Huxley or Orwell?

[DotCommunist]

I haven't voted, it would be meaningless to do so, but I did have a much stronger emotional response to 1984, I thought it a deeply scary and disturbing book.

To paraphrase the last few words, a fist smashing a face, for ever and ever and ever. Sometimes I think elements of modern power really is about that.

I'm irritated when people say it was an endictment of Stalinism, it's abit like saying BNW was all about drugs. Kind of lose alot of information by putting either book in those terms, both are about far more than just 'anti-communism' or narcotics.

They do? it's an indictment of totalitarian societies rgeardless of ideological flavour. Perhaps those who see the allegorical nature of Animal Farm then seek to paste another easy interpretation on to 1984. Niether are the simplistic critiques people paint them to be, although Animal Farmis the more obviously satirical.

 

[Dhimmi]

Orwell for me for his range, and also in his ability to defend the seemingly indefensible. Huxley did have a good Captain Beefheart anecdote though, so it's close...

 

[DotCommunist]

Orwell for me for his range, and also in his ability to defend the seemingly indefensible. Huxley did have a good Captain Beefheart anecdote though, so it's close...

Decline of the English Murder ftw!

In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was another very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitted.

 

[Dhimmi]

Decline of the English Murder ftw!

If it weren't so late I'd respond with some quotes, but his defence of P.G. Wodehouse is cracking, and also his comments on Kipling, centred roughly around "So bad it's good", but more he's a "good bad poet" who could touch the "common man" with his verse.

Also anyone who can write an essay on "How to make a good cup of tea." really rates in my eyes. I'd be impressed if Will Self managed "Hobnob king of biscuits", although Peter Kay came close with "the marine of biscuits" but that's not really well written. I read Orwell often, and genuinely wish there was an equally sound, thoughtful and just "so damned right" writer around today.

 

[DotCommunist]

If it weren't so late I'd respond with some quotes, but his defence of P.G. Wodehouse is cracking, and also his comments on Kipling, centred roughly around "So bad it's good", but more he's a "good bad poet" who could touch the "common man" with his verse.

Also anyone who can write an essay on "How to make a good cup of tea." really rates in my eyes. I'd be impressed if Will Self managed "Hobnob king of biscuits", although Peter Kay came close with "the marine of biscuits" but that's not really well written. I read Orwell often, and genuinely wish there was an equally sound, thoughtful and just "so damned right" writer around today.

Have you read Chestertone's eulogy on cheese?

My forthcoming work in five volumes, `The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,' is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful whether I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to springle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet that I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: `If all the trees were bread and cheese' - which is indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in an exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to `breeze' and `seas' (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say `Cheese it!' or even `Quite the cheese.' The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient - sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/cheese.html

 

[Dhimmi]

Oh that's really rather special, good call. One hundred years old and spanks the arse of any "lifestyle" feature you might find today.

You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

What are you studying? This knowledge shared makes me rather envious young communist.

 

[DotCommunist]

Oh that's really rather special, good call. One hundred years old and spanks the arse of any "lifestyle" feature you might find today.

You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

What are you studying? This knowledge shared makes me rather envious young communist.

Creative Writing, a pick n Mix degee that lets ye choose various lit. modules from across the journo/eng lit range.

Lots of scope for noodling but mandatory lessons in poetry and biography


e2a and Lit theory which is double irritating and only makes sense when using marxist crit. The humanist. post and structuralist, the bastard psychoanalist.
Bollox ways of looking at a book

 

[Hocus Eye.]

I get very annoyed and frustrated when I hear the idea propounded once again that science fiction is about predicting the future. Science fiction writers from H G Wells onward have been damned with this superficial view of their intentions.

Most science fiction is about the present at the time it was written. It takes the perceived trends of the present and extends them into a future where they are exaggerated to reveal more about the present. Orwell whom I admire greatly is writing from his experience of both Fascism and Stalinism. He shows the common aspects of both and projects them into a horrible future in 1984. He is not predicting the future, he is warning against the possibilities of his present. More than that, Orwell is dealing with what is happening with language. Yes what he reports has got worse, but he was not trying to predict anything I assert. He was just pointing out what he saw to be happening.

Huxley in Brave New World is writing about an imagined future in which the commercial values of his time, Capitalism as encapsulated by the ideas and methods of Henry Ford, are combined with an exaggerated version of the beginnings of sexual liberation and the devotion to science as a solution to human problems and social control,are projected into a nightmare future. Once again his message is to the people of his time.

A parallel can be drawn with Fritz Lang's film Metropolis. It is a very recognisable world really. It is America in the 1930s theatrically amplified. I can't go into my local shopping mall and see the glass faced lift ascending through the floors of the major department store without recalling Metropolis.

The images, the social values, the ecomomic trends, the alienation of the human individual were already there in the period between the wars. These stories tell us when it was that the modern world broke from the old world. We are not living in Orwell or Huxley's future. We are continuing to live in their present.

In the end though, I favour Orwell as someone to admire and whose commentary on language is as apposite today as it was in his day.

 

[Dhimmi]

Lots of scope for noodling but mandatory lessons in poetry and biography

From your I assume that's writing the stuff rather than reading?

Ever heard of "Wine, Women and Words" by Billy Rose? It's a cracking little autobiog of sorts, pretty hard to find as it was illustrated by Dali and a lot of copies were butchered to frame those up to flog off to folk with more pennies than brain cells.

 

[DotCommunist]

From your I assume that's writing the stuff rather than reading?

just so. Hard bastard work, given that I want only to write genre fiction

Ever heard of "Wine, Women and Words" by Billy Rose? It's a cracking little autobiog of sorts, pretty hard to find as it was illustrated by Dali and a lot of copies were butchered to frame those up to flog off to folk with more pennies than brain cells.

ooh sounds intriuging, has you can links?

 

[DotCommunist]

I get very annoyed and frustrated when I hear the idea propounded once again that science fiction is about predicting the future. Science fiction writers from H G Wells onward have been damned with this superficial view of their intentions.

Most science fiction is about the present at the time it was written. It takes the perceived trends of the present and extends them into a future where they are exaggerated to reveal more about the present. Orwell whom I admire greatly is writing from his experience of both Fascism and Stalinism. He shows the common aspects of both and projects them into a horrible future in 1984. He is not predicting the future, he is warning against the possibilities of his present. More than that, Orwell is dealing with what is happening with language. Yes what he reports has got worse, but he was not trying to predict anything I assert. He was just pointing out what he saw to be happening.

Huxley in Brave New World is writing about an imagined future in which the commercial values of his time, Capitalism as encapsulated by the ideas and methods of Henry Ford, are combined with an exaggerated version of the beginnings of sexual liberation and the devotion to science as a solution to human problems and social control,are projected into a nightmare future. Once again his message is to the people of his time.

A parallel can be drawn with Fritz Lang's film Metropolis. It is a very recognisable world really. It is America in the 1930s theatrically amplified. I can't go into my local shopping mall and see the glass faced lift ascending through the floors of the major department store without recalling Metropolis.

The images, the social values, the ecomomic trends, the alienation of the human individual were already there in the period between the wars. These stories tell us when it was that the modern world broke from the old world. We are not living in Orwell or Huxley's future. We are continuing to live in their present.

In the end though, I favour Orwell as someone to admire and whose commentary on language is as apposite today as it was in his day.

Ah to define sci fi. A thorny issue at best. We have the people writing science fantasy visions about Princess Garlaxx piloting the starship Palamonisin. We have Richard Morgan doing his Altered Carbon which is little more than Andy McNabb in space. The field of sci fi is littered with crap, but I feel that you'll not see better than Adam Roberts analysis of sci fi in the book what he wrote. H's a lecturer in Romantic Lit. at some american Uni, and an author of fiercly inventive SciFi. See his recent 'Land of the Headless' or his sequel to gullivers travel's ;Swiftly'

 

[Hocus Eye.]

(writes the name Richard Morgan in notebook)

 

[Dhimmi]

ooh sounds intriuging, has you can links?

Afraid not, I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy in a charity shop about 10 years ago, I've since seen it going for between £30-125, the highest being yank book dealers for some reason. I highly recommend it though, not sure if it's ever been reprinted, mines first ed '47 I think. Worth a search for though... so I just did a quick one and saw a pb from a couple of quid: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=wine, women and words billy rose&index=books&page=1

Best Seller in it's time too, which I didn't realise until I did that search

N O N F I C T I O N
1. Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower
2. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie
3. Peace of Mind, Joshua L. Liebman
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, A. C. Kinsey, et al.
5. Wine, Women and Words, Billy Rose
6. The Life and Times of the Shmoo, Al Capp
7. The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill
8. Roosevelt and Hopkins, Robert E. Sherwood
9. A Guide to Confident Living, Norman Vincent Peale
10. The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald

More popular than Churchill I can imagine him putting that up in lights...

Some info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Rose being wiki it doesn't even mention that book, which is almost a recommendation in my eyes. The story of the dead whale is one of my faves, but I'll not spoil it.

which is little more than Andy McNabb in space.

That's Andy McKnob in the vernacular.

 

[purves grundy]

Orwell's vision is far more tangible than Huxley's, which feels like a sci-fi story more than it does a real evocation of a future. Where Orwell is grim and recognisable in events of the past (e.g. the representations of Soviet totalitarianism which we've all experienced), Huxley looks to the future and tells us what will be possible. Orwell didn't rely on much technology to invoke his dystopia, but Huxley depends entirely on technology.
Both of their visions have materialised in part, so surely we should be reevaluating them both in terms of their present relevance, rather than as old texts.

word

 

[DotCommunist]

Afraid not, I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy in a charity shop about 10 years ago, I've since seen it going for between £30-125, the highest being yank book dealers for some reason. I highly recommend it though, not sure if it's ever been reprinted, mines first ed '47 I think. Worth a search for though... so I just did a quick one and saw a pb from a couple of quid: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=wine, women and words billy rose&index=books&page=1

Best Seller in it's time too, which I didn't realise until I did that search

N O N F I C T I O N
1. Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower
2. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie
3. Peace of Mind, Joshua L. Liebman
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, A. C. Kinsey, et al.
5. Wine, Women and Words, Billy Rose
6. The Life and Times of the Shmoo, Al Capp
7. The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill
8. Roosevelt and Hopkins, Robert E. Sherwood
9. A Guide to Confident Living, Norman Vincent Peale
10. The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald

More popular than Churchill I can imagine him putting that up in lights...

Some info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Rose being wiki it doesn't even mention that book, which is almost a recommendation in my eyes. The story of the dead whale is one of my faves, but I'll not spoil it.



That's Andy McKnob in the vernacular.

I'm a cheap cunt and won't be buying that expensive tome

Hopefully a re-issue might happen

 

[ChrisC]

Brave New World. Think about this for a second. How many people are on anti-psychotics and anti-depressants. So they can be subdued and fit into society and maintain a job la dee la dee la and so on...

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Who got it right? in their dystopian nightmare?

Huxley for me, he seemed to anticipate more, though Orwell was probably more dramatic, and dare I say it better written...

Why can't it be a combo?

 

[Voley]

Ah to define sci fi. A thorny issue at best.

How about 'fucking shit, by and large'?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Brave New World. Think about this for a second. How many people are on anti-psychotics and anti-depressants. So they can be subdued and fit into society and maintain a job la dee la dee la and so on...

An excellent point. It is very worrying to me that so many people are encouraged to find chemical mechanisms for ignoring their problems rather than taking action to address them, and this is no doubt because the root of so many emotional problems can be found in the fundamental structure of a society we are all forced to participate in.

 

[Firky]

How about 'fucking shit, by and large'?

I bet I could name at least one sci-fi you like.

 

[CharlieAddict]

as a political writer, essayist, orwell wins hands down.

then, i not read much huxley - except for BNW and DOP...

 

[ChrisC]

I would quite like to live in Brave New World

there were only 2 miserable cunts on the whole planet

Same here! However, I'm just another headcase. So take that as you will...

 

[SpookyFrank]

All the free drugs and compulsory shagging does have a certain appeal, but I bet they have crap music in Huxley's future. Autotune all the way

 

[SpookyFrank]

Where's Yevgeny Zamyatin in the poll anyway? [/smartarse]

 

[ska invita]

Is this a poll about 1984 vs Brave New World? If so then a Brave New World probably beats 1984 by a fraction of an inch. The bit about Goldstein's book in 1984 bores the shit out of me after more than one reading.

However if it is about the better of the two authors then Orwell wins hands down.

My memories of BNW are that it was a bit stupid, and reaked of class snobbishness. Might be wrong on that, but that was my impression

1984 is by far the more accurate and prophetic of the two.

Homage to Catalonia has proved to be an important experiential text (was ignored at the time of print) - perhaps you could compare to Doors of Perception, which though enjoyable is a bit lightweight (better accounts of getting properly high out there).

Politically Orwell was by far the most interesting - youve got Animal Farm, 1984 and down and out in Paris and London, Catalonia and essays.

Havent read that much other Huxley (Island looks important), but Im pretty sure that Orwell is the more interesting of the two, even though Im more personally drawn to Huxleys lsd-hippy vision of utopia! I say Orwell...

 

[Gmart]

(Island looks important)

Now that's a great book! Really interesting! Again a commentary on today which is very recognisable.

I would say that Huxley's vision was better than Orwell's as he saw the homogeniety of now.

Sure Orwell is very good politically, but Huxley described such a vast picture.

Even Anthony Burgess' 1985 was a better vision coz it anticipated the religious problem more.

 

[camouflage]

They do? it's an indictment of totalitarian societies rgeardless of ideological flavour. Perhaps those who see the allegorical nature of Animal Farm then seek to paste another easy interpretation on to 1984. Niether are the simplistic critiques people paint them to be, although Animal Farmis the more obviously satirical.

Yes, they do.

not amongst the intelligent folk of urban of course, but I've seen 1984 described as a warning against the evils of Stalinism by that twat historian Niall Fergusson (iirc) in his documentary about the ideological struggles of the 20th centuary.

I agree with you that it's about totalitarian societies regardless of ideology, in fact wasn't one of the other two megastates fascist?

I read Animal Farm at school so long ago I remember almost nothing of it, remember watching a cartoon of it whoich was pretty cool. That stupid horse always saying "We must work harder", heheheh, what an absolute tool.

 

[Gmart]

I called someone Boxer as an insult recently. I was quite proud of it, tho I think it went straight over his head.

Prob just as well, it was over on the Middle East forum, and they're a bit stressed over there...

 

[In Bloom]

Orwell's writing is far better, and 1984 serves as a great critique of society as it existed at the time and now. Huxley, on the other hand, was an arse dull, monomaniacal tool.

 

[_angel_]

Orwell's writing is far better, and 1984 serves as a great critique of society as it existed at the time and now. Huxley, on the other hand, was an arse dull, monomaniacal tool.

I only read Brave New World by Huxley but didn't rate it. Orwell's a better writer.