ellauri051.html on line 1136: 545 Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy, 545 Jokainen hetki ja mitä tahansa tapahtuu, jännittää minua ilolla,
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.
ellauri321.html on line 220: Set in the year before the Wall Street crash, Juan in America is a classic evocation of the final mania of prohibition, as seen through equally maniacal British eyes. The character Eric Linklater devised to be his unreliable explorer was one capable of absorbing the enormity of the American experience without being overwhelmed by its incongruities. A blithe, bastard descendent of Byron(tm)s Don Juan, Linklater´s Juan is an anti-hero with a taste for the grotesque and the ridiculous, at once both dirty and deity whose response when faced either with sudden catastrophe or miraculous survival is simply to laugh. A novel in the mode of the picaresque, this is a story of erotic discovery in the sense, as Juan puts it, that, eh, your trousers hide not only your willy but your kinship to the clown. A nation emerging as a great power is exalting in absurdist energies. In its last spasms before the great depression, America is revealed through a series of unlikely accidents as Juan stumbles from state to state, somehow evading consequences as he goes. On his first day, he falls for the daughter of a gangster, witnesses a murder in a speakeasy and watches a woman leap to her death in a New York street. He thrills to the bizarreness of each spectacle and moves on to the next in a galloping mood that is part medieval romance, part running commentary on what was still, in the 1920s, the new world.
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