ellauri106.html on line 106: That same year, rather than wait to be drafted, Roth enlisted in the army. Roth enlisted in the Army that year to avoid being drafted and assigned to unpleasant duty like the infantry. Fortunately he suffered a back injury during basic training and was given a medical discharge. Who knows. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a PhD in literature but dropped out after one term. It was a yeasty environment for a young writer. Saul Bellow was a contemporary and with some what similar backgrounds and interests they could not avoid being rivals. During that year he met a lovely shiksa waitress Margaret Martinson, a single woman with a small child. He was smitten. An intense, but often troubled relationship ensued. At the end of the year he dropped out of the U of C and headed to the University of Iowa to teach in its creative writing program. None the less, whatever he may have said, Roth was not happy there, perhaps because the semi-rural Midwesterness of Ames was alien to him. After a while with Martinson in tow he moved on to a similar position at Princeton, another WASP bastion but one with even more prestige. Everyone who knew him recognized Roth as an early comer. He later continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991. Roth started teaching literature in the late 1960s at the University of Pennsylvania. The 1969 feature film adaptation of Goodbye, Columbus coincided with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, which soon became a best-seller amid controversy for its prurient content. (Those who've read it will likely not forget Portnoy's "love affair" with mom´s slab of liver in the fridge.)
ellauri162.html on line 831: PZ Myers' caustic blog post on the death of Robin Williams See: PZ Myers on the death of Robin Williams (n.h.). Myers was angry because he felt that the news of Robins Williams death was crowding out the news story of the African-American Michael Brown who was shot by a police officer (a race riot subsequently ensued).
ellauri299.html on line 176: In 1984, Snyder endured a fifty-one-day hunger strike to call attention to the neglect of the homeless. With his reelection a month away, President Reagan boldly announced his plans to turn the building into a model shelter for the homeless. Snyder ended his strike. Everyone was happy. After the election, Reagan went back on his promise, and all sorts of nasty litigation ensued. Snyder committed suicide on 1990.
xxx/ellauri068.html on line 276: Martin was not a nice guy. One of his great talents was singing at the Pulperia. At the fort, he was forced to work hard and fight against the Indians. He had a night-long payada (singing duel) with a black payador (singer), who turns out to be the younger brother of the man Fierro murdered in a duel. He deliberately provoked an affair of honor by insulting a black woman in a bar. In the knife duel that ensued, he killer her male companion. He escaped justice with a police sergeant and went native.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 185: When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.” I wonder what that meant. Must look up the word in the dictionary someday.
xxx/ellauri174.html on line 63: Malebranche was giving in to laws of cause an effect by placing a greater emphasis than he had previously done on his occasionalist account of causation, and particularly on his contention that God acted for the most part through "general volitions" and only rarely, as in the case of miracles, through "particular volitions". A bitter dispute ensued between Malebranche and his fellow Cartesian, Arnauld, whose name I remember from Chomsky's airy forays to Port-Royal grammar in the 60's. Over the next few years, the two men wrote enough polemics against one another to fill four volumes of Malebranche's collected works and three of Arnauld's. Arnauld's supporters managed to persuade the Roman Catholic Church to place Nature and Grace on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1690, and it was followed there by the Search nineteen years later in 1709. (Ironically, the Index already contained several works by the Jansenist Arnauld himself.) Somebody blamed Malebranche for being a Spinozan, which Nick himself vehemently demented. 1715 - Malebranche dies.
xxx/ellauri253.html on line 101: The Soviet Union's last year of economic growth was 1989, and throughout the 1990s, recession ensued in the Former Soviet Republics. In May 1998, following the 1997 crash of the East Asian economy, things began to get even worse in Russia. In August 1998, the value of the ruble fell 34% and people clamored to get their money out of banks (see 1998 Russian financial crisis). The government acted by dragging its feet on privatization programs. Russians responded to this situation with approval by electing the more pro-dirigist and less liberal Vladimir Putin as President in 2000. Putin proceeded to reassert the role of the federal government, and gave it power it had not seen since the Soviet era. State-run businesses were used to out-compete some of the more wealthy rivals of Putin. Putin's policies were popular with the Russian people, gaining him re-election in 2004. At the same time, the export-oriented Russian economy enjoyed considerable influx of foreign currency thanks to rising worldwide oil prices (from $15 per barrel in early 1999 to an average of $30 per barrel during Putin's first term). The early 2000s recession was avoided in Russia due to rebound in exports and, to some degree, a return to dirigism.
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