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 orioleorgans)
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.
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.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
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.
We have always been allies with metal and at war with Coldplay.
The International Brigades against Fashion.
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.
Yeah no I just say things like that sometimes.
Seriously that book is going to rule so hard.
titled “Homage to the Road to Animal Farm”, i.e. Road to Wigan Pier. I just read a couple of days ago that Animal Farm was the first of his books to make any money, which is no great surprise.
Orwell on political writing, from the opening of a long-ish essay on Koestler’s work at the time:
“One striking fact about English literature during the present century is the extent to which it has been dominated by foreigners—for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Still, if you chose to make this a matter of national prestige and examine our achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special class of literature that has arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading novels, autobiographies, books of “reportage”, sociological treatises and plain pamphlets can all be lumped together, all of them having a common origin and to a great extent the same emotional atmosphere.
Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself. Some of these are imaginative writers, some not, but they are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary history, but unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in the newspapers. Also they are all alike in being continental Europeans. It may be an exaggeration, but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book dealing with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still seems worth reading six months after publication, it is a book translated from some foreign language. English writers, over the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political literature, but they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic value, and very little of historical value either. The Left Book Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of its chosen volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia—all that these and kindred subjects have produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up again, half digested, and a very few reliable guide books and text-books. 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…”
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
“But there was more to it than the mere fact that business is a swindle. What he realized, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion - the only really felt religion - that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One is for the employers - the elect, the money-priesthood as it were - ‘Thou shalt make money’; the other for the employed - the slaves and underlings - ‘Thou shalt not lose thy job.’ It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousers Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.”
