellauri078.html on line 151: Dickinson left the academy at the age of 15 in order to pursue a higher, and for women, final, level of education. In the fall of 1847 Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Under the guidance of Mary Lyon, the school was known for its religious predilection. Part and parcel of the curriculum were weekly sessions with Lyon in which religious questions were examined and the state of the students’ faith assessed. The young women were divided into three categories: those who were “established Christians,” those who “expressed hope,” and those who were “without hope.” Much has been made of Emily’s place in this latter category and of the widely circulated story that she was the only member of that group. Years later fellow student Clara Newman Turner remembered the moment when Mary Lyon “asked all those who wanted to be Christians to rise.” Emily remained seated. No one else did. Turner reports Emily’s comment to her: “‘They thought it queer I didn’t rise’—adding with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I thought a lie would be queerer.’“
ellauri079.html on line 122: A lot of fans will remember this awkward but funny family from TV and probably be able to sing the theme song without having to hear it. The Beverly Hillbillies were after all a favorite show back in their day and inspired a lot of other ideas that came much later, like David Foster Wallace´s magnum opus The Infinite Jest. The attempt to make a movie out of the show wasn’t all that successful and kind of left a bad taste in a lot of peoples’ mouths since it was such a poor attempt that even watching the trailer was something that people didn’t want to admit for a while. Sometimes the best thing you can do is remember the good times and think back to the original that made it something special. Lets hope they will never, never try to make a movie out of Infinite Jest. Jim Incandenza tried that once already, with singularly bad results.
ellauri080.html on line 741: In 1897, he was stripped and nearly lynched by a white mob in Natal, but when the governor sought to press charges, Gandhi refused – saying he didn’t want to use a court of law for personal issues.
ellauri082.html on line 143: It’s too late because someone got there first and took the anti-Entertainment cartridge (126) embedded in JOI’s head (31). Whoever took it is presumably the person who’s made and mailed the extant copies. It couldn’t be the A.F.R. or O.U.S. or they wouldn’t still be searching for it. It probably wasn’t the F.L.Q. because they didn’t know how to read master cartridges—they just thought they were blank tapes in their displays were blank. (483n205) It couldn’t be Avril acting alone; she has problems but she’s not that kind of cold-blooded killer. It had to have been Orin.1
ellauri083.html on line 378: “What astounds me,” said Ziering in an interview, is that for the past nearly three decades, people assume that this has been a matter of “he said, she said”—meaning Allen’s word versus Farrow’s. But after Ziering and codirector Kirby Dick began their research, they realized, “Actually, it’s been a ‘he said, he said’ situation. Mia didn’t even speak until the Vanity Fair interview [in 2013]. Never. She is such a private person. That’s really important to know. And she was sort of blindsided by all these events that happened to her. And kept trying to navigate the best that she could just to protect her children and family.”
ellauri097.html on line 302: In some respects this reflects a national pathology. Unlike an American or British child, an Australian student can go through thirteen years of education without reading much of their country’s literature at all (of the more than twenty writers I studied in high school, only two were Australian). This is symptomatic of the country’s famed “cultural cringe,” a term first coined in the 1940s by the critic A.A. Phillips to describe the ways that Australians tend to be prejudiced against home-grown art and ideas in favor of those imported from the UK and America. Australia’s attitude to the arts has, for much of the last two centuries, been moral. “What these idiots didn’t realize about White was that he was the most powerful spruiker for morality that anybody was going to read in an Australian work,” argued David Marr, White’s biographer, during a talk at the Wheeler Centre in 2013. “And here were these petty little would-be moral tyrants whinging about this man whose greatest message about this country in the end was that we are an unprincipled people.”
ellauri097.html on line 416: Nietzsche meant that Kant established the validity of Christian morality by making philosophical arguments that didn’t rely on Christian beliefs. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes (in German though):
ellauri099.html on line 203: Athens didn’t make the same mistake as Thebes and meekly submitted to the Macedonian pike. It is in this context that Aristotle returned to the city at around age 50. And he came back big time. Because of his metic status, Aristotle was not allowed to buy property. So — as one does — he rented. He took over a gymnasium site sacred to Apollo Lyceus (the wolf-god) and transformed it into the most powerful and well-endowed school in the world.
ellauri099.html on line 213: It leads one to ponder the awkward proximity between philosophy and political power. It is unclear whether the school charged fees but, given its vast wealth, it probably didn’t need to. It sounds a little like Harvard, doesn’t it?
ellauri100.html on line 493: We are interested in measuring happiness on this site because many studies have found that religious people are happier than non-believers, and some have found that politcally conservative people are slightly happier than are political liberals, even after controlling statistically for religiosity. A recent Gallup survey found that religiosity was associated with better mental health for Republicans, but it didn’t make a difference for Democrats. We want to investigate these complex relationships among happiness, morality, religion, and ideology.
ellauri106.html on line 46: Philip Roth has not had much luck with biographers. Late in his life, furiously aggrieved after the failure of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the publication of Bloom’s incendiary memoir of their years together, he asked a close friend, Ross Miller, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, to take on the task. Roth sent Miller lists of family members and friends he wanted to be interviewed, along with the questions that he felt should be asked. (“Would you have expected him to achieve success on the scale he has?”) It didn’t work out, for various reasons. Roth had wanted Miller to refute a familiar charge, “this whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit!” that he felt flattened his long erotic history into one false accusation. But Miller came to his own conclusion. “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip,” he told a cousin of Roth’s. (Sandy was Roth’s older brother.) “They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”
ellauri107.html on line 158: “Found it!” he announces. “Opened the book and skimmed for 10 minutes and there it was. Goes like this, and you’re ideally situated to hear it: ‘A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns. The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up … In the destructive element immerse.’ This has been my credo, the lifeblood of my books. I knew it was from Lord Jim but didn’t know where. All I had to do was put myself in a trance and I found it: ‘In the destructive element immerse.’ It’s what I’ve said to myself in art and, woe is me, in life too. Submit to the deeps. Let them buoy you up.”
ellauri111.html on line 228: “The question is: what is guilt and what is it to be guilty or to confess your guilt? Most people don’t understand this at all. They think it’s just a matter of fact – did he or didn’t he do it? If he did, he’s guilty, if he didn’t, he’s not guilty. Remember what Ivan Karamazov said, that everyone wants to kill their father – but the world knows many of these mental parricides as obedient and loving sons, who are not guilty of anything.”
ellauri111.html on line 247: “Sorry, I didn’t mean that in a bad way, but …”
ellauri111.html on line 263: As Fyodor Mikhailovich spoke, he became quite agitated. His face narrowed and his eyes flashed. At first he had just tapped his fingers intermittently on the arms of his chair but as he went on he started to wave his hands around with increasing energy. Whatever he had seen in the world he now inhabited, it was clear that he was still unreconciled to the outrages that adult human beings inflict on children, who, as he had said in The Brothers Karamazov, hadn’t eaten that fatal apple. I didn’t know the details of the cases he was talking about, but I couldn’t help thinking about a particularly horrifying case that had recently happened here in Scotland. I’ll spare you the details.
ellauri111.html on line 291: “I remember. It’s unforgettable. Horrific. In a way I’m not surprised they didn’t let you publish it.”
ellauri111.html on line 293: “Nor was I, though it was very frustrating. But you will also remember that he didn’t just go to confess his sin in the way that a normal penitent does: he had even arranged for a full copy to be printed, ready to be published for the world to see.”
ellauri111.html on line 303: “Exactly! It’s a performance. It’s not the heart speaking. The heart would say something very different. In fact, the heart wouldn’t need to say very much at all: it has only one thing to say, to love and to ask for love, to forgive and to ask forgiveness. We’ve been talking about people who commit crimes but won’t own up to what they’ve done, people who want to say to anyone who’ll listen: ‘Not guilty! My conscience is clear! Don’t blame me!’ But the real problem is not the evidence of the facts—did he or didn’t he do this or say that. The real problem is that this is completely back to front. The person who loves, even if they haven’t committed any crimes, is the person who wants to be guilty, who doesn’t just want to forgive but wants to be forgiven; the person who thinks of themselves not only as guilty but infinitely guilty, guilty of everything, before everyone, in fact the guiltiest one of all.”
ellauri112.html on line 702: I appreciated the fact that a troubled mom did seek help, I’m just not sure the script needed the plot twist. I didn’t immediately warm to this flick. Actually, I often alternated between exasperation and captivation – and a key plot twist at the end left a sour taste in my mouth, though for petty reasons. Nonetheless, something about it didn’t feel quite right. It took one observation from a friend afterward to allow for the film’s brilliance to bloom in my mind.
ellauri112.html on line 879: But didn’t Paul Tell Timothy to Take Wine for His Stomach?
ellauri119.html on line 720: In a different scene, Hank Rearden helps a small manufacturer, a guy Rand describes as respectable but no master of industry. Rearden could have refused to help or charged him an exorbitant amount for the favor. But he didn’t. Again, this portrayal of a wealthy industrialist doesn’t fit your contention that Rand advocated a dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism.
ellauri133.html on line 466: I think the whole story is a bit of a— approaches the theme of growing up, and the group sex episode in the book is a bit of a metaphor of the end of childhood and into adulthood. And I don’t think it was really needed in the movie, apart that it was very hard to allow us to shoot an orgy in the movie so, I didn’t think it was necessary because the story itself is a bit of a journey, and it illustrates that. And in the end, the replacement for it is the scene with the blood oath, where everyone sort of says goodbye. Spoiler. The blood oath scene is there and it’s the last time they see each other as a group. It’s unspoken. And they don’t know it, but it’s a bit of a foreboding that this is the last time, and being together was a bit of a necessity to beat the monster. Now that the monster recedes, they don’t need to be together. And also because their childhood is ending, and their adulthood is starting. And that’s the bittersweet moment of that sequence. Blood oath, bloody sheath, they even sound the same.
ellauri133.html on line 565: Teppo and chubby Tabitha are still happily married, and continue to write successful works of fiction. Teppo fell in love with Tabitha because Tabitha understood his art. Tabitha grew tired of King’s habits with drugs and alcohol. Eventually, she called up an intervention for her husband. If he didn’t get his act together, he would be forced to the curb. So he got his act together.
ellauri147.html on line 340: "It really hurt my career, or my public persona," he said. “It was based on an untruth…If I say it didn’t happen, I’m trusting that people will believe me.”
ellauri147.html on line 350: Although he was anxious about introducing Orianne to his daughter, all was well after Collins told six-year-old Lily that Orianne looked just like Princess Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin. The couple tied the knot in 1999, but it also didn’t stand the test of time…
ellauri152.html on line 605: Or it would be fine if the movie didn’t play it for laughs. The movie puts Yentl in multiple awkward situations where she has to perform verbal and physical gymnastics to keep people from seeing her without clothes, that gross classic trope whereby trans characters are outed all the time in fiction. As always, the movie drags this scene out into a whole joke, that Yentl has to scramble to prevent Badass from finding out she’s a woman because Badass wants to have sex with her, a woman, isn’t that just soooooo funny? On multiple levels, I am unamused and unhappy.
ellauri152.html on line 622: And yet in other ways, the film can’t help preserving the queerness of the story despite itself. Barbra Streisand can add a song about how Yentl is just jealous of Badass for being a conventionally feminine woman whom Avigdor loves, but she can’t stop me from putting my grubby little bi hands all over her film, pointing at Yentl’s tortured gaze aimed at Badass, and saying “GAY.” And she certainly didn’t no-homo the interactions between Anshel and Avigdor very well, because they are in fact very yes-homo, and I will point and say “GAY” at that too.
ellauri155.html on line 376: Cursory inspection of the incident proved that was total bunk, I mean that it didn’t matter.
ellauri161.html on line 631: I’ve seen some people criticise Don’t Look Up for lacking subtlety. I’m not bothered by this. I don’t necessarily need or want the communications about climate change to be subtle. The issue itself certainly is not subtle. We are heading towards—and, again, already are in the midst of—unprecedented death and destruction. Our systems and rulers are not just woefully ill-equipped to deal with this or to prevent the worst of it, they are actively complicit in bringing it about. Those communities around the world that are the most vulnerable and that have had the least part to play in causing the crisis will be the ones to suffer the first and the worst. This isn’t subtle sh*t! This is horrifying, grotesque, psychologically debilitating stuff to ponder—if you even have the privilege to ponder in the first place! I don’t necessarily need subtlety here. Sometimes, to fight propaganda, you need to go loud and bold. But you still have to be effective. We are fighting an almightily powerful enemy. Competence is a necessary minimum. Regrettably, Don’t Look Up does not meet those standards. Its central metaphor doesn’t even make sense! Yes, capitalism is responding as dreadfully to climate change in real life as it does to the comet in the film—the key difference is that capitalism didn’t cause that comet to come hurtling out of the sky in the first place.
ellauri164.html on line 370: I thought this was one of those books that comes with a “guarantee.” But of course there is no such thing. Still, I’d read only glowing reviews and boy was I ready for a “triumphant experience.” But on p. 26 I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was really reading about. On p. 54 the voice of the innocent and well-meaning young priest began to irk the shit out of me. On p. 55 I skipped ahead to see if anything would ever actually happen to dilute all the fluffy introspection and it didn’t look promising. On p. 64 I took the kitty to the well and drowned it.
ellauri164.html on line 502: Another thing we see from Moses during his time spent in Midian is that, when God finally did call him into service, Moses was resistant. The man of action early in his life, Moses, now 80 years old, became overly timid. When called to speak for God, Moses said he was “slow of speech and tongue” (Exodus 4:10). Some commentators believe that Moses may have had a speech impediment. Perhaps, but then it would be odd for Stephen to say Moses was “mighty in words and deeds” (Acts 7:22). Perhaps Moses just didn’t want to go back into Egypt and fail again. This isn’t an uncommon feeling. How many of us have tried to do something (whether or not it was for God) and failed, and then been hesitant to try again? There are two things Moses seemed to have overlooked. One was the obvious change that had occurred in his own life in the intervening 40 years. The other, and more important, change was that God would be with him. Moses failed at first not so much because he acted impulsively, but because he acted without God. Therefore, the lesson to be learned here is that when you discern a clear call from God, step forward in faith, knowing that God goes with you! Do not be timid, but be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might (Ephesians 6:10).
ellauri164.html on line 504: The third and final chapter in Moses’ life is the chapter that Scripture spends the most time chronicling, namely, his role in the redemption of Israel. Several lessons can be gleaned from this chapter of Moses’ life as well. First is how to be an effective leader of people. Moses essentially had responsibility over two million Hebrew refugees. When things began to wear on him, his father-in-law, Jethro Tull, suggested that he delegate responsibility to other faithful men, a lesson that many people in authority over others need to learn (Exodus 18). We also see a man who was dependent on the grace of God to help with his task. Moses was continually pleading on behalf of the people before God. If only all people in authority would petition God on behalf of those over whom they are in charge! Moses was keenly aware of the necessity of God’s presence and even requested to see God’s glory (Exodus 33). Moses knew that, apart from God, the exodus would be meaningless. It was God who made the Israelites distinct, and they needed Him most. Moses’ life also teaches us the lesson that there are certain sins that will continue to haunt us throughout our lives. The same hot temper that got Moses into trouble in Egypt also got him into trouble during the wilderness wanderings. In the aforementioned incident at Meribah, Moses struck the rock in anger in order to provide water for the people. However, he didn’t give God the glory, nor did he follow God’s precise commands. Because of this, God forbade him from entering the Promised Land. In a similar manner, we all succumb to certain besetting sins which plague us all our days, sins that require us to be on constant alert.
ellauri164.html on line 628: Moses was in no mood to deal with this today. Why couldn’t these people let him mourn his sister in peace? Why had God brought them to a dry thirsty land with no water again? Why did these people always blame him? Why didn’t these people bring their problems to God in prayer instead of always complaining to him? Why were there always so many demands on him? Why was it always “Moses, Moses, Moses”?
ellauri164.html on line 681: That’s ALL God had to say about it. He didn’t criticize Moses for striking the rock when he was told to speak to it. Similarly, God did not indicate that Moses was trying to take credit for the miracle. He said Moses had failed to believe in Him.
ellauri164.html on line 705: Based on the pattern established in Numbers, what do you expect will happen at Meribah when the people rebel against Moses? We expect the pattern to repeat and for God to decree punishment, but that doesn’t happen. The pattern breaks down! Instead of decreeing punishment for the people’s sin, God simply tells Moses to give the people water by speaking to the rock. This is a significant departure from the previous pattern. When a Bible author develops a pattern and then breaks it, we should pay attention because this signals that the author wants us to notice something important. Why didn’t God punish the people at Meribah? Why did he go at Moses instead?
ellauri164.html on line 707: To understand why God didn’t pronounce judgement, let’s notice what Moses did. He leads the people to the rock, calls them rebels, and instead of speaking to the rock he hits it twice with this staff. Moses is having a temper tantrum. In the prior examples in Numbers Moses never speaks harshly or loses patience. Moses is also breaking the pattern and this is the clue to understanding his sin.
ellauri164.html on line 717: Conclusion: Moses’s sin wasn’t striking the rock as such when he was told to speak to it; his sin was losing faith in God’s ability to use the Israelites for anything positive. This is why God could say that Moses didn’t trust in Him and is also why Moses could say God was angry with him on account of the people.
ellauri164.html on line 844: So why didn’t Moses do what God told him to do? God tells us why:
ellauri164.html on line 845: Moses didn’t trust God enough. Oh, he was trusting, but not quite to the point of doing what he was told, how he was told, when he was told.
ellauri172.html on line 301: 36 When Balak(L) heard that Balaam was coming, he went out to meet him at the Moabite town on the Arnon(M) border, at the edge of his territory. 37 Balak said to Balaam, “Did I not send you an urgent summons? Why didn’t you come to me? Am I really not able to reward you?”
ellauri180.html on line 53: Executive producers Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson agreed that in the book series, Elena was turned into a vampire too early, which was around page 200 of The Awakening. Elena's transition into a vampire was planned for two years. Plec said: "That felt obviously too soon, and rushed, and we didn’t want to make a show about a teenage girl who instantly becomes a vampire. But we always knew that her journey would take her there eventually". At the second season's conclusion, Elena was nearly turned into a vampire. Dobrev was happy that she wasn't, because she felt "it would have been like she came too soon", and also didn't think it was something Elena or she wanted.
ellauri180.html on line 299: For the longest time, I didn’t think that white authors should write non-white characters. I had seen it done badly (as my previous article about Sarah J. Maas explains) and offensively (think J. K. Rowling with Cho Chang and the Patil twins).
ellauri183.html on line 86: In a 1974 New York Review of Boox essay, Roth took on Malamud, his friend and literary father-figure, criticizing him for creating characters that were suffering Jews, virtuous victims, full of “righteousness and restraint,” lacking their stereotypical “libidinous or aggressive activities.” Though he didn’t use the phrase, Malamud had painted them as Christ-like in their poverty, pain, moral goodness, and quest for redemption. By contrast, the Christian characters, like Frank Alpine, were full of sexual lust and transgressive behavior — the bad goy to Morris Bober’s good Jew. “The Assistant,” Roth wrote, was a book of “stern morality.”
ellauri183.html on line 91: Roth wrote back, audaciously insisting that he had pointed out “fictional skeletons” that perhaps Malamud himself didn’t see. Like a sanctimonious little shit.
ellauri185.html on line 861: Bellow didn’t just model some main characters on famous friends, but all characters were taken from life. He was in many ways a very thoughtful and kind person, but I think his need to be the top dog, the best, was very deep.
ellauri189.html on line 761: A man marries his dead brother’s widow if the brother didn’t have children. In the Torah it is called Yibum.
ellauri189.html on line 791: It is true that the Pashtuns do not speak Hebrew, but I think it is highly probable that Pashto is the Yidish of Pashtuns. It is also possible that Pashtuns didn’t need another foreign language (like Jews needed to know German or Spanish) because unlike Jews, Pashtuns had their own territory. It might be just a wild theory, but it might have been used, like Yidish, so that Pashtuns won’t mix with other nations.
ellauri189.html on line 799: People who are descendents of Bene Israel who didn’t keep the religion of Moses and Israel, but didn’t mix with other people.
ellauri189.html on line 805: So the question is whether one believes the tradition that Pashtuns didn’t mix with other nations or doesn’t. It is less provable than the tradition of being Bene Israel, because if Pashtuns did mix and stopped mixing at some generation A, it is possible that the tradition of not mixing was created at a later generation B, if they didn’t mix for enough generations.
ellauri189.html on line 807: That said, I think it is more likely that they didn’t mix than that they did. One reason is because the current situation is that most Pashtuns are not mixing. Another reason is that I can’t find a good reason why at some generation A they’d stop mixing after they mixed before that. And finally, we know from Moses (Deuteronomy 30), from Yehezkel (37), from Yirmiya (31), Yishaaya (51, 27), and from many other prophecies that the Bene Israel are out there (those who were exiled by the damn Assyrian). Because we know they don’t keep Judaism, the only possibility for them to exist as Israelis is by not mixing, and there is one, and only one, nation that fits those conditions, and it is the Pashtuns.
ellauri189.html on line 809: I should note that if some of the Pashtun tribes are descendants of Bene Israel and others aren’t, and the Pashtuns mixed within themselves, that would exclude Pashtuns from category 2. Yet, as far as I know, mixing even between tribes is rare (or at least was rare until recently). So I guess that if you are a Pashtun and the elders of your tribe say you are Bene Israel and that your tribe’s ancestors didn’t mix with tribes that aren’t Bene Israel, then you are Israeli. Otherwise, there might be some doubts in case some tribes (those that don’t have this tradition) weren’t original Pashtuns but adopted the Pashtuns’ culture at some point in history.
ellauri197.html on line 78: The two stanzas of the poem are quite similar in form. Yeats repeats parts of the same lines twice in order to maintain the song-like qualities of the first three lines that he could remember. The speaker’s relationship failed because, despite his love’s urgings, he did not take life or love easy. Perhaps he rushed into things too quickly or made decisions that she didn’t approve of. Either way, it ended in tears.
ellauri197.html on line 82: Yeats engages with several important themes in ‘Down By the Salley Gardens’ such as memory and love/relationships. There is also a great deal of regret underneath these primary themes. The speaker spends the poem looking back at a failed relationship, one that he surely regrets and would like to go back and change. He knows exactly what he did wrong, in fact, his love warned him about it several times and he didn’t listen. This is likely part of what makes the loss so painful, even though a great deal of time has passed.
ellauri210.html on line 383: The money Cravan earned from the Johnson fight helped him buy his passage out of Europe, and what he thought was safety from the war. In January 1917, he sailed for New York. Dozens of other European artists and intellectuals were making the same journey at the time; one of Cravan’s shipmates was Leon Trotsky, who noted in his diary that he’d met a man who claimed to be related to Oscar Wilde and “who frankly declared that he would rather smash a Yankee’s face in the noble art of boxing than be done in by a German.” Cravan didn’t stay in New York long; just long enough to put several noses metsphorically out of joint. He split his time between sleeping rough in Central Park and hobnobbing with Greenwich Village bohemians. Among them was the poet Mina Loy, with whom Cravan began an intense love affair.
ellauri210.html on line 385: New York’s first encounter with modern art had come four years earlier with the seminal Armory Show, at which Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase caused an almighty rumpus. This time, Duchamp presented Fountain, the urinal that changed art history. Having witnessed Cravan’s work back in Paris, Duchamp and Picabia invited Cravan to deliver one of his anti-art lectures at the exhibition. He didn’t disappoint. On the day, he stood half cut in front of his audience, swore at them, waved his cock around, and was promptly arrested.
ellauri214.html on line 88: The Harry Potter series didn’t become a global phenomenon just because it was an exciting adventure, but because there was a real heart to it, characters who had both strengths and weaknesses, who struggled with their choices, much like Batman or Superman. Not so this time. Instead, “The Casual Vacancy” is a generally well-written book whose central theme is responsibility for those less fortunate, all the time imbued with ever-present British themes of class and notions of propriety.
ellauri214.html on line 554: “I opened a history that was taboo from a number of perspectives: it was swept under the carpet by Catholics, Jews and communists. It took me eight years to research such fragile and contentious facts,” she says, “But after I won the Nike Jogging Shoe Award [Poland’s most prestigious literary prize], I was attacked by people who didn’t want to know about Poland’s dark past.” She sighs.
ellauri219.html on line 300: Striking and versatile, Tony Curtis was a Hollywood idol who made a dizzying amount of movies (over 100) between 1949 and 2008. He will always be remembered for his role alongside Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe (No.25) in the 1959 cross-dressing caper Some Like It Hot, but another stand-out remains his performance alongside Burt Lancaster as fast-talking press agent Sidney Falco in the 1957 film noir The Sweet Smell Of Success. Tässä jää nyt mainizematta Veijareita ja pyhimyksiä (The Persuaders!), ITC Entertainmentin 1970–1971 tuottama televisiosarja. Sen pääosissa esiintyivät Tony Curtis (Danny Wilde) ja Roger Moore (lordi Brett Sinclair; koko nimi Brett Rupert George Robert Andrew Sinclair, Marnockin 15. jaarli). Sitä tehtiin 24 jaksoa. Tony ja Roger eivät voineet sietää toisiaan. Läskiintynyt Tony kuoli kasarina sydämen pysähdyxeen. Rooger aateloitiin, vaikkei käynyt loppuun edes teatterikoulua. “But because of the war there were 16 girls in every class to four boys so while I didn’t learn that much about acting, I learned a hell of a lot about sex.”
ellauri222.html on line 74: Bellow didn’t just model some main characters on famous friends, but all characters were taken from life. He was in many ways a very thoughtful and kind person, but I think his need to be the top dog, the best, was very deep.
ellauri222.html on line 94: “It was part of who he was, but he didn’t want to be thought of as a ‘Jewish’ author,” Wolpe, who has been the top-ranked rabbi on the Newsweek “50 Most Influential Rabbis in America” list, told JNS.org.
ellauri222.html on line 121: Abraham spent the rest of his life in Chicago, and he ended up running a retail coal business. But he never really learned English—Yiddish was the language at home—and he never became a citizen. He had no passport and no driver’s license (which didn’t prevent him from driving). Saul did not become an American citizen until 1943.
ellauri222.html on line 149: The subject of “Augie March” is the same as the subject of “Dangling Man” and “The Victim”: the danger of becoming trapped in other people’s definition of you. In the case of “Augie March,” the person in danger of being trapped was Saul Bellow. “This was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant”: he is referring to the expectations of his intellectual backers. He realized that he didn’t want to be the great hope of the novel or to give voice to a generation’s angst. He wanted to write up the life he knew in the way James Joyce had written up the life he knew, and to transform it into a fantastic verbal artifact, a book that broke all the rules.
ellauri222.html on line 179: I have just given you the back story and the dramatis personae of “Herzog.” “Herzog” is a novel about a forty-seven-year-old man having a nervous breakdown after learning that his much younger wife, who has left him abruptly, had been cheating on him with his closest friend. The man seeks succor in the arms of a loving, patient, and understanding woman. There is at least one respect in which the novel is not based on real life: Bellow didn’t have a nervous breakdown. He wrote “Herzog” instead.
ellauri236.html on line 398: While he waited, Eddie noticed a girl standing by a nearby bus stop. She immediately attracted his attention: every good-looking girl did. She was a tall, cool-looking blonde with a figure that made him come in his pants twice. She had a pert prettiness that appealed to Eddie. He studied her face for a brief moment. Her make-up was good. Her mouth was a trifle large, but Eddie didn’t mind that. He liked the sexy look she had and the sophisticated way she wore her yellow summery whore dress.
ellauri240.html on line 61: Another Jewish woman, Nora Barnacle burned most of the letters she received in 1909 from her lover who signed his name, “Jim.” But she didn’t destroy all of them. Indeed, they have survived all these years. In one of them, Jim, aka James Joyce, wrote to his muse whom he called his “little fuckbird,” “Fuck me, darling, in as many ways as your lust will suggest.” He went on and on: ”Fuck me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy.” Sellaisia ne miehet on, koprofiilejä.
ellauri257.html on line 506: In the United States, Singer went through a period of depression in which he published little fiction, until in 1938, he met Alma Wasserman and the two married in 1940. For Singer as homo domesticus, I needed the views of his wife, Alma Haimann, whom I’ll refer to by her first name hereafter. I had read in a 1970s article from The Jewish Exponent that Alma had been at work on an autobiography. “I’m about as far as the first 100 pages,” she told the Philadelphia newspaper. I was also aware, from Paul Kresh’s 1979 biography, “The Magician of West 86th Street,” that Singer didn’t think his wife would ever finish the manuscript. But was there such a manuscript?
ellauri264.html on line 442: From an early age, Pattis says he has felt a burning desire to know God personally. To that end, he spent time in Switzerland at the compound of an American Christian fundamentalist thinker named Francis Schaeffer and then inveigled himself in the graduate philosophy program of Columbia University, where he studied and taught for six years. At one point, he nearly joined the CIA, but that opportunity fizzled when the agency didn’t like his polygraph answers about homosexual experiences. “I said, ‘Well, I haven’t had any yet. I don’t know how I’m going to respond if you ask,’ ” he recalls. “I think they decided that was a little too much for them.”
ellauri264.html on line 702: Steve Jobs is known to all as the founder of Apple, known to fewer as a ruthless man who squeezed and burned many bridges with his friends and employees and even known to fewer as a man who chose to become the “bad man”/Devil´s Advocate. But - get this! Steve would wait in line in the Apple cafeteria like everyone else. He could have easily gone to the front of any line, or have someone get food for him. But he didn’t. On a number of occasions, he ended up in line behind me. And often he would ask me to ‘hold his place’ while he went to check other food stations.
ellauri270.html on line 371: Finally, the last man has drawn. Mr. Summers says, “all right, fellows,” and, after a moment of stillness, all the papers are opened. The crowd begins to ask who has it. Some begin to say that it’s Bill Hutchinson. Mrs. Dunbar tells her son to go tell his father who was chosen, and Horace leaves. Bill Hutchinson is quietly staring down at his piece of paper, but suddenly Tessie yells at Mr. Summers that he didn’t give her husband enough time to choose, and it wasn’t fair.
ellauri270.html on line 379: Bill Hutchinson regretfully agrees with Mr. Summers, and says that his only other family is “the kids.” Mr. Summers formally asks how many kids there are, and Bill responds that there are three: Bill Jr., Nancy, and little Davy. Mr. Graves takes the slips of paper back and puts five, including the marked slip of paper, in the black box. The others he drops on the ground, where a breeze catches them. Mrs. Hutchinson says that she thinks the ritual should be started over—it wasn’t fair, as Bill didn’t have enough time to choose his slip.
ellauri309.html on line 292: kind of retraction after I reached out to her, it didn’t stop some of her
ellauri324.html on line 240: If the author of the question long one is wealthy and well traveled he would know that Europe and Asia had many technological advances long before USA did or will ever have such as TGV or bullet trains for example. After spending time in Europe and Asia it was decades later I saw many of these advances here to buy or experience. Japanese cars nearly sunk USA automakers. Why didn’t the corp heads heed anything. TGV in France and Japan and other nations is unrivaled and we have not even one such train here. Tankless water heaters, available in Asia and Europe decades before here. Roads and other infrastructure also superior. My research shows that Americans were so busy creating totalitarian policies like redlining and private cars and pools and expressways removed entire neighborhoods of blacks to create all white suburbs that they were unconcerned with advances that would unite people. Sure everywhere are class societies but it’s a whole different level here. The homeless situation is opening eyes in this country and many things are borne out of a highly segregated society where it’s expensive to live in certain cities and suburbs and the rest be damned. Obviously California has destroyed itself from within. The liberals there and other states are the most class and race conscious than any other people on earth. This blind spot is like a beacon. A prism that breaks down social order. The wealthy libs have to accept their roles in American destruction. It will get worse long before it improves. [Redlining is an illegal practice in which lenders avoid providing credit services to individuals living in or seeking to live in, communities of color because of the race, color, or national origin of the residents in those communities.]
ellauri336.html on line 520: Popa probably didn’t realize how much he would get done, and when he ran out of printed sheets, he wrote the last three amudim from memory and then chazzered them.
ellauri336.html on line 581: Commenting on the recently Israel-Palestine tensions, Thunberg had a take which didn’t go down very well with Twitter. For weeks now, Palestinian protesters and Israeli police have clashed on a daily basis in and around Jerusalem’s Old City, home to major religious sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims and the emotional epicentre of the Middle East conflict. On Monday, stun grenades echoed across a holy hilltop compound, and hundreds of Palestinians were hurt in clashes between stone-throwing protesters and police firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Police were also injured! And men!
ellauri339.html on line 608: in the field and reach deep into its vast territory to find ever more conscripts to wait out the enemy. It didn’t hurt that Russia’s capability versus NATO equipment was surprisingly good, or perhaps the Ukrainians’ handling of sophisticated Western arms was surprisingly bad.
ellauri359.html on line 61: Actually, I already knew that; what I didn’t know was that the cause was very possibly inherited syphilis. Grahame, a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor who loved “messing about in boats”, seems to have married under duress, the sort to which upper-middle-classes were particularly susceptible: namely, propriety. His sister believed Elspeth Thomson deliberately compromised him. On receiving news of his nuptials, she asked if he really intended to marry her. “I suppose so; I suppose so,” was the telling reply.
ellauri378.html on line 222: Up until fairly recently most people didn’t consider Ukraine a particularly Western aligned country. It was a neutral state and in fact fairly Eastern and Russian aligned. But then we saw the gap in the traffic, and in we went!
ellauri383.html on line 55: This 98-year-old woman walked 10 km with a cane to bring this splinter of wood to the Ukrainian-controlled territory from the settlement of Ocheretyne in Donetsk region, captured by Russia last week. Because she didn’t want to leave a perfectly good splinter to the Russian occupiers.
ellauri389.html on line 235: “But I feel weighed down by the short sightedness, the petty bureaucracy, and the often pointless activities that are creeping into higher education. These things eat time and, more importantly, sap energy. Meanwhile the sand sifts through the hourglass. At the Open University I’d always hoped that we’d be able to offer a named undergraduate degree in philosophy, but actually the subject has, if anything, become marginalised, with fewer courses available than when I joined nineteen years ago, and with much higher fees. This at a time when philosophy is becoming increasingly popular. There had also been suggestions that I might be able to take on an official role promoting the public understanding of philosophy, but that didn’t materialise either.
ellauri389.html on line 271: “I spent most of my time at school playing rugby. I ended up going to Bristol University to do psychology, and I took philosophy and sociology as subsidiary subjects in the first year. I got disillusioned with psychology, dropped out, was a car park attendant for six months, tried to start a new course in English, but I wouldn’t have got a grant, so I carried on into my second year with philosophy, thinking I would become a journalist. Probably because I did so much student journalism I could write well enough that I conned them into a first class degree in philosophy, which meant I could go to Cambridge to do a PhD – there were proper grants in those days. I tried to get a job in publishing in my first year there but didn’t get that, so it’s only philosophy in want of anything better really."
ellauri392.html on line 390: He didn’t love Beatrice. At least the
ellauri392.html on line 406: I don’t blame him. He didn’t feel
ellauri392.html on line 458: I wish I didn’t keep sounding like Richard the Third
ellauri392.html on line 531: Although even Freud didn’t deserve a son like Lacan.
ellauri393.html on line 292: Although he married three times and raised a family, Rockwell acknowledged that he didn’t pine for women. They made him feel imperiled. He preferred the nearly constant companionship of men whom he perceived as physically strong. It may have represented Rockwell’s solution to the problem of feeling wimpish and small. Rockwell, who was born in New York City in 1894, the son of a textile salesman, attributed much about his life and his work to his underwhelming physique. As a child he felt overshadowed by his older brother, Jarvis, a first-rate student and athlete. Norman, by contrast, was slight and pigeon-toed and squinted at the world through owlish glasses. His grades were barely passing and he struggled with reading and writing—today, he surely would be labeled dyslexic. Growing up in an era when boys were still judged largely by their body type and athletic prowess, he felt, he once wrote, like “a lump, a long skinny nothing, a bean pole without beans.” Assistants looked better than the missus. “Fred is most fetching in his long flannels,” he notes appreciatively.
ellauri399.html on line 153: [Steve] wanted his buddy Daniel to live with them because he believed it would break up the intensity of what wasn’t working between us. He said he didn’t want us to play assumed roles and that he wanted to choose when we would be together. Daniel, who was sort of charmingly odd, slept in the living room on the floor next to his piano. But after a month [Steve] literally picked me up and moved everything I owned and took over the master bedroom. He’d finally realized that I had the better deal: a larger room with an en suite bath and the privacy of the backyard. [Steve] had paid the security deposit for the rental so was, in fact, entitled to the room he wanted. But he was so graceless that I felt humiliated and outraged.
ellauri399.html on line 155: It was like a game of Snakes and Ladders, with [Steve] as the game master. The ups were hopeful and the downs were extreme. I didn’t know how to hold my own with him because he didn’t play fair. He just played to win — and win at any cost. [Steve] had a way of being spiritually advanced while also being emotionally underdeveloped.
ellauri399.html on line 156: He wanted either to own everything or diminish its value. I just didn’t understand how to take care of myself in the face of his enlarged sense of self importance.
ellauri399.html on line 158: [Steve] was learning how to gain power by insinuating negative self-images onto others. As Apple grew, so did [Steve]’s sense of self-entitlement; in parallel they both seemed to take on lives of their own. And his behaviors didn’t improve with success, they changed from adolescent and dopey to just plain vicious. [Steve] was uncontrollably critical. His reactions had a Tourette’s quality — as if he couldn’t stop himself.
ellauri408.html on line 269: Jesus was a Jew: why do you think He was not? Jeshua Ben Joseph, as he was known by other Jews at the time, followed the Law of Moses, was circumcised, studied the Jewish Scriptures and attended Temple. He became a Bar Mitzvah at 13 years old, but waited until he was 30 before He began his mission: that is because Jewish men become Elders at the age of 30 and are allowed to speak in the Temple or Synegogue. His life was ruled by the Law, and he abided by every one of the laws (except filching corn and screwing disciples), showing it was possible to live in accordance with the old Covenant, if you were without sin and perfect. The new Covenant is based on Faith in Jesus, and accepts you as a sinner because His Passion on the Cross paid the price for that sin: the New Covenant was necessary because no-one other than Christ is capable of living without sin. Those who follow Christ are called Christians, but Christ didn’t follow himself, obviously, he followed YHWH, God the Father, so he was a Jew. So there!
ellauri408.html on line 325: John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, turned Jesus into a false prophet by putting words in his mouth. In the letters to the churches, John of Patmos has Jesus saying that he will personally murder children for their mother’s sins. (Revelation 2:20-23) Do you think Jesus actually returned to earth and murdered children for something they didn’t do? And John of Patmos was no Christian, because he said Jesus would judge Christians and murder their children for eating foods offered to idols. But Jesus clearly said that Christians can eat ANY food and Paul specifically said that he could eat foods offered to idols, since they were false gods. John of Patmos in another false prophecy accused Jesus of murdering trillions of animals after they had all sung the praises of God. Why? And he said human beings would be tortured with fire and brimstone — not in “hell” — but in the presence of the Lamb and Holy Angels. So according to John of Patmos, there will be a torture chamber in heaven, at the foot of the throne of God! Thomas Jefferson called John of Patmos a lunatic, and I agree.
ellauri408.html on line 340: The Bible is full of badly-told fairy tales. For instance, the book of Acts says Jesus flew into the clouds like Superman before a Jerusalem crowd, with angels preaching a sermon and prophesying that he would return “the same way.” But we know that didn’t happen because no other author of the New Testament mentioned the most miraculous thing human eyes ever witnessed. The four gospels and Acts all disagree on what Jesus said and did after the alleged resurrection. But if you were hearing the words of the resurrected God, wouldn’t you be sure to remember and communicate them faithfully? Clearly five different authors made up five different accounts of what happened post-alleged-resurrection because no one knew what really happened after the empty grave was discovered. Acts says Jesus taught the mysteries of the Kingdom of God for 40 days in Jerusalem, but no one bothered to record a single word he said. Can anyone really believe that is possible?
ellauri408.html on line 428: And it wasn’t just non-Christian Jews who failed to write about such things, it was the earliest Christians including the evangelist Paul. The “miracles” were created and backdated into the NT texts by Greek-speaking Christians who obviously had never spoken to an eyewitness; got Middle Eastern culture, geography and timelines wrong; misquoted prophets; and constantly contradicted each other. Furthermore, they didn’t consider what they were writing to be sacred texts because they changed the texts as if they were drunk, according to the Greek philosopher Celsus in his debates with the early church father Origen.
ellauri409.html on line 275: I didn’t mean your pocket, Mr., no: En tarkoittanut käydä teidän taskuilla;
ellauri411.html on line 50: Tomalin writes of Bowden, “In the immediate aftermath of the fiasco of the wedding he thought her frigidity towards him might be a sign of lesbianism.” “Frigidity”, “a sign of lesbianism” – what antique expressions, as well as male hostilities. She didn’t want to have sex with me so there must be something wrong with her. Bowden has long since been scorned by Mansfield biographers as someone who she found repulsive. “Rather weak”, as Tomalin dismissed him, and “clearly not a passionate lover”.
ellauri411.html on line 184: The Babylonian Empire didn’t last long beyond their conquest of Judea. The Babylonians were soon defeated and conquered by the Persians, who had very different policies about the people they conquered. They did not believe in exiling elites and wiping out local cultures. Rather, they wanted to ensure peace by restoring people to their homelands and letting them live by their ancestral laws. They even helped them rebuild their temples.
ellauri412.html on line 655: What would be unreasonable in the skeptic who says “offspring” in Isaiah 53:10 means only naturalistic biological offspring, so because Jesus didn’t have any naturalistic biological children, he is not the suffering servant of Isaiah 53?
xxx/ellauri027.html on line 307: If you want to be a self-development seminar and motivate people, then be a self-development seminar and motivate people. If you want to be a formal institute and have serious effects on policy and academia, then do that. Don’t half-ass both and muddy them with gratuitous talks and performances. The irony in all of this was that Wilber’s integral framework applied to organizations and business and should have accounted for these branding issues, but didn’t. The ironies would soon continue to mount.
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/ellauri085.html on line 428: Other barriers are produced by govt in their speeches, it might not even be policy yet, but if for example Obama talks about raising taxes and tells business owners like Joe the Plumber that “You didn’t build that!” Then what signal does that send to would-be entrepreneurs? Probably just wait til a more friendly administration comes along. Not surprising that business activity increased toward the end of Obama’s term and really took off once people figured out that Trump was going to have policies that reduced barriers.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 218: As for the culture police’s obsession with “authenticity,” fiction is inherently inauthentic. It’s fake. It’s self-confessedly fake; that is the nature of the form, which is about people who don’t exist and events that didn’t happen. The name of the game is not whether your novel honours reality; it’s all about what you can get away with. Well mine is anyway, I don't know about you. I try to get away with anything that is not nailed or welded fast.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 252: In fact, I’m reminded of a letter I received in relation to my seventh novel from an Armenian-American who objected – why did I have to make the narrator of We Need to Talk About Kevin Armenian? He didn’t like my narrator, and felt that her ethnicity disparaged his community. I took pains to explain that I knew something about Armenian heritage, because my best friend in the States was Armenian, and I also thought there was something dark and aggrieved in the culture of the Armenian diaspora that was atmospherically germane to that book. Besides, I despaired, everyone in the US has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something! Joe Biden has finally admitted that the Armenian genocide was a genocide and not just an unusually bad case of flu. I am not convinced of it yet.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 255: I confess that this climate of scrutiny has got under my lucidly white skin. When I was first starting out as a novelist, I didn’t hesitate to write black characters, for example, or to avail myself of black dialects, for which, having grown up in the American South, I had a pretty good ear. I am now much more anxious about depicting characters of different races, and accents make me nervous. I try my best to talk average middle class American, but occasionally a few bits of North Carolina slip out. Sorry about that. Here's how I'd sound if I din't steal from anyone but the likes of me:
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 282: (From my days as a business consultant, I remember hearing one of the owners of a client company talking on the phone in a language I didn’t recognize. When he hung up I asked what language he had been speaking. “It was Farsi,” he said, “the Persian language.” “Then you’re an Arab,” I responded.
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 295: We also need to remember that Bible prophecy only illuminates world history where Israel is concerned. Great Empires have come and gone during Israel’s absence without so much as a hint of their existence in the Bible. Even the United States, by any measure the most successful of them all, is missing from the prophetic record. You can’t tell me God didn’t know these empires were coming, so their absence has to mean that He sees them as irrelevant to Israel’s destiny. Don’t get me wrong, He has used them all to advance His plan for His people, and they were all blessed through their time of participation. But He didn’t find any of them worthy of mention because He didn’t actually need any of them to fulfil His plan.
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 561: First of all, I didn’t know that what I’d come up with weren’t actually principles. They were just rules.
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 571: It didn’t matter that the list was arbitrary. What mattered was that it sent me on a path where I would look for rules and principles everywhere, learn to tell the difference, and continue to build my life around them as I went. Like never pee against the wind.
xxx/ellauri130.html on line 603: My mate has the campest walk ever. We did a sponsored 13-mile walk once and I tied his shoelaces together as a joke. He didn’t even notice.
xxx/ellauri167.html on line 596: The notion that simply showing police violence was evidence of liberal bias didn’t begin with Chicago. It traces back rather directly to TV coverage of civil rights, when white Southerners complained that the networks ignored their perspective and were manipulated by publicity seekers within the movement. By the late 1950s, many of the same people who would later object to the network’s coverage in Chicago had already taken to calling CBS the “Communist” or “Coon” or “Colored Broadcasting Company.” The same bigoted wordplay made NBC the “Nigger Broadcasting Company.” Alabama’s Bull Connor summed up the situation with an aphorism that wouldn’t seem out of place in some conservative circles today: “The trouble with this country is communism, socialism and journalism.”
xxx/ellauri178.html on line 336: But, you raise a valid point, that’s the Biblical advice for dealing with medical issues. Granted, they didn’t have medical care like we do today, so I’m not saying that the Bible discounts that care. But, neither should I bury the fact that the Bible says to take it to the elders to pray over, just because I don’t think anyone will do it.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 181: Whereas Hemingway wrote passionately about boxing and his own prowess, others, like Dempsey, saw something else. “There were a lot of Americans in Paris and I sparred with a couple, just to be obliging,” the Champ said. “But there was one fellow I wouldn’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hemingway. He was about twenty-five or so and in good shape, and I was getting so I could read people, or anyway men, pretty well. I had this sense that Hemingway, who really thought he could box, would come out of the corner like a madman. To stop him, I would have to hurt him badly, I didn’t want to do that to Hemingway. That’s why I never sparred with him.” Hemingway’s frequent sparring partner and fellow writer Morley Callaghan offered another sobering account of his training partner, saying, “we were two amateur boxers. The difference between us was that Ernie had given time and imagination to boxing; I had actually worked out a lot with good fast college boxers.” I had never seen Mr. Hemingway box, of course. But I will say this: the confidence of mediocre men is a fucking superpower. I have met many versions of this guy. Hell, I’ve sparred with the dude myself.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 197: It could be “the cod of the hunter,” or “the cod of the bullfighter,” or (most fittingly) “the cod of the sea.” It didn’t matter what cod one chose — just as long as it provided rules for living a life of rectitude and dignity in an otherwise meaningless universe. Bets are off about the outcome of a war, says Hem's cod, for instance.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 614: What Henry James did or didn’t do with Oliver Wendell Holmes (or anyone else). By Leon Edel Dec 12, 19963:30 AM
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 616: The newest biography of Henry James is the work of a Vermont law professor who has written one earlier biography, Honorable Justice, The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, of the “great dissenter” on the Supreme Court in the first half of our century. Proceeding from the law into literature, Sheldon M. Novick tells us in a book titled Henry James, The Young Master–as if James were a young Mozart or a Paganini and didn’t work hard to achieve literary mastery–that the celibate and sexually diffident novelist, who put most of his life into his art, was in reality a regular guy who “underwent the ordinary experiences of life.” In fact, says Novick, he had an affair at the end of the Civil War with–yes, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 621: Another bit of imaginative projection upon James’ life can be found in Ernest Hemingway’s letters. This novelist, on learning that Brooks had written that James was “prevented by an accident from taking part in the Civil War,” immediately incorporated this into his nearly finished novel, The Sun Also Rises. In Chapter 12, Jake Barnes refers to his World War I accident, and Gorton says, “That’s the sort of thing that can’t be spoken of. That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle.” Barnes replies it wasn’t a bicycle; “he was riding horseback.” (In his memoirs, James spoke of having had a “horrid” but “obscure hurt.” He had strained his back during a stable fire while serving as a volunteer fireman.) Hemingway had originally inserted James’ name in the novel, but Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, vetoed this. Hemingway insisted. They finally compromised on the “Henry” alone. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Brooks, “Why didn’t you touch more on James’ impotence (physical) and its influence?” The castration theme was picked up by R.P. Blackmur, Glenway Wescott, Lionel Trilling, and F.O. Matthiessen in their critical writings.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 886: She didn’t know what it were; se ei tiennyt mitä sillä tarkoitin;
xxx/ellauri187.html on line 205: Predictably, the honeymoon didn’t last forever. A row over a letter Rilke wrote to one of Rodin’s contacts without permission in April 1906 aroused Rodin’s suspicion, so he fired Rilke. But an indelible impression was nevertheless left on the poet.
xxx/ellauri193.html on line 594: FRANS EEMIL SILLANPÄÄ: Hell yeah—wait, didn’t you share the prize? Give me that beer back!
xxx/ellauri193.html on line 600: Well, first of all, everything can be exaggerated, so calm down a little, Karl Ragnar Gierow. But also there’s a tone here that doesn’t sit well with me. Certainly the literary world has a tendency to calcify—the people who have enough time to write books tend to be from the ­upper classes, so literature’s concerns and perspectives invariably get narrow without new blood. But those sidebar reassurances that working-class poets aren’t here to ravage and plunder seem nervous and uptight, and not really reassuring to boot. It seems to me that we want a little ravagement and plunder in our literary traditions. Why else would we welcome a stirring new voice, if it didn’t stir us up a little? And if it doesn’t stir us up, is it really a new voice, even if it comes from a place most of us haven’t visited? “To determine an author and his work against the background of his social origin and political environment is, at present, good form,” the speech continues, and that’s OK as far as it goes. But if you’re going to decide that two authors are tied for literary merit, surely we can find some criterion besides their socioeconomic origin stories.
xxx/ellauri218.html on line 123: So, the government which was supposed to fall didn’t. As a result, Iraq’s little boys and girls and men and women of all ages didn’t shower kisses on US troops as they freed successive cities and finally Baghdad. During this piece of cake triumph, the "coalition forces" might lose a few troops to accidents and friendly fire like in Grenada, Bosnia and even Afghanistan, but the Iraqis wouldn’t really fight. Thus, we would not have a serious casualty count on our side and attribute a limited number of Iraqi civilian deaths to the cause of freedom itself. The United States would show off the tens of thousands of cowardly Iraqi POWs who surrendered without firing a shot.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 325: Of course, Le Guin was writing daring stories decades before me, stories of women who loved women, of four-person marriages, of people without gender. Her stories offered possibilities that most of society hadn’t even imagined in the late 1960s; I knew she must have faced similar societal disapproval. So I wanted to know why she faded to black for her sex scenes. “There Arrad took me into his arms and I took Arrad into my arms, and then between my legs, and fell upward, upward through the golden light.” (“Coming of Age in Karhide”) There was plenty of sex in her books – sometimes tremendously important sex — but Le Guin didn’t dwell on the details. In fact her sex scenes were prudish and infinitely boring.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 327: When she took questions after her reading, I stood up from my spot in the back of the room and asked Le Guin why she didn’t talk explicitly about sex, hoping for I’m not sure what — some response that would both justify the work I’d been trying to do and connect it to her own work, that I so admired. Instead, Le Guin gave a curt answer about those details not being that interesting. I said, “Oh.” And “Thank you.” I sat down, and tried not to be crushed.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 329: I told my literature students about Ursula K. Le Guin today, squeezing a few minutes for her into a class on American science fiction writers of color, a class where she didn’t strictly speaking belong – though to be honest, I rather think she’d improve almost any class. I told them about the six books that comprise Earthsea, about the gender-bending brilliance of The Left Hand of Darkness, the anarchist explorations in The Dispossessed, the stories in The Birthday of the World and Four Ways to Forgiveness (many of which I teach, gratefully). I mentioned her National Book Award, and her host of awards in science fiction and fantasy. I gave them her story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which is one of the most brilliant, uncomfortable stories I’ve ever read. But no blow-by-blow romps in the sack, alas.
xxx/ellauri229.html on line 279: Imaginary friends are there to take the heat for us. They can be blamed for the accidents we have. ‘I didn’t break the vase, Mum, it was Rudger,’ for example. Algernon Moncrieff’s non-existent invalid friend Bunbury serves the same function, allowing him to get out of dull social affairs. Invalid friends in the country do this. We should all have one. Or be one.
xxx/ellauri235.html on line 479: Anti-Semitic sentiments appear in many of his stories, inspired by Jewish publishers who had turned down his work – sentiments for which he never really apologized. In 1983, he told a journalist, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
xxx/ellauri250.html on line 724: That money was sent in the form of crypto from Ukraine, through FTX, and then cashed out by FTX and sent to the DNC, i.e. US taxpayer money was taken by Congress, signed off by Biden and shipped to Ukraine as an aid package. Ukraine using FTX sent it back (they didn’t need it but probably kept a part) as a way of laundering it to the Democratic National Committee for their election campaigns (and commit election fraud, as has been proven). Taxpayer money was used to finance the midterm elections, which is no less than money laundering.
xxx/ellauri255.html on line 113: Even many Bolsheviks were shocked by Lenin’s extremism. His new government abolished the police and the army, replacing them with Red Guards from the factories, and absolutely everything was nationalised! How indecent! This course of action wasn’t apparent beforehand, and – not surprisingly since they lost their jobs and status – many of the civil servants didn’t want to work with the new government.
xxx/ellauri255.html on line 118: Rob Attaboy: The Bolsheviks didn’t have the support of the majority of people around the country at the time of the revolution. Didn’t that put them at a serious disadvantage once the civil war began?
xxx/ellauri255.html on line 138: Antony Pyp Pipo: Earlier on, Russia’s First World War Allies agreed to provide a certain amount of help to the White cause in the form of weaponry. Now, you can provide weapons and you can provide supplies, but you’ve got to be able to get them to their destination – and, until the First World War came to an end in November 1918, the Allies didn’t have access through the Dardanelles and therefore couldn’t supply the Cossacks and Denikin’s White armies in the south of Russia.
xxx/ellauri261.html on line 257: Suddenly she grabbed my knee. “Sammy,” she said, “do you think that Alice and I are lesbians?” I had a genuine hot curl of fire up my spine. “I don’t see that it’s anybody’s business one way or another,” I said. “Do you care whether we are,” she asked. “Not in the least,” I said. I was suddenly dripping wet. “Are you queer or gay or different or ‘of it’ as the French say or whatever they are calling it nowadays,” she said, looking narrowly at me. I waggled my hand sidewise. “Both ways,” I said. “I don’t see why I should go through life limping on just one leg to satisfy a so-called norm.” “It bothers a lot of people,” Gertrude said. “But like you said, it’s nobody’s business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it. Did Thornie tell you?” “Only when I asked him a direct question and then he didn’t want to answer, he didn’t want to at all. He said yes he supposed in the beginning but that it was all over now.” Gertrude laughed. “How could he know. He doesn’t know what love is. And that’s just like Thornie.”
xxx/ellauri268.html on line 351: No doubt that (as Stewart said) Rowling didn’t intend to use antisemitic tropes, just as Carpenter didn’t. There’s a clear distinction between Rowling’s clumsy, clueless use of antisemitic caricature and her enthusiastic, ideological embrace of transphobic hate.
xxx/ellauri281.html on line 527: The public didn’t exactly applaud this match. Gossip columnists fixated on, as Mr. Bigsby puts it, “a red in bed with America’s snow queen.” Mailer famously snarked that “the Great American Brain” had met “the Great American Body.”
xxx/ellauri304.html on line 519: Heroes have their Achilles heels. The most honest president of the U.S. cheats on the golf course; that is what makes people real. The late Robert Parker’s Spenser character was interesting. He was a yuppie. He ran, he lifted weights, he liked to cook, he liked unimposing little wines with sardonic personalities, he pretended he didn’t care about clothes but somehow always managed to wear the same basic uniform;, he lived with a woman, Susan the insufferable, who could psycho-babble Jay-Z into impotence. But the characterization hook was that Spenser spent his life being a private eye and shooting people, which was totally alien to the character’s nature. That started to round him out and make him real. Without that hard edge, he’d have been just another fan of Barry Manilow.
xxx/ellauri304.html on line 549: “After his fake execution for a murder he didn’t commit, ex-cop Remo Williams is forced to work for America’s secret crime-fighting agency CURE, while being trained by the world’s greatest assassin, the aged, ageless, cranky, mercenary, mystical Chiun, Master of Sinanju.”
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