ellauri040.html on line 335: Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, and include assertions that postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, and that it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.
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.
ellauri080.html on line 530: This helps illuminate a number of characteristics of SI and NE individually: dominant SI types focus their energy on the apprehension and upholding of the Truth as it is carefully and cautiously composited and systematically tested for weaknesses; hence, their stereotypically thorough, cautious, and reserved nature, and why they are not so sure in idea-based conversation as Ni types: because of just that — they aren’t sure. Meanwhile, dominant NE types, focusing their energy on the exploration and experimentation from various angles, have the same presence of doubt, which is why NE types so often eschew dogma and may be perceived as intellectually ‘flakey’ or ‘capricious’ because they never truly commit to anything: it’s all experimentation and exploration, forming a composite Truth, though their trouble is they never want to stop. The SI’s trouble, on the other hand, is that they don’t want to start.
ellauri098.html on line 441: Their intellectually combative nature means that ENTPs can be difficult to work with, and they can bruise others’ feelings because they never shy away from conflict. But ENTPs are unflinchingly honest, even about themselves, and they hold up a clear mirror to the world around them.

ellauri100.html on line 266: Post-retirement: Spent 18 months as the managing editor of an economics journal published by a privately funded, libertarian think-tank in D.C. — more for the meager wage than for the stimulation of working with semi-intelligent, intellectually doubtfully honest contributors and colleagues. Quit when this part-time job became too hot.
ellauri115.html on line 418: In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate.
ellauri155.html on line 888: Like William James, his friend and mentor, he wrote philosophy in a literary way. Ezra Pound includes Santayana among his many cultural references in The Cantos, notably in "Canto LXXXI" and "Canto XCV". Santayana is usually considered an American writer, although he declined to become an American citizen, resided in Fascist Italy for decades, and said that he was most comfortable, intellectually and aesthetically, at Oxford University. Although an atheist, Santayana considered himself an "aesthetic Catholic" and spent the last decade of his life in a Roman residence under Catholic nuns. It felt a little like his young days under William James. He held racial superiority and eugenic views. He believed superior races should be discouraged from "intermarriage with inferior stock". Maybe that was why he had no kids.
ellauri159.html on line 1001: Ss are concrete thinkers, placing more trust in experience than in flashes of insight. They’re more interested in sensory data than in the patterns perceived by the unconscious mind. Ss tend to be intellectually content—they want to enjoy the world.
ellauri159.html on line 1004: Ns are abstract thinkers, placing more trust in flashes of insight than in experience. They’re less interested in sensory data than in the patterns perceived by the unconscious mind. Ns tend to be intellectually restless—they want to change the world.
ellauri163.html on line 833: In essence, the film called Mouchette recapitulates the point of view of its character Mouchette, which allows the viewer to both ‘feel’ a bit of the character’s warp, while also being able to step back and intellectually distance oneself and ‘understand’ the character’s warp. Whether or not Bresson intended this doubled perspective on life, it, and many of the film’s other strengths more than make up for its weak ending, and lift it to a greatness that, while it falls short of the utmost in the canon of great cinema, nonetheless makes Mouchette a film for which the term “great” is applied a surety. There are, certainly, worse ways to misfire, slightly or otherwise.
ellauri181.html on line 43: Oliko se sit Ivan Klima? His friend Philip Roth once described him, with his "Beatle haircut" and "carnivorous teeth" as "a much more intellectually evolved Ringo Starr". Ei kuulosta ihan tältäkään. Ivan Klima says "There are some differences between a dictatorship which is strong and one which is tired. By the late Eighties ours was a tired dictatorship. They were no longer killing people and they made every effort not to arrest people. In this condition of a dictatorship you could find your own freedom. You could not become rich, you could not travel except maybe to Hungary, but you could write." Olipa paha ettei voinut rikastua eikä lennellä ympäriinsä. Ja saihan sitä kirjoittaa, kuha ei julkaissut.
ellauri182.html on line 106: Mikage’s voice can be complex as well, which keeps the reader intellectually engaged. She can go from the light and ironic, talking casually about herself and her situation, to the literary and complex, making more formal and generalized statements, such as this musing on fate that begins: “We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many.”
ellauri203.html on line 302: In the novel, a new Mongol Empire conquers Poland and introduces Murti-Bing pills as a cure for independent thought. At first, the pills create contentment and blind obedience, but ultimately lead those taking them to develop dual personalities. Kaxoisolentoja taas! Miłosz compares the pills to the intellectually deadening effects of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR and the Soviet Bloc.
ellauri222.html on line 723: Saul Bellow is widely recognized as America's preeminent living novelist. His fiction, which is as intellectually demanding as it is imaginatively appealing, steadfastly affirms the value of the human soul while simultaneously recognizing the claims of community and the demoralizing inauthenticity of daily life. Refusing to give in to the pessimism and despair that threaten to overwhelm American experience, Bellow offers a persistently optimistic, though often tentative and ambiguous, alternative to postmodern alienation. In their struggle to understand their past and reorder their present, his protagonists chart a course of possibility for all who would live meaningfully in urban American society and make loads of money.
ellauri222.html on line 725: Bellow's first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, are brief and disciplined works, darker in mood and less intellectually complex than the later fiction but featuring protagonists who anticipate later Bellovian heroes both in their introspection and in their resistance to urban apathy. In Paris, Saul realized he need not copycat Flaubert and that instead he could write as he spoke. The result was Augie.
ellauri236.html on line 202: In a book like No Orchids one is not, as in the old-style crime story, simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual perversion. No Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct, which Raffles or the Sherlock Holmes stories are not. At the same time the English attitude towards crime is not so superior to the American as I may have seemed to imply. It too is mixed up with power-worship, and has become more noticeably so in the last twenty years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar Wallace, especially in such typical books as The Orator and the Mr. J. G. Reeder stories. Wallace was one of the first crime-story writers to break away from the old tradition of the private detective and make his central figure a Scotland Yard official. Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, solving his problems without the help and even, in the earlier stories, against the opposition of the police. Moreover, like Lupin, he is essentially an intellectual, even a scientist. He reasons logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the routine methods of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered it, on Scotland Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of his way to denounce Holmes by name. His own ideal was the detective-inspector who catches criminals not because he is intellectually brilliant but because he is part of an all-powerful organization. Hence the curious fact that in Wallace's most characteristic stories the ‘clue’ and the ‘deduction’ play no part. The criminal is always defeated by an incredible coincidence, or because in some unexplained manner the police know all about the crime beforehand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace's admiration for the police is pure bully-worship. A Scotland Yard detective is the most powerful kind of being that he can imagine, while the criminal figures in his mind as an outlaw against whom anything is permissible, like the condemned slaves in the Roman arena. His policemen behave much more brutally than British policemen do in real life — they hit people with out provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and so on — and some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism. (For instance, Wallace likes to arrange things so that the villain is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married.) But it is sadism after the English fashion: that is to say, it is unconscious, there is not overtly any sex in it, and it keeps within the bounds of the law. The British public tolerates a harsh criminal law and gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder trials: but still that is better, on any account, than tolerating or admiring crime. If one must worship a bully, it is better that he should be a policeman than a gangster. Wallace is still governed to some extent by the concept of ‘not done’. In No Orchids anything is ‘done’ so long as it leads on to power. All the barriers are down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is a worse symptom than Wallace, to the extent that all-in wrestling is worse than boxing, or Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy.
ellauri257.html on line 398: I don’t like Jordan Peterson, or, more accurately, I don’t like the role Peterson is playing in the culture war because I find it intellectually impoverished, uninformed, and feeding into a repugnant far-right cultural revolution that Peterson himself does not necessarily endorse but which he nonetheless gives aid to.
ellauri266.html on line 338: Let me quote a letter from a lady in Oakland after a recent weekend seminar. The lady is intellectually inclined. She goes to my seminars and is excited by my ideas and wants to be friends on an intellectual basis with some of the fine lecturers she has heard. Invariably, she gets the door politely slammed in her face. Men like me are terribly afraid of getting involved in sex with ladies past their better before date. "I am forced to the conclusion," she writes, "that if a man doesn´t want to get involved in sex,´ then he sees no point in talking to a woman at all. A homely looking thinking woman is to most men some sort of contradiction in terms." True, regrettably.
ellauri272.html on line 298: has consistently appeared on the annual list of intellectually challenged books since
ellauri369.html on line 359: As a boy, Teufelsdröckh was left in a basket on the doorstep of a childless couple in the German country town of Entepfuhl ("Duck-Pond"); his father a retired sergeant of Frederick the Great and his mother a very pious woman, who to Teufelsdröckh´s gratitude, raises him in utmost spiritual discipline. In very flowery language, Teufelsdröckh recalls at length the values instilled in his idyllic childhood, the Editor noting most of his descriptions originating in intense spiritual pride. Teufelsdröckh eventually is recognized as being clever, and sent to Hinterschlag (slap-behind) Gymnasium. While there, Teufelsdröckh is intellectually stimulated, and befriended by a few of his teachers, but frequently bullied by other students. His reflections on this time of his life are ambivalent: glad for his education, but critical of that education´s disregard for actual human activity and character, as regarding both his own treatment and his education´s application to politics. While at University, Teufelsdröckh encounters the same problems, but eventually gains a small teaching post and some favour and recognition from the German nobility. While interacting with these social circles, Teufelsdröckh meets a woman he calls Blumine (Goddess of Flowers; the Editor assumes this to be a pseudonym), and abandons his teaching post to pursue her. She spurns his advances for a British aristocrat named Towgood. Teufelsdröckh is thrust into a spiritual crisis, and leaves the city to wander the European countryside, but even there encounters Blumine and Towgood on their honeymoon. He sinks into a deep depression, culminating in the celebrated Everlasting No, disdaining all human activity. Still trying to piece together the fragments, the Editor surmises that Teufelsdröckh either fights in a war during this period, or at least intensely uses its imagery, which leads him to a "Centre of Indifference", and on reflection of all the ancient villages and forces of history around him, ultimately comes upon the affirmation of all life in "The Everlasting Yea". The Editor, in relief, promises to return to Teufelsdröckh´s book, hoping with the of his assembled biography to glean some new insight into the philosophy. Wow, sounds a lot like Carlyle´s personal biography, lightly camouflaged?
xxx/ellauri218.html on line 125: Bush and Rumsfeld obviously believed in this Gulf War 2 scenario. They sneered at the nay-saying generals who demanded more troops and reinforcements to besiege Baghdad. Rummy felt certain that air strikes, with high tech bombs and guided missiles, would more than suffice. They knew, from their studies of selected books and articles written by their ideological neo-con mentors that the Iraqis would surrender rather than fight after US explosives showed them our power; so why the need for all those troops! The brilliant advisers, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, recently resigned as Defense Advisory Board Chief, and other intellectuals had spun a convincing tale, one that included the oft-referenced domino theory. They convinced the lesser IQs like Rummy who in turn convinced the even more intellectually challenged president.
xxx/ellauri354.html on line 243: Hemingway is not an Existentialist, for there has been no known liason between him and the other existentialsists, niether personally nor intellectually, and neither has ever formally recognized a kinship to the other.
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