Shelley (1980)

 

Random George Orwell quote of the day

Found the quote below in amongst my drafts on the blog. I presume the words were uttered by Martin Newell, but the magazine, Rolling Stone, is one of the labels and I find it hard to believe that Martin Newell was quoted in said magazine. I mean, he should, the bloke's a lost and neglected songwriting gem, but it's strange all the same. If nothing else, it has reminded me that his autobiography (part 2) is on my bookshelf, and should be read:

  "Everybody's quoting Orwell nowadays on the blogosphere for some reason. Something to do with quintessential Englishness and such like. (England must be getting tanked at the cricket again.)"

Room (for) 101?

Don't mind me, I'll be back to nicking lines off shows I'm bingeing, once I've hit a few more 180s:

101/50

Animal Farm 2.0

"This time we're not going to fuck it up  . . ."

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books 2017)

FEBRUARY

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole – in spite of my employer’s kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop – no.

George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’, London, November 1936

Orwell’s reluctance to commit to bookselling is understandable. There is a stereotype of the impatient, intolerant, antisocial proprietor – played so perfectly by Dylan Moran in Black Books – and it seems (on the whole) to be true. There are exceptions of course, and many booksellers do not conform to this type. Sadly, I do. It was not always thus, though, and before buying the shop I recall being quite amenable and friendly. The constant barrage of dull questions, the parlous finances of the business, the incessant arguments with staff and the unending, exhausting, haggling customers have reduced me to this. Would I change any of it? No.

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff (Random House 2008)

On that same balmy night in June of 1930, while Waugh was amusing the duchess, a young man of the same age but very different appearance, Eric Blair, was working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds, a manufacturing city in the north. He was the unwelcome guest of his brother-in-law, who regarded this lodger as a penniless failure with no job and no future.

This opinion was shared by almost everyone acquainted with Blair. It was a relatively small group but one that included several experts on failure; they had learned about it firsthand. Blair looked, and often smelled, like a tramp, because he was one. He, however, made the distinction that he wasn’t really a tramp, but only chose to be among tramps to free himself from class prejudices about poverty and dirt. He put it this way: “When you have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of the same snuff-tin, you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no terrors for you.

Mixing Footie and Orwell

I didn't think my opinion of Joey Barton could get any higher after that quote about England's 2006 World Cup prima donnas - and the funny quip at Lampard's expense back in '07 - but he's gone and topped it in the past few days by quoting Orwell on his Twitter page:

It's not so implausible when you think about it: Barton's been at Newcastle Utd now for just over four years, and I'm sure during the course of that time he's been a regular reader of the North East's premier SPGBer blog, 'Class Warfare', which just happens to have Orwell's self-same quote on its masthead.

I hope the rumours are right, and that Barton does sign for Arsenal. Wenger's teams have lacked that midfield enforcer with a touch of footballing class since Grimaldi left . . . and SPGB's Enfield & Haringey Branch would welcome the infusion of fresh funds to the Branch collections.

Of course, this isn't the first time that an Orwell and Footie have been in the mix. Most people with a passing familiarity with Orwell will know that famous quote of his that football " . . . is war minus the shooting.” but it's only in recent seasons that Orwell scholars have discovered that Orwell's quote was specifically referring to those teams managed by Alex McLeish.

Orwell Remembered by Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (Facts On File Publications 1984)

A bit of a departure from the usual business of cutting and pasting a paragraph to give you a flavour of the book just read.

As it's Orwell, and as it's a book given over to reminiscences, I've decided to cut and paste three passages which give you both a sense of the book and of the man . . . and of where I'm coming from now that I come to think about it.
And that was typical of him. I remember his comment when I told him of an experience of mine in the early 1920s. In those days the Communist Party enjoyed very little prestige in England and was still affiliated to the Labour Party. One day I was at a Labour Club in north London and someone said: 'You must meet our Communist poet.' I was then introduced to a dishevelled looking man whose name, to my astonishment, I recognised as that of a distinguished member of the Symbolist group. When I told Orwell about this many years later he said: 'Ah, but in those days, you see, it didn't pay to be a Communist; and it's a pretty safe rule to say about anything that as long as it doesn't pay it's all right.' Justice, in other words, is always with the weaker side because it does not pay to join it. But he certainly sometimes carried the principle to absurd lengths, and this aspect of him was wittily described by Mr V. S. Pritchett in an account of how Orwell once advised him that he ought to keep goats. The chief point being, so Mr Pritchett gathered, that it would put him to a lot of trouble and he would be certain to lose a lot of money; and Orwell got quite carried away with enthusiasm as he expounded the 'alluring disadvantages' of the scheme.

(Sir Richard Rees, pages 120-121)

Let this point be made clear: Orwell did cope with the baby. It may have been romanticism, but, if so, it was romanticism that found practical expression. This was characteristic of him in all he did. His idiosyncrasies were based in guts.
He would still go out at night to address protest meetings - 'probably a blackguard, but it was unjust to lock him up' - and the baby would be left to sleep for an hour or two at our house while Orwell was haranguing his audience.
'What was the meeting like?' one would ask on his return.
'Oh, the usual people.'
'Always the same?'
'There must be about two hundred of them altogether. They go round to everything of this sort. About forty or fifty turned up tonight, which is quite good.'
This down-to-earth scepticism, seasoned with a dash of self-dramatisation, supplied a contradictory element in Orwell's character. With all his honesty and ability to face disagreeable facts, there was always about him, too, the air of acting a part . . .

(Anthony Powell, page 245)

While he was attacking the bullies on the right he nearly starved to death. Once he turned to the bullies on the left, the right having been temporarily beaten, he made his fortune. This was due to no lack of integrity on his part. For he never fell for Communism for a moment although he was more deeply concerned with social justice than most men, and more unselfishly so than some. It had cost him plenty in the thirties and on the left to be so uncompromisingly anti-Communist, yet he liked reading Trotsky and even more reading Rosa Luxemburg. For all his masculineness the fact that it was a woman who had such a good mind, a better one than Lenin's, did attract him.
As for the British anarchists and near-anarchists, vegetarians and sex reformers, he found them the most disappointing of all. As they never had the slightest chance of getting into power anyway he thought that they might as well have stuck to their principles, whereas all they seemed to do was get bogged down in the mess of their doctrines. About their principles, they chopped and changed, like a Christian Brother on a debating platform with a lot of non-conformists. He loved Bartolomeo Vanzetti, however, as much as I do; whose hands were smelly with the smell of the fish he peddled, but to whom all the poor of the whole world were what Beatrice was to that great Florentine, his countryman. Because of him, Piedmont can stand unashamed in front of Tuscany. At the trial of the anarchists during the war, the British judge, Sir Norman Birkett, as he then was, behaved better in his role than did the prisoners in the dock in theirs, which of course was a better role.

(Paul Potts, pages 253-254)

'No luck with the woodchuck?'

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 136

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 136th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1562 friends!

Recent blogs:

Beyond Capitalism

“All this Hard Graft no Longer Makes Sense”

Demand the Impossible

Quote for the week:

"To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay."

George Orwell, Inside The Whale, 1940.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

(Hat tip to Matteo Scalera for the image.)

A novel approach to politics

Back to the Socialist Standard.

There are long term plans to digitise every issue of the Socialist Standard going back to September 1904, in order that they can be made available online for anyone and everyone to read but, in the meantime, the work of posting articles of interest from old Socialist Standards falls on the shoulders of a few members who do the work off their own bat.

So, therefore, kudos to my old Central London Branch mucker Rob S for recently posting on the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog three old articles from the Socialist Standard on novelists and thinkers who have been of interest to socialists going back several decades:

From the March 1971 issue of the Standard, Robert Barltrop's review of the (then) recently published paperback version of the four volumed collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell: Coming up for Orwell

From the May 1987 issue of the Standard, Carl Pinel's Leo Tolstoy: author and anarchist

And from the November 1973 Standard, Paul Bennett's Camus: Portrait of a 'Rebel'

It'll come as no surprise to seasoned SPGB watchers that of three authors under discussion, Tolstoy comes out best from the three review essays. (Though with obvious qualification.)

To be honest, despite being a long term fan of Barltrop as a writer, I'm rather disappointed by the tone of his article on Orwell. A bit too sniffy and vinegary for my liking. Maybe, as someone who had just returned to the SPGB after ten years of other political activity, he was playing to a particular gallery a bit.

I much prefer both Brian Rubin's article on Orwell from the December 1983 Socialist Standard and (I believe) Les Dale's article on the Political Ideas of Orwell from the October 1986 issue of the Standard.

Of course Orwell knew about the SPGB. As an avowed anti-Stalinist writer and journalist in London in the 30s and 40s how could he have not crossed paths with the SPGB? There is the mention in passing to the SPGB in the aforementioned Collected Essays but it's also the case that I remember from a few years back a comrade mentioning that when he looked at Orwell's collected papers for research purposes in London they contained a number of SPGB pamphlets, with scribblings in the margins.

I wish now that I'd asked him what Party pamphlets were in Orwell's collected papers and what were those damn scribbles.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (Harbrace Paperbound Library 1933)

You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn't put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police won't stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The copper came along and saw it, and he says, “You rub that out, and look sharp about it,” he says. I had to rub it out. The copper's got the right to move you on for loitering, and it's no good giving them a back answer.’
. . .
Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? — for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

Eggciting

Still checking in. Still boring as fuck.

CIA's George Orwell's Animal Farm

A Season of Free Film Evenings

From Sunday 14th September to Sunday 23rd November

Radical Film Forum - 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North)

- Tired of mainstream films?· Bored of the blockbuster?

- Want more than just passive consumption?

Find out about other films featured in the Radical Film Forum season here.

August 9, 1938 . . . August 9, 2008

The people behind the Orwell Prize have hit upon the bright idea of publishing Orwell's diaries in blog form.

The first entry, from this day seventy years ago, finds Orwell back in Britain after his experiences in Spain. He's convalescing in a sanatorium in Kent where he and his dog- which goes by the name of Marx - discover a large snake in the grounds.

All I can I say is that that snippet of information is eerily uncanny because, on August 9. 2008, our Boston Terrier - who goes by the name of Martov - decided to puke his dinner up all over Kara's snake-like pregnancy pillow. It took me all of SIDE A of Martin Newell's 1993 classic, 'The Greatest Living Englishman', to put the bastard cover back on the pillow after putting it through the hot wash.

Be sure to check out the Orwell Diaries each and every day as they are published, and look on in wonderment as every shade of the political blogosphere decided to claim as Eric Arthur Blair as one of their own.

Martov? Put it this way: if the wee git pukes up on our bedding and pillows again, he's going in the dog crate of history.

Down and out in the sidebar

What the hell happened to my old George Orwell link? That was a brilliant resource that seems to have gone awol.

Until further notice, this link will have to do.

George Galloway as George Orwell

The 299th best Political Blogger in Britain likes to wind me up about all things relating to Glasgow Celtic and, knowing I was pissed off at hearing the news that John Reid has lined up a cushy number at Celtic Park, Alan has sent me the link to this old excerpt from George Galloway's TalkSPORT Show.

Don't bother about the title of this post - though I would say that there is hint of Orwell in Galloway's free-flowing rhetoric in the clip *ducks the brickbats hurled at high velocity* - as I'm just being playful. However, listen in for Galloway's dig at John Reid for his former choice of songbook. (I also have to admit laughing at Galloway's Santa Claus barb directed at John Reid.

You know the type. Those "completely demoralized elements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts."

Not sure if Jim D over at Shiraz Socialist is blogging with a straight face, but he's unearthed a quote from James P. Cannon for those of you who are sick and tired of always having to fall back on that old George Orwell quote from 'The Road To Wigan Pier'. You know . . . that one.

Yeah, I know the Cannon and the Orwell quotes are not like for like, but they both boil down to the same sentiment. To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre: "Hell is other party members."