ellauri069.html on line 479: Imagine a story that combines Ulysses, Catch-22, The Canterbury tales, Under the Volcano, On the Road and many others. First, there is a huge cast of characters and most times, it is unclear who’s speaking and to whom. A second challenge is getting into the context of the book. The novel demands a vast knowledge of history, geography, music, literature, science, mathematics and occult. Apart from this the book also explicitly deals with profanity, racism, violence, pedophilia, coprophilia and seemingly infinite number of sex scenes. That being said, Pynchon doesn’t throw them arbitrarily and each one of them have a purpose. The main plot itself is set at the end of World War 2 and Europe is in chaos. As new countries and alliances are being formed, so too are new perspectives within the characters. Mental state being broken down, people making poor choices and actions being justified and helps us see how people tend to live destructively. As if there complexities weren’t enough, Pynchon includes a “postmodern” aspect of the book that leaves the first-time reader confused. Pynchon’s voice is seen through this aspect and a sense of paranoia creeps throughout the book and everything is questioned.
ellauri074.html on line 247: One way he would get people to do this is by making them do a firewalk over a bed of hot embers. Most people at his seminars normally thought that would be impossible. By showing them that they can walk on fire, it helped the attendees see that they had preconceived notions that weren’t true. (The trick is to wear thick-soled shoes with a huge carbon footprint.)
ellauri097.html on line 475: Of course, this trades on the notion that human beings, in this case, were made for certain ends. And if a person wants to deny God, then we weren’t made for certain ends, and that’s a way to get out of this argument. So does this argument work for people who are not theists?
ellauri112.html on line 600: Yes, we know that once a person has a kid their life changes completely, often with hardships and challenges along the way. But Reitman and Cody inject a level of warmth that prevents this from being simply depressing, at times it’s quite funny. Being a parent is a tough job, but it’s a necessary one – where would any of us be if there weren’t someone watching after us as toddlers?
ellauri132.html on line 193: THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
ellauri132.html on line 195: Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen year-old son, Harrison, away.
ellauri152.html on line 600: Anshel had found a way to deflower the bride. Badass in her innocence was unaware that things weren’t quite as they should have been.
ellauri162.html on line 834: We can’t say we weren’t warned about Alexa! Alexa is the name given to the voice that responds to your commands on the Amazon Echo device. In a recent post, I discussed the creepiness of having someone potentially listen to every conversation in its vicinity. As I understand it (not having one) the device is only supposed to be activated if you first say “Alexa” but apparently that is not the case. A family in Portland, Oregon reports that an Amazon Alexa device recorded a private conversation about hardwood floors and randomly sent it to a contact in Seattle. Danielle, who declined to provide her last name, told KIRO-TV that the contact called her family to tell them that their privacy was being compromised. Unplug your Alexa devices right now, the reportedly unnamed individual said, you’re being hacked.
ellauri189.html on line 809: I should note that if some of the Pashtun tribes are descendants of Bene Israel and others aren’t, and the Pashtuns mixed within themselves, that would exclude Pashtuns from category 2. Yet, as far as I know, mixing even between tribes is rare (or at least was rare until recently). So I guess that if you are a Pashtun and the elders of your tribe say you are Bene Israel and that your tribe’s ancestors didn’t mix with tribes that aren’t Bene Israel, then you are Israeli. Otherwise, there might be some doubts in case some tribes (those that don’t have this tradition) weren’t original Pashtuns but adopted the Pashtuns’ culture at some point in history.
ellauri222.html on line 97: “In college I behaved as though my career was to be a writer, and that guided me,” Bellow later said. There was also the fact that his principal interest was literature, and, until after the war, Jews were rarely hired by English departments. “You weren’t born to it” is the way the chairman of the department at Northwestern clarified the matter when Bellow inquired about graduate school. Leader thinks that this encounter “produced a lifelong antipathy, mild but real, to English departments.” It’s true that there was antipathy. But Bellow would have been interested in a university career only as a means to support his writing. Fiction was his calling. “He was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning,” David Peltz, Bellow’s oldest friend, told Leader. “I mean, he never veered.”
ellauri226.html on line 312: the street. They weren’t deliberately trying to hit a person,
ellauri257.html on line 520: What kind of inner, private life did Alma have? Did she tire of years of cooking, cleaning, ironing and sewing for Singer? Was it difficult to be the wife of a public person? How did she cope with his escapades? About these the manuscript remains silent. After all, Alma belonged to a social class where women weren’t encouraged to explore such details. In an interview, she does represent the younger Singer as easy-going and says how much he changed over time. But she ascribes those changes to how much people wanted from him and not the other way around.
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 561: First of all, I didn’t know that what I’d come up with weren’t actually principles. They were just rules.
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 315: Hardened? Most certainly, and the evidence is everywhere. Here’s a man so powerful that he can boss around both massage therapists and waiters, as he does in “I Am a God”: “I am a god / So hurry up with my damn massage / in the French … restaurant / hurry up with my damn croissants.” If it weren’t embedded within a truly frightening song featuring curdling screams and deep bass, the line would be laughable.
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/ellauri193.html on line 591: Ladies and gentlemen, we have a tie! That’s probably not how they announced it back in October of 1974. A tie is not even the proper term for the rare occasions when the Nobel Prize in Literature’s gone to two people at once. Sharing the honor is the phrase that seems to crop up, and these shared honors look like political moves—when the prize is going to a country that the Nobel committee might not get back to in a while. (The novelist António Lobo Antunes, for example, was reportedly heartbroken when the Nobel went to José Saramago, because he knew they weren’t going to give it to Portugal again in his lifetime.) Still, there’s something about a shared prize that feels slighting, the A-minus of literary glory. I picture scenes like this:
xxx/ellauri228.html on line 446: The year was 1945. Prostitution in America is a respectable business. The sisters weren’t talented and weren’t educated or good looking, but they certainly were not lacking in entrepreneurship. With few available choices, the Venezuela’s set up their business. "Rancho El Ángel" was a bordello featuring as the main dish, you guessed it, the four sisters. An attached bar serving hot mineral oil with ball bearings in it was added to increase the allure.
xxx/ellauri228.html on line 467: A high-IQ person in Quora complains: I know there are many high-IQ people like me out there who weren’t as lucky, and live average or even miserable lives despite their intelligence. Life can be really unfair. It’s really very easy to screw life up, even when you have a high IQ. Especially when you have a high IQ.
xxx/ellauri268.html on line 556: “When history looks back, I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,” he once said, according to the center’s website. Wiesenthal died in 2005 at the age of 96. Kosto elää, tai siis eli.
xxx/ellauri304.html on line 517: Sometimes though they might do a little more. They won’t steal the real action but they set the mood, they add humor, they make the setting more believable. You can do this by making placeholders eccentric or obsessive. I read analysis once of an old flick called Beverly Hills Cop. It featured a clerk in an art gallery. He was effeminate. By itself, that’s not unusual. But he had a Jewish accent, and that was unusual because Jews weren’t generally treated as queens in Hollywood — it teems with them (although today H’wood can say anything it wants about Jews, even Christians. You can tell this was an old movie.) What that character did however in the film was to help make Detroit cop Eddie Murphy, the negro comedian, feel even more alien in L.A. than he otherwise would have.
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