This is a profoundly dumb and misguided roaming-junior-male-ape-gang roadmovie type of thought. Damn wagnerian homoerotic Quest for a Holy Grail. Murder mysteries. Spoilers. "Nyaah we already got the Grail!" taunt the French knights Arthur & co. in Monty Python´s Holy Grail:
ellauri082.html on line 54: When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, it was clear he had been profoundly depressed. But the first major biography of the writer, D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, out on August 30th, reveals an even more troubled mind than anyone realized. From the time he was in college, the brilliant author of Infinite Jest was in and out of institutions as he struggled with depression and addictions to alcohol and marijuana. But the book is also full of all kinds of other strange surprises, painting the most complete, and warmest, portrait of Wallace yet.
ellauri095.html on line 453: Christina Rossetti became for Hopkins the embodiment of the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Oxford Movement, and Victorian religious poetry generally. In the 1860s Hopkins was profoundly influenced by her example and succeeded, unbeknownst to her and to the critics of his time, in becoming a rival far greater than any of her contemporaries.
ellauri106.html on line 177: Roth was far more prolific than either of the novelists he was frequently lumped with—29 full length novels and a dazzling debut novella over nearly 50 years. His output was also more diverse in style and topic than either of the other while reaping critical praise, armloads of awards, and commercial success. Yet at the core of his varied output were common threads—a Jewish identity with which he was not always comfortable but could not deny, a sense of being profoundly American— “if I am not American what am I”—a, a sex drive that was often creepily compulsive, and the world observed by fictional doppelgangers for the author, or sometimes the author himself as a fictional character.
ellauri108.html on line 491: The scholar Maureen Warner-Lewis observed that Rastafari combined a "radical, even revolutionary" stance on socio-political issues, particularly regarding race, with a "profoundly traditional" approach to "philosophical conservatism" on other religious issues. Rastas typically look critically upon modern capitalism with its consumerism and materialism. They favour small-scale, pre-industrial and agricultural societies. Not just sinners but bad businessmen.
ellauri110.html on line 147: On the other hand, Swift was profoundly mistrustful of attempts at reason that resulted in either hubris (for example, the Projectors satirised in A Tale of a Tub or in Book III of Gulliver's Travels) or immorality (such as the speaker of A Modest Proposal, who offers an entirely logical and wholly immoral proposal for cannibalism). The Houyhnhnms embody both the good and the bad side of reason, for they have the pure language Swift wished for and the amorally rational approach to solving the problems of humanity (Yahoos); the extirpation of the Yahoo population by the horses is very like the speaker of A Modest Proposal.
ellauri112.html on line 675: Tully’s like a hip millennial Marry Poppins. It all seems too good to be true. Their deepening connection hints at something that’s either eerie or profoundly healing. Are they dykes?
ellauri146.html on line 654: Poe, unlike other great American writers of his time, spent a considerable portion of his childhood in Britain. In 1815, John Allan set out for England, accompanied by his wife, Frances Allan; his sister-in-law, “Aunt Nancy” Valentine; and his six-year-old foster son, Edgar Poe. For a time Edgar attended the small London school of Miss Dubourg (a name which subsequently was to appear in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”) and later, for a period of three years from 1817 to 1820, was sent to a better school, the Manor House at Stoke Newington near London. Here Poe, in addition to being affected profoundly by the atmosphere of England, studied French, Latin, history and literature. The Manor House School, with its “Dr.” Bransby, Poe later was to transplant bodily to the semi-autobiographical tale “William Wilson” (1840).
ellauri155.html on line 880: Santayana is mostly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", "Only the dead have seen the end of war", and the definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified". Although an atheist, he treasured the Spanish Catholic values, practices, and worldview in which he was raised.] Santayana was a broad-ranging cultural critic spanning many disciplines. He was profoundly influenced by Spinoza´s life and thought; and, in many respects, was another Spinoza. Was he too a jew? I guess not. His father was a minor intellectual. His mother married a Bostonian merchant Sturgis who died. In Madrid, he married the Santayana guy. In 1869, Josefina Borrás de Santayana returned to Boston with her three Sturgis children, because she had promised her first husband to raise the children in the US. She left the six-year-old Jorge with his father in Spain. Jorge and his father followed her to Boston in 1872. His father, finding neither Boston nor his wife´s attitude to his liking, soon returned alone to Ávila, and remained there the rest of his life as a minor intellectual.
ellauri164.html on line 379: I wanted to like this book so much more than I did. I actually found it incredibly difficult to understand. Some of it, I think, was that it was poorly translated. I read a 1962 edition that doesn't even cite a translator -- so many of the sentences were so convoluted as to be utterly obtuse. Poor translation or witless reader? I never could figure out why Mlle Chantal was such an angry bitch and why she insisted on tormenting the priest. What was her secret? Was the priest an alcoholic or just terminally sick? Gay? Why did M le Comte come to hate the priest? These are just some of the basic narrative issues I couldn't figure out. Forget the whole spiritual aspect--much of what the priest mused on and felt was incomprehensible to me as he described it. I can't help wondering if I'd have understood it if I had read it in French. Or maybe I'm just so spiritually challenged (in a God believing, Catholic way) that I can't comprehend it when it's described. All of that said, there were profoundly moving passages here and there, but over all I don't begin to know what I read. It's rather embarrassing actually--I feel so simple! (less)
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