george orwell: S and D

His analysis of Trump's victory includes fake news, conspiracies, lies, facebook and ends on AI -- anything but policy, the oposing candidate, the desertion of the working class from what was on offer, and the simple fact that Trump was on the Republican ticket.

Surely if you're writing about 1984 specifically then those angles are less relevant than the disinformation angle? More generally you can't write about Orwell without writing about class and socialism (and he would be considered an extremist lefty by the standards of most of the people who smugly namedrop him nowadays). I assume the book covers that stuff somewhere but I'm not interested enough in Orwell to read a biography of him.

isn't it just a biography of the novel "1984"?

ie (i assume) at least in part a study of the ideological uses it's been put to? which doesn't seem to me an *intrinsically* terrible idea tho i'm not sure who i'd trust to write it well

If you include these other things then I dunno disinformation on its own becomes less relevant? Also disinformation is an active part of elections. There's a book there but by focusing on 2016 without a treatment of the past to talk about a shift just looks a bit thin to me. Maybe he does do it.

His book is a biography of 1984 the book, which is just as well as it can exclude Orwell.

xp

i'm guessing (hoping) that priming the 2016 pump is more a way of getting guardian reader attention RIGHT NOW in this overnoisy moment than a speed-read rehearsal of the book;s actual argument

tired: "it's called 1984 but actually it's about 1948, i.e. set 36 years earlier than the title"
wired: "it's called 1984 but actually it's about 2020, i.e. set 36 years LATER than the title"

”But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Dunty”

No, it's "He loved Mr Blobby." Been decades since I read it, but I enjoyed Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life, which seemed more inquisitive and speculative than most bios: he was diligent, did his paper work and also came up with good quotes from class mates etc., but wasn't presenting The Big Reveal or any other meal ticket sure shot.

btw, this was an excellent discussion of Orwell.

The day ends in Y, so the centrist journos are invoking one of the two Orwell books they've read. Instead of reading them, why not revisit last year's @ResonanceFM show with @owenhatherley & @hekale on Orwell's works and legacies? https://t.co/E1bL4FnaIw

— Suite (212) (@Suite_212) July 11, 2020

So he just got inducted into Gallimard's 'Bibliothèque de la Pléiade', which is an official French literary canon in all but name.

I found 'Burmese Days' and 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' to be fairly readable, but I have completely forgotten anything about 'Clergyman's Daughter', which is not a good sign at all.

― Aimless (Aimless), Saturday, April 8, 2006 8:14 AM (fourteen years ago)

A month or so ago I tried to re-read A Clergyman's Daughter and bailed out in under 20 pages. It was not well-written. I'm moving it into 'Destroy' category. Everything else can stay in 'Search'.

Search: "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool." One of my favorite essays. I love the moment where he says, "Lear is about renunciation," and all the pieces of his argument come together at once. It all fits so perfectly you can almost hear the click as it snaps into place.

This bit us quite good.

In fairness Orwell's domestic reporting has a lot of good stuff in it

— Matthijs Krul (@McCaineNL) July 25, 2022

Didn't mean to post the tweet in response to this:

I have very mixed feelings about Orwell (of course) but he got it at least about excluding kids from pubs. https://t.co/0g2aPEDDVN pic.twitter.com/jmOetE8nCT

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) July 25, 2022