Letter from Orwell to his publisher regarding 1984
lettersofnote.com
lettersofnote.com
The Lewis book itself is remarkably little-read (the traditional C. S. Lewis fan may not appreciate its atmosphere, I suppose) and will probably surprise most people who have preconceptions about the man's philosophy and what he was capable of writing. But I digress.
It's good to think that in 1945, just as now, people felt that the golden age of literature was behind us.
Not much has appeared since 1945 that really is comparable to the "golden age of literature" (that would be around 18xx-1940, I guess) --just a few exceptions to prove the rule, and tons of crap.
1984 itself, is a minor work, literary wise.
And you've completely discounted the post-modern literature of post-WWII, including Nabokov (!), DeLillo, Franzen, Morrison. Them's fighting words.
It mostly has political (in the broad sense) importance, not actual literary one. ("Brave New World" is even worse in this regard, but it also has the same kind of importance).
"""And you've completely discounted the post-modern literature of post-WWII, including Nabokov (!), DeLillo, Franzen, Morrison."""
I said there are "a few exceptions to prove the rule". Nabokov could be one, true, but surely not DeLillo, Franzen and Morrison, and not crap like Rothman, Pynchon et al.
*This is an example*
Obviously listing a bunch of names isn't going to prove the argument one way or the other, but I think it's a bit unfair to claim that all post-WWII literature is crap mod a few exceptions. Sci-Fi basically didn't exist before 1940.
I think it is more relevant to look at the 19th century vs. 20th century.
Um, seriously? What genre would you place either of The War of the Worlds or 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, then? That the books manage to get a lot of things wrong doesn't really alter the fact that they were early, very popular examples of science fiction (and there were a lot more dating back to before WWII, when SF really took off.)
Try and find something new. Don't wait for someone else to tell you what you should read because they said it was great. Find your own great works.
A partial copy is here: http://books.google.com/books?id=V7YkpPwnFlUC&lpg=PA103&...
(That Hideous Strength is a hard book to appreciate, because it doesn't have a natural audience. It mixes dystopian transhumanist science fiction with religious parables, Arthurian legend and British academic politics.)
The nice thing about the Orwell review for me is that by explicitly talking about the atomic bomb and spelling it out for me in that context, it led me to an understanding of a lot of other cultural output (especially film) over the next few decades. Star Trek IV? Oh, that space probe that's out to destroy the world is a symbol for the atomic bomb. (I had some help from the boombox quip about how "we'll all be crispy critters after WORLD WAR III.") Blade Runner? Is about living with the expectation your life could end tomorrow. Aliens? Is about the destruction of civilization. And it's not just hardcore sci-fi. Why did the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH into The Secret of NIMH rewrite the end plot with that stupid mystical jewel-locket-thing? Besides the fact that it's more cinematic, perhaps the director was pondering the promise and perils of science, especially atomic weapons and atomic energy. Flippin' Rock-a-doodle? I'm thinking 'nuclear winter'.
You just don't get that same flavor with things produced after the mid-eighties.
They pretty much rewrote the entire premise of the book. It was originally about lab rats who acquired human-level intelligence from experiments, and then had to rapidly build a civilization from scratch. Disnification turned it into some typical magical talking animal thing.
Yeah, he rewrote the premise, and now it's about saving your family from imminent nuclear/tractor-related apocalypse with a lab-rat sideshow. Ironic, since this means Frisby is about the NIMH story while Secret of NIMH is about Mrs Frisby (/Brisby, per Frisbee Corp. lawsuit concerns).
"TB" = Tuberculosis.
Reading his little abbreviations, it's like some kind of new language or something... ;)
Even more common: 'Oxala' (oh-shah-LAH) taken from Arabic 'in sha lah' meaning the same thing.
> One could ignore this, just possibly, if it existed in a single book. And yet for 10 years the abstract figure of "the Jew" makes regular appearances in Orwell's diaries. Out tramping in the early 30s, he falls in with "a little Liverpool Jew, a thorough guttersnipe" with a face that recalls "some low-down carrion bird". Watching the crowds thronging the London underground in October 1940, he decides that what is "bad" about the Jews is that they are not only conspicuous but go out of their way to make themselves so.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/13/biography.higher...
I suggest reading his essay about anti-semitism if you wish to learn more about his opinion based on his writings. http://www.george-orwell.org/AntiSemitism_In_Britian/0.html
The essay to which you have linked surprised me; I can only conclude that Orwell must have been an anti-semite most of his life, and changed (or at least appeared to change) his views towards the very end of his life.
"Writing in the spring of 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain", for the Contemporary Jewish Record, Orwell stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in Britain, and that it was "irrational and will not yield to arguments". He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others". He wrote: "For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. ... Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness." In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein."
How many times have you finished a program but known it could be better, if only you had more time? A little optimization here, some refactoring there... The necessities of producing actual works prevent us from ever giving them the degree of polish we feel they deserve.
"The trick is to realize that there's no real contradiction here. You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of whatever solution you've got so far.
People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is no good. Others see what they've done and are full of wonder, but the creator is full of worry. This pattern is no coincidence: it is the worry that made the work good.
If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you'll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn't outweigh your hope, you'll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think, how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?, thereby continuing the cycle."
-Paul Graham
Success is the balance of dissatisfaction with your own work combined with a drive to push forward. The drive without the dissatisfaction just leads to a bunch of mediocre half done projects, the dissatisfaction without the drive will just end in depression.
I think truly great people are nearly torn apart by these clashing drives, but that's what leads to true masterpieces.
On a personal note I think it's important to find the level of dissatisfaction that works best for you. It my be great to make Thriller, but paradoxically if you're the person that makes Thriller you won't be able to accept its greatness. At the same time you never want to be in a state of comfort such that your life is spent playing xbox all day. Of course some (Buddhists being one group) would argue that true happiness is elimination of both the drive and the dissatisfaction, they may be right but I'm too driven in my personal work to follow that path ;)
It's unclear whether you're talking about Thriller itself or about Bad, but Thriller was definitely driven by dissatisfaction with himself (he was extremely lonely according to his bios) and with the world at large: Jackson was frustrated by Off The Wall not having gotten Album of the Year (and felt it was unfair), and he was annoyed that the music industry and its press did not care about black people in general and him in particular (e.g. in 1980 Rolling Stone refused to do a cover story on him).
Slashdot once interviewed The Filthy Critic, and he talked about a friend who had spent time in the writing rooms of a few sitcoms. The writers working on shows that were really pretty poor thought their work was hilarious. They couldn't get enough of their own jokes. He contrasted it with The Simpsons's writing room: full of frustrated, self-loathing writers who didn't think what they were doing was any good at all.
"On the other hand a skilled typist under my eye could do it easily enough. If you can think of anybody who would be willing to come, I will send money for the journey and full instructions. I think we could make her quite comfortable. There is always plenty to eat and I will see that she has a comfortable warm place to work in"
Do any writers really, truly like other writers?