98% Orwell Free

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> An intriguing proposition, with no end of possibilities. Leaving aside
> for the moment the fact that little discussion of Pynchon's Foreword (as
> opposed to Orwell's novel and the obligatory infighting) has heretofore
> taken place ... who would the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks be?

Who cares? Their all dead and Orwell got it wrong. It's not simply that
Orwell's writings (i.e., Animal Farm) become tools in the hands  of
those who control the past and the future. As a political/historical art
it doesn't hold up. 

It's good to remember that Orwell failed to see how the Russian people
of the period were not simply fools deluded by their naturally more
intelligent masters. 


And _1984_ is a fiction not a prophecy. 


It only makes sense as art. Orwell's objective--to make the political
into art-- is deeply flawed. Isn't this one of the reasons why Pynchon's
postmodern history novel (i.e., M&D)  is so much better than Orwells?
Isn't this one of the reasons why Wood is wrong? The Estate of Melville
is broken, spilled, there is no  way back, but allegory and metaphor
continue to work for fiction makers who make fictions, not predictions. 

Happy Birthday Ralph. 


An American preoccupation with the Self--celebrated by Emerson--makes of
every man an island for whom the bell tolls.  Our continuing belief in
Emersonian self-reliance has
perpetuated the image of the Solitary Man and the self indulgent baby
boomer.   Every school boy passing under the shadows of the great
figures at the  Museum of
Natural History, where a survival of the fittest Darwinian Spirit
animates the souls in the stone--Danial Boone and Davery Crocket, Teddy
Roosevelt--larger than life, his obsequious Indian and African by his
side ....

On the tube ... the aloof private eye, the lonely cowboy, western 
gunfighter
must, as HDT said,  "live free and uncommitted." 


We should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the
day together, should depart at night, as into foreign countries. In all
things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as
the gods, talking from peak to peak all around Olympus. No degree of
affection need invade this religion. This is myrrh and rosemary to keep
the other sweet. Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive
too much, all slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push
this deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness and absence of heat
and haste indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise: a lady is
serene. Proportionate is our disgust at those
invaders who fill a studious house with blast and running, to secure
some paltry convenience.
   Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbors needs.
Must we have a good understanding with one another’s palates? as foolish
people who have lived long together, know when each wants salt or sugar.
I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if
he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold
out his plate, as if I knew already. Every natural function can be
dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The
compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should signify, however
remotely, the recollection of the grandeur of our destiny.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,  XII. Manners


I guess you've all read this one. Recall that we had another of our
protracted debates over P's founding fathers and the like .... and
recently re-defined Dissident & Fascist 


http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/fischer24.htm

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