Hardcore for Nerds

"Why sneer at the intellectuals?"*
punk music, left politics, and cultural history - previously found here.
contact: gabbaweeks[at]gmail.com (sorry, no promos/submissions, thanks) or ask
Dublin, Ireland. 25, male, history and politics graduate
HFN | HFN 2012 2011 2010 2009 | HRO 2k9 | Hoover Genealogy Project | Hitler Runoff | @HC4N
*from the title of a review of Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure by Michael Foot, Evening Standard, Nov. 26, 1943.
Jan 21
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At the basis of this lies his hedonism, which leads him to think of the Earthly Paradise as desirable. Perhaps, however, whether desirable or not, it isn’t possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect, but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.

George Orwell, ‘Arthur Koestler’ (1944)

Quoted in my thesis, p. 43. I think the most obvious sign that this comes from a different era, with different political sensibilities, is simply the word ‘perhaps’.

orwell history koestler socialism
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Permalink koestler books history orwell socialism darkness at noon
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Jan 18
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on killing cops and reading (Koestler)

“I have a book up there, confessions of ex communists who quit when they recognized its totalitarian beastliness, The God That Failed the title  (including one dull O awfully dull account of André Gide’s that old postmortem bore) - all I have, for reading - and become depressed by the thought of a world (O what a world is this, that friendships cancel enmity of the heart, people fighting for something to fight, everywhere) a world of GPU’s and spies and dictators and purges and midnight murders and marijuana revolutions with guns and gangs in the desert - suddenly, just by tuning in on America via the lookout radio listening to the other boys in the bull session, I hear football scores, talk of so-and-so “Bo Pelligrini! - what a bruiser!! I don’t talk to anybody from Maryland” - and the jokes and the laconic stay, I realize, “America is as free as that wild wind, out there, still free, free as when there was no name to that border to call it Canada and on Friday nights when Canadian Fishermen come in old cars on the old road beyond the lake tarn” (that I can see, the little lights of Friday night, thinking then immediately of their hats and gear and flies and lines) “on Friday nights it was the nameless Indian came, the Skagit, and a few log forts were up there, and down here a ways, and winds blew on free feet and free antlers, and still do, on free radio waves, on free wild youngtalk of America on the radio, college boys, fearless free boys, a million miles from Siberia this is and Amerikay is a good old country yet-“

For the whole blighted darkness-woe of thinking about Russias and plots to assassinate whole peoples’ souls, is lifted just by hearing “My God, the score is 26-0 already - they couldn’t gain anything thru the line” - “Just like the All Stars” - “Hey Ed when you comin down off your lookout?” - “He’s goin steady, he’ll be wantin to go home straight” - “We might take a look at Glacier National Park” - “We’re going home thru the Badlands of North Dakota” - “You mean the Black Hills” - “I don’t talk to anybody from Syracuse” - “Anybody know a good bedtime story?” - “Hey it’s eight thirty, we better knock off- How 33 ten-seven until tomorrow morning. Good night” - “Ho! How 32 ten-seven till tomorrow morning- Sleep tight” - “Did you say you had Honkgonk on your portable radio?” - “Sure, listen, hingya hingya hingya” - “That does it, good night” -

And I know that America is too vast with people too vast to ever be degraded to the level of a slave nation, and I can go hitch hiking down that road and on into the remaining years of my life knowing that outside of a couple of fights in bars started by drunks I’ll have not a hair of my head (and I need a haircut) harmed by Totalitarian cruelty- 

Indian scalp say this, and prophesy:

“From these walls, laughter will run over the world, infecting with courage the bent laborious peon of antiquity.”

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, I:15 (1965)

Although it’s one of my favourite Kerouac books (more creative, though less accessible, than On The Road or even Dharma Bums) I haven’t read it in a few years and didn’t realise there was a passing, indirect reference to my thesis subject Arthur Koestler (I like Ks and misogynists who have penetrating insights into the human condition). Actually I never read The God That Failed, which Koestler contributed one of the essays to, because it was at least five years outside my timeframe and the library copy was missing. But I read enough about what was in it, and Koestler’s story as recounted in his novels and autobiography - propaganda for the increasingly virulent anti-Communist attitude in the west, but also a genuine psychological exposé of a totalitarian ideology.

It’s not surprising that a book which was so much part of the cultural and political zeitgeist ended up with Kerouac in his fire-lookout cabin on a Washington State mountain. It’s also not surprising, reading these thoughts, that he voted for Eisenhower (or so he is supposed to have said). It may seem a little odd to posit sports fanaticism as a countervailing tradition to totalitarian dictatorships, but I’d imagine it would have a lot of resonance with many conservatives today (not Republicans, necessarily, just conservatives - with a small c, perhaps). You could probably find a New York Times op-ed on the subject, even. Kerouac’s genius was to romanticise in a hectic, muddy way the underbelly of American capitalism - the bums, the petty crooks, the marginal workers - while portraying his journey as an artistic flight from suburban, respectable conservatism.

Read More

kerouac koestler books politics american exceptionalism orwell buddhism
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Jan 27
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betterbooktitles:

George Orwell: 1984

This is a rather ungood title - it’s the ending, for chrissakes! It took me a moment to work that out though, so kudos I suppose. But since it’s all most people reference from the book anyway, I’d go with ‘Big Brother’s Little Brother (The Novel)’.
(Or, more mischievously, how about ‘Big Government is Bad’?)

betterbooktitles:

George Orwell: 1984

This is a rather ungood title - it’s the ending, for chrissakes! It took me a moment to work that out though, so kudos I suppose. But since it’s all most people reference from the book anyway, I’d go with ‘Big Brother’s Little Brother (The Novel)’.

(Or, more mischievously, how about ‘Big Government is Bad’?)

(via oriolewithoutorgans-deactivated)

books orwell tv
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Oct 11
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My vision of the future is a shoe sitting on top of a human head forever.

My vision of the future is a shoe sitting on top of a human head forever.

zen orwell
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May 08
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think of Arthur Koestler, who specialised in treating people abominably while writing the sublime Darkness at Noon

Why sneer at don’t we love our intellectuals? - Books - The Observer

“…or of the British intellectuals of the 1930s who so admired Stalin, even as he was slaughtering his own people.”

There’s more than a slight touch of the bizarre about this Guardian set of features on ‘Britain’s Intellectuals’ - culminating in this list of 300 names that are, more or less, recognizable and which includes two psychotherapists, two religious leaders (the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi, natch), two activists and two classicists, and four social scientists and four theatre directors; also three Irish people that I noticed - Declan Kiberd, Fintan O’Toole and Ruth Dudley Edwards (the Brits can keep her, she’s a West one anyway). But mostly it’s that the notion of the ‘public intellectual’ is almost exclusively defined in relation to the French examples (principally Sartre/de Beauvoir and Bernard-Henri Lévy), with a few mentions of American Ivy League professors.

If the British conception of the public intellectual is supposed to be that they begin at Calais, then the counter-response ends at Charles de Gaulle and doesn’t take off, apart from a few connecting flights to the States. It must be a sign of the British detachment, even in such an outward-looking newspaper as the Guardian, from Europe that someone like Jurgen Habermas, the quintessential public intellectual with regards to German national affairs and its European role, as well as the academic or political philosophy of public discourse itself as it is taught across the West, is absent from a comparative discussion seeking to establish the type of the British intellectual.   

The most interesting contribution from the ten ‘celebrated thinkers’ on the question of Britain’s intellectuals comes from youthful, TV-friendly, former 90s pop musician and now physicist Prof. Brian Cox, who notes: “The dilemma for the public intellectual is to remember at all times that the point of the project is to remove arguments from authority.” Of course, he’s speaking from the position of hard science, not the humanities - but his argument on public discourse is all the better for it. In Ireland currently, I’d see our public intellectuals as coming from the fringes of both disciplines - namely economists and essayists (whether primarily novelists or journalists): those who can no longer claim authority, because of the erosion of their fields due to the changes in the economy and society, but who can display both experience and vision in describing those changes. 

Which, in a rather roundabout way, brings me back to Koestler - who may have been a deeply unpleasant person to be around, but who also wrote Darkness at Noon while in Paris as an exile from Nazi Germany and his Hungarian homeland, and who then became in the interval between its completion and its publication an exile from the Continent itself; the experiences he recounts in The Scum of the Earth point to a good degree of abominable treatment of himself and similarly situated political refugees, from which British intellectuals were almost entirely insulated, a fact Orwell used as the starting point for his essay on Koestler:

“…There has been nothing resembling, for instance, FONTAMARA or DARKNESS AT NOON, because there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside. In Europe, during the past decade and more, things have been happening to middle-class people which in England do not even happen to the working class. Most of the European writers I mentioned above, and scores of others like them, have been obliged to break the law in order to engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in street battles, many have been in prison or the concentration camp, or fled across frontiers with false names and forged passports. One cannot imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in activities of that kind.”

One result of this, he says, “is that there exists in England almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union.” That is the particular reason for the complaint above, oddly juxtaposed as it is with the half-criticism of Koestler; of course some French intellectuals persisted in their commitment to Stalinism for much longer, practically to the finish in many cases - but that is a function of political climate of the post-war period there as the gradual disengagement was in Labour-led Britain. What this Guardian articles decries as a theory of ‘British exceptionalism’ is simply an exaggeration of the true state of affairs which separated Britain from the more volatile course of Continental European history in the 20th century:

“As a historian, Collini smells an ideological rat here, and traces the odour to an ideological belief in British exceptionalism. What it amounts to is the belief that the course of British history has been so exceptionally smooth – with its adaptable aristocracy, (relatively) tolerant church, apolitical military and reformist bourgeoisie – that there was no call for the evolution of an oppositional intelligentsia. So the fact that there are no intellectuals in Britain is something to be proud of. It’s a byproduct of the Whig interpretation of history.

This strikes me as baloney, mostly derived from a comprehensive misunderstanding of other cultures – a species of what Collini calls “Dreyfus envy”, after the celebrated late 19th-century affair in which intellectuals took on the French establishment and won. Intellectuals may enjoy a higher celebrity status across the Channel but I can see little evidence that France is more governed by ideas than is Britain.”

And so on, to complain of the stereotypical image of the continental intellectual, which is of course limited to that of France. The problem is not that the author is incorrect in diagnosing the problems of that country’s politicised intelligentsia, but that it’s then used as an excuse to cast off the influence of European history and to paper over the glaring short-sightedness of that stereotypical scope. From that point on, the intellectual is to be defined in a purely Anglo-American sense, with a virtuous pragmatism and an affinity for the low-key - exemplified in Will Self’s comparison of “the odious spectacle of Bernard-Henri Lévy urging Sarko on to bomb Libya” with the contribution of ethicist Mary Warnock to public policy on IVF treatment. Though since she is now a peer, speaking in the House of Lords, and given the wistfulness with which many contributors regard the profile of Ivy League professors as the ‘American public intellectuals’, the aversion to celebrity seems more a matter of taste than intellectual principle.

british exceptionalism history koestler orwell politics uk hitler runoff
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Apr 11
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1. ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
2. THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
3. BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
4. THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
6. 1984 by George Orwell
7. ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
8. WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
9. MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
10. FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

The Reader’s List, where your “reader” is a 17-year-old guy from 4chan.

(via katherinestasaph)

hey, there are 3 good books there (even if respectively they have been over-romanticised*, are perhaps overly didactic, and are far too narrowly understood relative to the context and the rest of the writer’s output). and no. 11 is Ulysses. 

on the ‘Board’ list (critical elite of gatekeepers FTW!) that last is no. 1, Portrait of the Artist is no. 3, but perhaps more importantly - because it’s to my mind just as good as if not better than 1984, and just as relevant to contemporary ideological politics as the latter is to contemporary technological politics - Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon at no. 8.   

and then there’s James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake at no. 77 in the Board list and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds at no. 76 in the Reader’s - the latter is probably a lot more worth reading for most people.

I guess the 4chan remark above is by way of pointing to the (deliberate) manipulation of internet polls, but equally it could just be the weight of mediocrity/popularity that propels so many bestsellers into one poll and taste/refinement that fills the other up with quality literary novels**.

another Tumblr I follow credits this to Roger Ebert’s Twitter, so I assume this is now or will shortly be doing the rounds, because everyone wants to pile on with their criticism. I say, find a better book to read.

*I read the book long before the films, duh. 

**though only ones first published in English, by the terms of reference. I understand the need to restrict things - even if the US series began as the idea “to provide American readers with inexpensive reprints of European modernist titles, plus the work of a few contemporary Americans” - but ironically Darkness at Noon was written in German, and would probably have been published as such had the Nazi era not been a factor.

books critical runoff joyce koestler orwell Flann O'Brien
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Feb 04
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Leatherface - ‘Gang Party’ from BYO Split Series Vol. 1 with Hot Water Music (1999)

This is a vinyl rip from the LP version which I recently acquired, and which exhibits one of the features of the record (properly speaking) as physical artefact: the compression that often occurs with the final track on an LP side. It’s a consequence of angular geometry - each complete rotation takes 1/33 of a minute, but closer to the centre of the record the length of that rotation in the spiral groove decreases, reducing the quality of the sound recorded in it. Usually it’s not a problem, but with a lot of music to be recorded per side - as in the case of this excellent split with seven songs from Leatherface and six from Hot Water Music - the distortion at the very end can become noticeable even to a untrained ear such as mine. Particularly for the music involved, it’s not a wholly unpleasant effect, a bit like the clipping you might get at a gig (or on a Sleigh Bells record?), a drifting in and out of clarity and full volume. It’s also present on the final Hot Water Music track, the superb ‘Bitter End’, though that’s a little strange as the run-out groove (the space between the regular, sound-bearing grooves and the centre label) is much larger - but I suppose there may be a more complex yet still technically imperfect process at work there than I understand. 

As for the song, it’s one of my favourites of theirs; a gritty paean to diversity, and a quintessentially English warning against some version of the Orwellian nanny-state - “I pray the day won’t come when all that’s wrong is how much we love everyone” - where goodness is imposed and standardised rather than originating organically. The price of liberty is eternal dirt. And, one might add, distortion.

40 plays
leatherface punk uk socialism orwell
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Oct 27
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raptoravatar:

We have always been allies with metal and at war with Coldplay.

The International Brigades against Fashion.

raptoravatar:

We have always been allies with metal and at war with Coldplay.

The International Brigades against Fashion.

orwell books
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Sep 29
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All these middle-class people, my parents, friends, relations and the like, were seething with a sort of repressed rage at the world around them. And what they were raging against was the post-war Labour government. It was impossible to have any sort of conversation about the rights and wrongs of the National Health Service, which was about to come in, they talked as if this Labour government was an occupying power, that the Bolsheviks had arrived and were about to strip them of everything they owned.

J.G. Ballard, quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945-51 (Bloomsbury, 2007)

I’ve just started reading this excellent book of social history, and something seemed awfully reminiscent of recent US politics… Bolshevik was the favourite term of British conservatives for “communist”, while the 1940s Labour party was actually socialist in its political ideals, and the NHS is roughly the dropped “public option” with bells on, i.e. completely universal and centrally funded healthcare. Clement Atlee was no Obama and Winston Churchill was not George W. Bush (although he was in charge of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in the First World War), but passions still ran high. There were even, believe it or not, racial slurs thrown around by the right-wing upper-class:

“At another Stock Exchange firm, the brokers Panmure and Gordon, the senior partner Richard Hart-Davis insisted that the Prime Minister was Chinese and invariably referred to him as A.T. Lee.”

Or, on the other hand, disillusionment on the left with the rate or even sincerity of progress, as expressed by George Orwell in 1946:

“In the social set-up there is no symptom by which one could infer that we are not living under a Conservative government. No move has been made against the House of Lords, for example, there has been no talk of disestablishing the Church, there has been very little replacement of Tory ambassadors, service chiefs or other high officials, and if any effort is really being made to democratize education, it has borne no fruit as yet. Allowing for the general impoverishment, the upper classes are still living their accustomed life.”

History repeating itself - I’m guessing at the farcical stage, by now. 

books history orwell politics uk socialism
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