There are lots of books out there. The reader has to decide quickly which one she is going to spend her time and money on. She's not going to buy something just because it might get good later on. Unless you have won a major prize or had a film made from your book, chances are your reader has never heard of you. She’s going to read a page or two and decide. If it’s on Amazon, she’s going to click “Look Inside” and read a few pages. Yep, "your reader" will do just that, being an analphabet in for mind-numbing pulp. "My reader" takes time to choose a book by its literary merits, not by its gaudy cover and advertising blurbs. And most likely from a public library on the recommendation of a friend. Preferably after reading the plot synopsis.

ellauri145.html on line 404: Roger Tichborne, heir to the noble and filthy rich Tichborne family´s title and fortunes, was presumed to have died in a shipwreck in 1854 at age 25. His mother clung to a belief that he might have survived, and after hearing rumours that he had made his way to Australia, she advertised extensively in Australian newspapers, offering a reward for information. In 1866, a Wagga Wagga butcher known as Thomas Castro came forward claiming to be Roger Tichborne. Although his manners and bearing were unrefined, he gathered support and travelled to England. He was instantly accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son, although other family members were dismissive and sought to expose him as an impostor. During protracted enquiries before the case went to court in 1871, details emerged suggesting that the claimant might be Arthur Orton, a butcher´s son from Wapping in London, who had gone to sea as a boy and had last been heard of in Australia. After a civil court had rejected the claimant´s case, he was charged with perjury; while awaiting trial he campaigned throughout the country to gain popular support. In 1874, a criminal court jury decided that he was not Roger Tichborne and declared him to be Arthur Orton. Before passing a sentence of 14 years, the judge condemned the behaviour of the claimant´s counsel, Edward Kenealy, who was subsequently disbarred because of his conduct.
ellauri145.html on line 518: Ernst Krieck, a prominent Nazi ideologue, sarcastically remarked that apart from the fact that Nietzsche was not a socialist, not a nationalist and opposed to racial thinking, he might have been a leading National Socialist thinker.
ellauri145.html on line 551: Although there is certainly a bias toward “masculinity” in Nietzsche’s works, this does not necessarily mean what it is presumed to mean. “Masculinity” is not, for instance a code word for “male”. It does not apply as a broad category to those who have a certain set of genitals. In fact what the term means is having the sort of virtues that one might have typically related to the masculine virtues that were considered admirable at various times in the past. These include courage, transcendence of petty emotional concerns, fearlessness in the face of death, and so on. Intellectual courage was a particular attribute that Nietzsche was trying to encourage in his readers though his appeal to the term, “masculinity”.
ellauri146.html on line 402: As any reader of Vigny's poem knows, Eloa descends from heaven to console and save Satan. It is suggested that if she had succeeded, evil might have ceased to exist, but Vigny does not permit this to happen. Instead, Satan seduces Eloa and causes her to fall with him to the depths of hell. Despite the failure of Eloa's attempt, the fact remains that Vigny lays out the essential elements of what I call the myth of the angel woman and the end of evil; he links together the divine feminine principle and the redemption of humanity. This constitutes one of the major original elements of Eloa.
ellauri146.html on line 404: We tend not to focus on this view of Eloa as a myth of the redeeming feminine for several reasons. First, the central portion of the poem is devoted to Satan's seduction of Eloa, an activity which, for most of us, is anything but celestial. Perhaps this explains Stendhal's sarcastic description of Eloa in the Courrier anglais of 1 December 1824: "Tex-Willer-larme, devenue ange femelle, et séduite par le diable lui-même" (the ex-tear, turned into a female angel, and seduced by the devil himself). Flottes and Bonnefoy insist that the very fine psychological analysis of the seduction makes us see human protagonists in an angelic decor, which weakens any metaphysical meaning Vigny might attach to his poem. Germain, who had the benefit of Hunt's masterly work, The Epic in Ninteenth Century France (1941), states flatly that the drama of Eloa is not metaphysical but moral. Bénichou, however, does remark in Le Sacre de l'écrivain 1750-1830 (1973) that the creation of Eloa corresponds to the theological promotion of the feminine as an agent of redemption prominent in the religious sects of the Romantic period. I am sure Satan was greatly consoled by Eloa, if that's any consolation.
ellauri146.html on line 646: The opinion has been often stated that Edgar Allan Poe was bizarre and amoral; that he was a lover of morbid beauty only; that he was unrelated to worldly circumstances-aloof from the affairs of the world; that his epitaph might well be: “Out of space-out of time.”
ellauri146.html on line 681: “We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself.”
ellauri147.html on line 228: Emily finally gets an opportunity to pitch her idea to Camille´s mother. Sylvie is unimpressed with Emily´s idea to market Camille´s family´s champagne. Emily meets Julia Roberts who is a member of the Aussie Football League (AFL). She is aware of Emily´s association with Pierre Cadault and asks if Pierre might be willing to donate her his dress to be auctioned at AFL´s fundraising benefit.
ellauri147.html on line 255: Some critics appeared ambivalent, such as Jo Ellison writing for the Financial Times. On one hand she expresses admiration for the way Darren Star manages to depict "a version of womanhood in which promiscuity, bossiness and shopaholicism are depicted as qualities to be celebrated"; on the other "the major plot lines might have been written in the 1940s and the Frenchies are routinely cast as vain, preening and parochial." She concludes "Cliché-ridden and completely outdated: Darren Star´s ´Sex and the Cité´ will no doubt be monstrously successful."
ellauri147.html on line 261: Megan Garber of The Atlantic was critical of the character Emily, writing, "An expat who acts like a tourist, she judges everything against the backdrop of her own rigid Americanness. You might figure that those moments are evidence of a show poking fun at its protagonist´s arrogance, or setting the stage for her to grow beyond her initial provincialism. But: You would be, as I was, mostly incorrect. Instead, other people change around her, becoming French-American. They grudgingly concede that her way (strident, striving, teeming with insistent individualism) is the right way. The show — the latest from the Sex and the City creator Darren Star — is selling several fantasies. Primary among them is the notion that Emily can bulldoze her way through France and be celebrated for it.
ellauri150.html on line 549: The faithful servant had at last his fitting reward. His broken body might never be restored; nor was there riddance of the recollection of his sufferings, or recall of the years embittered by them; but suddenly a new life was shown him, with assurance that it was for him—a new life lying just beyond this one—and its name was Paradise. There he would find the Kingdom of which he had been dreaming, and the King. A perfect peace fell upon him. Lokki parka. Poor albatross. Ammuin nuolen ilmoihin ja albatrossia haavoitin.
ellauri150.html on line 582: Ben-Hur, when he was told of the visit, knew certainly what he had long surmised—that on the day of the crucifixion Iras had deserted her father for Messala. Nevertheless, he set out immediately and hunted for him vainly; they never saw him more, or heard of him The blue bay, with all its laughing under the sun, has yet its dark secrets. Had it a tongue, it might tell us of the Messiah.
ellauri150.html on line 730: The Church sets a very high bar when it comes to morality. You would need to be a saint to be fully faithful, and even then many saints were sinners before they got sainted. By the way, I wrote a piece on Mary Magdalene imagining what her life might have been like, but I decided not to post it because I thought it might be heretical.
ellauri151.html on line 779: [9] For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.
ellauri151.html on line 964: [22] On that day many will say to me, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?"

ellauri151.html on line 1000: [5] to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
ellauri151.html on line 1134: Alissa reached, by going the other way round than The Immoralist, a damnation very similar to the Immoralist's – indeed, Strait is the Gate might be called The Moralist. Hers is a greater perversity than Michel's, who, after all, was only doing as he liked. Alissa is doing what she does not like, and at each act of monstrous virtue her anguish increases, 'till at last it kills her.
ellauri152.html on line 609: It’s frustrating to catalogue the ways in which the film works to cis-normify the story. No Yentl crossdressing into the infinite future. No wrestling with her gender identity. The film’s ending throws out the story’s ambiguity and unapologetic queerness in favor of, one might charitably say, a feminist ending, or one might say uncharitably and truthfully, a cisnormative ending.
ellauri152.html on line 681: We know that anything we do in this world produces spiritual energies that are stored in the upper worlds and last for eternity. These stored spiritual energies can be accessed even centuries after the act was performed. And, like a spiritual "radio receiver," Tefillin help us access such spiritual energies to nourish our souls, bringing us closer to the Almighty. Don't they look like radio receivers even?
ellauri152.html on line 685: In Rabbeinu Tam's Tefillin, the paragraph "And if you listen ..." (Devarim 11:13:21), which warns of the consequences of violating the dog's willy, din, harsh justice, precede the paragraph of "Hear O Israel ..." (Devarim 6:4-8), which declares our belief in the Almighty. Since this verse applies to even the sinners of Israel, it alludes to the dog's attribute of compassion, cheese. In Rabbeinu Tam's Tefillin, the aspect of harshness, din, precedes that of mercy, cheese, alluding to the dog's original intention to run the world through harshness, din.
ellauri155.html on line 683:

Why might someone (like Feifei Wang) say J.K. Rowling is a bad writer?

Wolpe wondered how many young people today even know Saul Bellow or read his work, but mused how wonderful it would be if more children of famous authors wrote about their parents, as Greg Bellow has.
ellauri222.html on line 112: Greg, asked to speculate on how his father might view today’s social values as compared to those of the ’60s, which Sammler criticized so strongly, told JNS.org that Saul Bellow probably would not have changed his opinion since “ours is a society with shallow moral values.”

“We’re not done with genocide on the basis of race and ethnicity, and we live at a time when death can come out of the sky at any moment,” Greg said. "We fear nothing except that the sky might crash on us one day."
ellauri222.html on line 139: So even “Dangling Man,” an awkwardly written book about which Bellow later said, “I can’t read a page of it without feeling embarrassed,” was received as a sign that the novel might after all be up to its historic task. “Here, for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation has been seized,” Delmore Schwartz wrote, in Partisan Review. In The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson called “Dangling Man” a “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation.” When Bellow’s second novel, “The Victim,” came out, in 1947, Martin Greenberg, in Commentary, explained that Bellow had succeeded in making Jewishness “a quality that informs all of modern life . . . the quality of modernity itself.” In Partisan Review, Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that Bellow might become “the redeeming novelist of the period.”
ellauri222.html on line 185: “Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition. Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce. (Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to. The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
ellauri222.html on line 187: Howe wrote that “Herzog” was a novel “driven by an idea”—the idea that modern man can overcome alienation and despair. Howe could see the appeal of this idea, but he was worried that it might not have been “worked out with sufficient care.” The reviewer in the Times Book Review thought that the novel offered “a credo for the times.” “The age is full of fearful abysses,” the reviewer explained. “If people are to go ahead, they must move into and through these abysses,” and so on.
ellauri222.html on line 205: Horrified that Madeleine and Gersbach might be abusing his child (in the novel, a girl), Herzog rushes off to his deceased father’s house, finds a gun his father owned, and goes to Madeleine’s. It is evening. He creeps into the yard and watches Madeleine and Gersbach through the window, loaded pistol in hand. What he sees is an ordinary domestic scene. Gersbach is giving the little girl a bath. Herzog creeps away.
ellauri222.html on line 265: this time the overall effect was not satisfactory. I was particularly aware of the absence of distance that the writer must put space between himself and the characters in his book. There should be a certain detachment from the writer's own passions. I speak as one who in Herzog committed the same sin. There I hoped that comic effects might protect me. Nevertheless I crossed the border too many times to raid the enemy camp. But then Herzog was a chump, a failed intellectual and at bottom a sentimentalist. In your case, the man who gives us Eve and Sylphid is an enragé, a fanatic-for-real.
ellauri222.html on line 379: Basteshaw is a biophysicist who works as ship’s carpenter on the McManus, the ship Augie is assigned to while in the Merchant Marines during World War II. After their ship is sunk by torpedoes, Augie and Basteshaw are the only survivors and end up on the same lifeboat. Augie gradually realizes that Basteshaw is an insane genius. Convinced that he has the power to create life from protoplasm, he tries to convince Augie to go with him to the Canary Islands and be his research assistant. In reality, their lifeboat is nowhere near the Canary Islands. Basteshaw ties Augie up to stop him from signaling a ship that might rescue them. Finally Augie gets free, ties up Basteshaw, and manages to signal a British tanker to rescue them.
ellauri222.html on line 779:

When might lively be a better fit than gay?