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Showing posts from October 30, 2022

NOTES ON ENGLAND

Because France doesn’t understand the communist candy orgy that is Halloween, and because Adam is a boy who loves a monster mask like French boys love kicking a soccer ball, we resolved to go to England and give Adam a proper trick or treating.   A concocted a costume to Adam’s specifications, which consisted of orange long johns and a burlap bag face, as sported by Sam, the   killer child in Trick r Treat. If you don’t know Trick r Treat, join the majority of the world – normies which the fans of Fangoria heartily despise. Thus, we awoke early, prepared our bags, and went to the Gare du Nord, there to take the train to London. It is a rather amazing thing, going to London from Paris on a train. There are people for whom the Chunnel is not a novelty. Who were born with the fact that there is a tunnel under the channel as one of the many facts, like Mount Everest being the highest mountain and the like. Me, I’m impressed and will always be. So light, darkness, light, and we ended

Notes on Orwell's apocalypso

  I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen. They forced 1984 down our throats in my Cold War era highschool – it was the golden age of warning the kiddies against Utopia, so Huxley’s … and Golding’s Lord of the Flies were thrown in for good measure – and I, little rebel, did not read these books. In fact, I’ve never read 1984 and Lord of the Flies. Chinks, no doubt, in the   armor of my reading. I read Zamyatin’s We instead. But I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen, when I systematically checked out of the library the edition of his essays and letters in three volumes, edited by Sonia Orwell. The volumes were entitled – the last one bore the wonderful title In Front of Your Nose, underlining the touch Orwell, the truth teller, the prophet. Orwell was an almost preternaturally bad prophet. In contrast to his ability to envision the past and the present – he had the gift for reducing the “mental atmosphere” of an era (or at least of his favored chronological unit, the decade) into