ellauri067.html on line 439: How much, or how little influence drugs, particularly hallucigenic drugs like lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, had on Pynchon’s narrative is unknown. If Siegel, however, is to be believed, and he should be despite any resentment he felt regarding Pynchon’s affair with his wife, then the writing of Gravity’s Rainbow was heavily influenced by drugs. In Pynchon’s most famous quote regarding this particular novel, which is notoriously difficult to interpret, he is alleged to have told Siegel,
ellauri067.html on line 502: Pynchon´s early story Low-lands contains general immaturity, and racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk. It´s his own voice in Pig Bodine, a notoriously bigoted and asinine sailor who recurs in later novels. The claims of racism and proto-Fascism are hardly substantiated, while the misogyny is pervasive. Women are considered as semi-inanimate objects upon which men have a right (or even a duty) of possession, imposition or defilation.
ellauri070.html on line 81: We learn that Cole Porter was notoriously promiscuous and loved giving head to young Marines. Tyrone Power, also an ex-Marine, was bisexual but preferred male sexual partners.
ellauri099.html on line 209: Expressing ancient money values in modern terms presents a perennial puzzle for historians of economics, so I called on my colleague, the economist Duncan Foley, for help. He very roughly calculated that the annual gross domestic product of classical Athens was about 4,400 talents. If that is right, then 800 talents is a vast figure, 32 times the expenditure on the Academy. Foley is somewhat skeptical of the figure, though. Ancient sources for numerical data (like the size of armies) are notoriously inaccurate, so perhaps a excited copyist simply added a zero.
ellauri115.html on line 392: One night, a drunken mob attacked his house. Rousseau was inside with his mistress, the former scullery maid Thérèse le Vasseur (by whom he had five children that he notoriously abandoned to a foundling hospital), and his beloved dog, Sultan. A shower of stones was thrown at the window. A rock "as big as a head" nearly landed on Rousseau's head, no bed. When a local official finally arrived, he declared, "My God, it's a quarry."
ellauri133.html on line 376: King is notoriously prolific, with more than 50 novels to his name. In fact, when It first came out, it was part of a wave of four books King published in the span of just 14 months. Between 1986 and 1987, King published It, The Eyes of the Dragon, Misery, and The Tommyknockers. Given that kind of productivity, it would be easy to assume that King seamlessly produces doorstoppers in mere months. But appearances can be deceiving: It took four years to write.
ellauri372.html on line 78: Some of Crassus' wealth was acquired conventionally, through slave trafficking, production from silver mines, and speculative real estate purchases. Crassus bought property that was confiscated in proscriptions and by notoriously purchasing burnt and collapsed buildings. Plutarch wrote that, observing how frequent such occurrences were, he bought slaves "who were architects and builders." When he had over 500 slaves, he bought houses that had burnt and the adjacent ones "because their owners would let go at a trifling price." He bought "the largest part of Rome" in this way, buying them on the cheap and rebuilding them with slave labor. Täähän on ihan kuin
xxx/ellauri167.html on line 578: The violence in Chicago was all-encompassing, and longhairs weren’t the only targets of the police. Journalists with clearly displayed credentials were attacked, including, most notoriously, CBS’ Dan Rather. This laid the foundation for the cries of “liberal bias” that hound and undermine the mainstream news media to this day.
xxx/ellauri202.html on line 385: “Even if there were Jews living in Graz in the 1830s, at the time when Adolf Hitler’s father, Alois, was born, this does not prove anything at all about the identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather,” Evans said, also pointing out that Frank’s memoir has been found to be “notoriously unreliable.”
xxx/ellauri410.html on line 225: Eliot writes to Dobrèe: Your confusion of the Crocodile and Camel recalls the behaviour of the primitive inhabitants of Bolovia. A notoriously lazy race. They had two Gods, named respectively Wux and Wux [a progenitor of the Greek “wanax,” meaning divine king?]. They observed that the carving of Idols out of ebony was hard work; therefore they carved only one Idol. In the Forenoon, they worshipped it as Wux, from the front; in the Afternoon, they worshiped it from Behind as Wux. (Hence the Black Bottom.) Those who worshipped in front were called Modernists; those who worshipped from behind were called Fundamentalists. (Letters II 509) They are noted for wearing bowler hats and practicing economically a ditheistic religion, using one idol for the two gods. Eliot’s comic sketches include men wearing bowler hats, which Eliot had
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