1985

1985

by Anthony Burgess

Some books age well, some don’t. Some books make prophesies of the future and they are wrong. Sometimes even when they are wrong they are still considered correct and are their jargon enter into the general lexicon as in 1984. Other books miss the mark of being correct about the future but they disappear from the world, as in the case of 1985.

I came across a reference to this book while thumbing through a biography on Anthony Burgess about five years ago. Since then I have kept my eyes opened looking in used book stores and those kinds of places for a copy of the book. I could have probably found the book to buy online, but I rarely ever do that kind of thing for myself. Last week though in a semi-ironic act I actually went to a library and saw that they had the book, so I took it out and finally got the read it.

The structure of the book is a little weird. The first hundred pages are a collection of essays and a faux-interview with the author on George Orwell’s much misused utopian novel. The gist of the first hundred pages is that Orwell’s book was grossly misunderstood by many and that it’s really a bleak picture of London in 1948 and also at heart a comic novel. It’s also according to Burgess the culmination and defeat of a lifetime of a conflicting belief in the working class by Orwell. After getting through this part of the book is a novella by Burgess where he presents his own possible future for England, one which he sees I’m sure as equally comical but also also a little less naive to the state of the world (why Orwell’s naivety is difficult to explain here). Basically Burgess’ version of a horrible future is taken from the idea that the bombs never did end up falling that everyone thought would in the post-war era, and instead of bombs there were even greater horrors to the killing of humanity present.

Burgess wrote his book in the late 1970’s. The book came out in 1978, a time when England was in a lot of trouble. Wide-spread unemployment, striking unions, inflation and general civil-unrest were present. This is the stage that would bring Thatcher and Reagen to prominence, and their own anti-labor acts would put a stop the basic premise of Burgess book, but that was still in the future.

Burgess saw a world destroyed by the power of unions, where strikes were a common thing and they were always held for more money-something that was quickly losing it’s value. In Burgess world everyone went on strike, firemen, the army, chocolate makers, train-operators, anyone you can think of. And if a building burned down, it was the fault of someone who didn’t give into the strike. It’s kind of a conservative horror show here, but there is still something subversive underlaying Burgess story. More than just the awfulness of syndicalism, Burgess also saw a general dumbing down of the culture taken beyond being just the norm but to the regulated norm. Language decided upon the majority usage, if most people misuse words then the misuse must be correct etc., (he called this Workers English, and he saw it as something even worse than Newspeak, or Doublespeak). He also saw a bleak pragmatic future where culture was left behind because it had no market value. As a result only the hooligans, or maybe droogs and the old resistors to the new world knew things like Latin or Greek, or the works of Plato and Shakespeare, or cared about history.

The book has something reactionary about it, and it is certainly an elitists nightmare of a possible future but it’s also a warning cry against the leveling a dumbed down consumerist culture could possibly create. Some of the premises of the book have essentially been destroyed by the actions of Thatcher and Regan in the early 80’s but there is still something to be read in this forgotten book.

Because I’m dumb…

I never thought of the idea that printing up this blog to hand in some of the entries for class would be difficult with an all black background. Oppps. I’ll be changing the background at some point temporarily for my own ease of printing, and then putting it back to black again or maybe a very vile color. Who can say for sure.

Quiet, Please…

Quiet, Please: Dispatches for a Public Librarian
By Scott Douglas

A review where I find I’m writing more about myself than the book at hand, only because the farther along I read in the book the more I saw myself in the book — which might not be the best way of reading a memoir.
(note: this is word for word my review that I also wrote on Goodreads.com–but I meant to actually put it here first, so I consider it a blog review for the book, rather than a goodreads review for the book. The distinction is a minor one and only matters to me, but now you know too. You’re a very very lucky person to know this fact.)

When I first came across this book I thought ‘oh cool – a book about being a librarian’, then I thought it will be nice in the biography section with the other book that came out a few months ago about being a librarian, and I’ll mean to read it and probably not, or at least until it comes out in paperback, and then maybe still forget about it. Then though I happened to open the book up to an early page and noticed first footnotes (and not that I would phrase it as a man-crush like the author does, I will admit being a complete sucker for David Foster Wallace (and Thomas Pynchon, but not Mark Twain who I avoid like the plague because of a horrible first experience with him at the hands of an incompetent English teacher)), which (I’m back on footnotes here) are an instant selling point to me and on the same page the story about trying to impress a librarian by reading Thomas Pynchon, only to find out the librarian thinks Pynchon is maybe some actor in a Julia Roberts movie. That’s all I needed to see, the book went right on top of my to buy pile of books and actually made it out of the to buy pile in the first week it was there (no little feat let me tell you, books can live in that pile for quite awhile).
Parts of the book were a little disheartening, since I’m currently enrolled in Library School, and hearing some of the bad things about being a librarian, and the way he questioned his decision to become one and stuff, but as the book went on I found myself seeing that it’s not so bad, and that a lot of the humorous horror stories he’s relating could be lifted out of my own experiences working at the bookstore, with maybe a few little details changed (for example, he has a patron come up and tell him there is a man sleeping in a restroom stall, I had a woman come up to me and tell me there was a woman scratching her skin off in the ladies room, or perverts jerking off on the computers compared to some guy blowing his wad on a woman’s leather jacket (while she was wearing it) in the Woman’s Study aisle). Besides taking an amused solace in similar kinds of experience I also loved reading his short tales of going to Library School. I was also happy to find out that there is some kind of web-page out there for Librarians with Tattoos, it’s nice to know that in the future I could belong to something bigger than myself.
I found the book to be overall really enjoyable, I’d recommend it to people, especially people who don’t work in places where the homeless and crazy come to spend their days just for the wonderfully bizarre tales they bring with them.
Good stuff.

Bad Teachers

I’m reading George Saunders sort of new collection of essays right now, and he has a short essay about the novel Johnny Tremain, a book that first opened his mind up to how good books can be. The essay is an interesting look at how writing can be dishonest, and that it’s the writers job to prune his or her writing of all the lies and false language to get to the truth of the matter.
The essay reminded me that I had never rated Johnny Tremain on Goodreads.com, a social networking site of sorts for people who read and write books (sadly too many people who write books are there, people who self-publish books that I can only imagine are pretty terrible, but oh I digress). Being as it’s my goal to rate every book I have ever read so that any stranger may see it, I went and rated this Newberry Award winner with two-stars. Two stars in my mind is a book I didn’t like, but I didn’t hate it either. The book didn’t scar me in anyway, but I didn’t like it. This two star book has joined the ranks of other most likely wonderful books I read when I was in either seventh or eighth grade that I have also recently rated with 1 and 2 stars. The thing that all of these books have in common is the same English teacher for both of these years. At the time, when I was twelve or however old one is at that age, I hated these books. I hated every book that old woman (I don’t remember her name, that’s pretty impressive since I had her for two years) had us read. At the time I figured that it must be the books themselves. Now I’m starting to think that maybe she was a soulless ghoul who had it in her power to suck all of the good out of a book and leave only the worst parts for the children to digest. I can’t remember enough of those classes to pin-point why she was a terrible teacher, but I think she must have been.
How can I say this since my memory seems to have blocked out two years of English from my mind, leaving only dislikes and hatreds in it’s place? Simple actually. Books and reading are great. I was a big fan of them then as I am now, and for anyone to kill a book like this woman must have done there has to be something wrong with the teacher.
Teachers at that age should be trying to instill a love for books and reading, not making them as dry and boring as possible. I had a couple of teachers who were excellent at this, sadly most of the teachers I ever had didn’t. What these bad teachers do to books and to the students they teach should be considered criminal and made to work a soulless job more suited to their particular skill set, like picking up dog shit on a sidewalk.
Maybe one day I’ll go back and try to read all of the books teachers ruined for me and see if maybe they are actually better than I remember. Or maybe I won’t.

Because I haven’t this week, and so I must….

Consider Phlebas
by Iain M. Banks

This is the second of his books that I’ve read in the past week or so. The other one I didn’t write about but it was called The Game Player, and it was better than this one. It was kind of like Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, but kind of cooler with mutilations and stuff like that. Like HH’s book though neither author ever really got down to describing what such a complex game would really be like, which I would be interested to know about, but oh well.
This book wasn’t quite as good, it’s part of the same series, a series I now realize is mostly out of print. It’s more of a traditional space opera I guess, I don’t read much Sci-Fi, so I’m just throwing out terms here. I liked the book when there wasn’t action going on, the general ideas of the book and the relationships between the utopian Culture and other societies I liked, and the idea of the Culture I find quite interesting, and the end notes giving the back story to the war going on in the book I found on the fascinating side. What I could stand though were drawn out fighting scenes and battles, I know these are the parts I’m supposed to find exciting, but I just couldn’t get into those scenes, and I found myself either reading at an abonormally fast rate (as if I was in the thick of it all), or just zoning out and realizing I was reading with no retention. Fortunately there were only a few of these moments in the book.
This posting turned out longer than I thought it would be. I planned on writing only that I read it. But taa-daa a real life posting.