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Is Duckspeak the Same as #Trumpspeak? Is TWITTER THE NEW DOUBLESPEAK?

3/31/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate—it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
​
Leo Buscaglia
​Born March 31, 1924
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Buscaglia

My Book World

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​Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four.
       New York: Harcourt, 1949.
 
For summer reading in 1966, I was required to peruse Nineteen Eighty-Four for my first college humanities class, along with Huxley’s ​Brave New World and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes a book begs to be re-read because it whispers to you. Yes, as I pass by my bookshelf words like HATE WEEK (two minutes of hate is rather like 140 characters of venom) and BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU carry a familiar ring, yet as if for the first time making sense. Other Orwellian terms spring from this novel: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, a language called NEWSPEAK in which words are deliberately manipulated by the government to control people’s thoughts. When I first read this book at eighteen, I did not stop to realize that the character Winston Smith, by Orwell’s own calendar, was born in 1945, a few years before me, his girlfriend Julia, in 1957. At the time, 1984 didn’t seem like eighteen years away; it seemed like FOREVER.
 
Now one has to wonder. Like citizens of Orwell’s London with telescreens in every room  (two-way cameras), we can be hunted down at any moment by way of our cell phones, the GPS systems in our cars, the fact that a certain G entity has photographed every one of our houses and connected them to our addresses so that anyone in the world—whether a relative or an assassin—can locate us within minutes. That the government can record our telephone calls at will or monitor our Internet use are ubiquitous realities that have become invisible to us. And how much does Orwell’s term DOUBLETHINK smack of 45’s ALTERNATE FACTS, DUCKSPEAK OF #TRUMPSPEAK?

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy” (80).
 And how is this for Orwell’s prescient definition of DOUBLETHINK: 
“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”? (214).
 
“It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink
 and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is” (215).
Upon my first reading years ago, I rather shrugged off Orwell’s dystopian depiction of life in the future. I wasn’t overly upset by Winston Smith’s treatment in the end, where he is severely punished physically and mentally for not believing in Big Brother because, to Smith, it is all make believe. Yet, in spite of the novel’s ugliness, Orwell does manage to limn the purity of human love, how Winston and Julia fall for one another but must hide their love, how the glass paperweight with a colorful piece of coral embedded inside is an extended metaphor for their hidden relationship, how in the end the paperweight is shattered like their love is shattered once they are discovered. In spite of the State’s efforts to “change” the two individuals, to erase their thoughts and make them party members, the State really doesn’t quite succeed, for in the end Winston sheds tears of love for who else, but Big Brother himself.
 
I purposely omit plot elements because many of you will already have read the novel, and if you haven’t, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. It would not be a waste of time to work it into your schedule at some point. If around today, characters Winston and Julia would be about seventy-one and sixty, yet it's hard to believe, given their plight in the novel, that they would be much more than folds of skin with hair.
 
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
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Fellow Travelers Sometimes Leave

3/27/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
True religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the heart of men.
​
Shusaku Endo
​Born March 27, 1923
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S. Endo

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
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​*** March 27, 2017, Victor Lodato, “Herman Melville, Volume I”: A young homeless woman is abandoned by Evan, her fellow-traveler boyfriend, and she must depend on the charity of others to survive. ¶ Because Evan has left behind a backpack with all his belongings, the twenty-year-old doesn’t at first realize her predicament until she comes to understand that he has also absconded with a substantial roll of money she has earned by playing an inherited banjo, for mere coins tossed into its leather case. Among Evan’s effects is a biography of Herman Melville, one must assume Hershel Parker’s Volume I of nearly a thousand pages. Its two pounds become a metaphor for her own weighty biography in which she’s left Tucson, her home, in part, because of her father’s violent death. This story is one of those in which you experience a tingle because you haven’t had the misfortune of living like this unnamed woman, and yet receive a jolt because for less than an hour you are bestowed the privilege of doing exactly that—feeding on a small sliver of her life, one that is equally as significant as a traveler called Ishmael. Lodato’s novel out earlier this month is Edgar and Lucy.
Photograph by Anthony Blasko.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Book-TV Update

3/24/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Everything has two sides—the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.
​
Olive Schreiner
Born March 24, 1855
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O. Schreiner

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation that recently piqued my interest.
Adrian Miller. The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017.
 
I found Mr. Miller’s reading, held at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, not only entertaining but quite edifying. His book scours history to locate the African-American men and women who cook for the nation’s first families and tells of their struggles. He includes anecdotes about presidents without much of a palate to tantalizing recipes that have survived. He describes one concoction, which sounds fascinating, in which one empties out a jar of pickles, mixes a packet of Kool-Aid with the remaining juice, repacks the jar with pickles, and lets the concoction cool in the fridge for two weeks. Mm, yum! The sweet-tart nature of that description creates a curiosity I can’t pass up (this book is on my Wish List). Perhaps you’ll find it tempting, as well, and tune in to Adrian Miller's presentation. I hope you'll be moved to buy a copy of his book.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
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Old is Not New Again

3/20/2017

 
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A WRITER'S WIT
It's a funny thing—when I'm crazed with work, spending time with my children relaxes me. Yet, at the end of a long weekend with them, the very thing I need to relax is a little work and time away from them!
​
Emily Giffin
Born March 20, 1972
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E. Giffin

New Yorker​ Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
**March 20, 2017, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The I.O.U.": In this story set about a hundred years ago, a New York company publishes the long-awaited book of an author who writes of his astrological connection with a nephew having died in World War I. ¶ On the Contributor’s Page of this issue, one learns that this story was to have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1920 but never did. One must wonder . . . could it have been because largely it is a plot-driven narrative with a clever trick ending? Who wouldn’t want to read that in 2017? I would imagine that the New Yorker turns down thousands of such stories a year but makes this one exception merely because it is written by FSF. Now, I’m a fan of his—I taught and annually re-read The Great Gatsby for a decade—but I believe he would now rise from his grave and shake a fist at us knowing that this story, not nearly as developed as “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” has made it into print at long last. Yet more unearthed works of Fitzgerald’s, collected in I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories, is out in April. Cahn’t wait.
Illustration by Seth.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Book-TV Update

3/17/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
​Penelope Lively
Born March 17, 1933

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P. Lively

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most all cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Below I list a presentation I recently found interesting.
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney. People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy. New York: Nation Books, 2016.

In spite of the apocalyptic title, authors McChesney and Nichols lay out for the reader what to expect in the future and perhaps ways to deal with it. From Amazon’s blurb: “The consequences of the technological revolution are about to hit hard: unemployment will spike as new technologies replace labor in the manufacturing, service, and professional sectors of an economy that is already struggling. The end of work as we know it will hit at the worst moment imaginable: as capitalism fosters permanent stagnation, when the labor market is in decrepit shape, with declining wages, expanding poverty, and scorching inequality. Only the dramatic democratization of our economy can address the existential challenges we now face. Yet, the US political process is so dominated by billionaires and corporate special interests, by corruption and monopoly, that it stymies not just democracy but progress.”
 
In his portion of this discussion held at the Tucson Festival of Books, John Nichols gives everyone a reason to grasp where we are in history and come to grips with it. Click on this link to view the entire presentation, about an hour in length.
 
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
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Luck of the Irish?

3/13/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I grew up . . . discontented, ugly, abnormally sensitive, and excessively conceited. No one liked me—not masters, boys, friends of the family, nor relations who came to stay; and I do not in the least wonder at it. I was untidy, uncleanly, excessively gauche. I believed that I was profoundly misunderstood, that people took my pale and pimpled countenance for the mirror of my soul, that I had marvelous things of interest in me that would one day be discovered.
​Hugh Walpole
Born March 13, 1884
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H. Walpole

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​
** March 13, 2017, Enright Anne, “Solstice”: A man in contemporary Dublin, Ireland, drives home on December 21, 2016—a dark and dreary day—and stares with his ordinary wife and children at a long trajectory toward the summer solstice. Enright’s novel, The Green Road, was published last May.

NEXT TIME: My Book World
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Book-TV Update

3/10/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
On sherry: The destiny of a thousand generations is concentrated in each drop. If the cares of the world overwhelm you, only taste it, pilgrim, and you will swear that heaven is on earth.
​
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
Born March 10, 1833

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de Alarcón

My Book World

OFTEN, if I’m involved reading two or three lengthy books at one time, I may spend two to four weeks completing them.

I am in one of those periods right now, perusing a lengthy biography of author E. M. Forster, revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eight-Four, a novel I read fifty years ago for college freshman orientation, and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters.

Each weekend, however, I do watch C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of new nonfiction literature hitting the shelves, often recording the ones I want to watch and viewing them later in the week. Sometimes the reading venue is a coveted bookstore, such as DC’s Politics and Prose, or it might be a university setting. Sometimes, conservative, sometimes progressive. Many times, the subject matter is not political at all. Now, here is the best part, you can view any one of these readings at Book-TV’s Web site at any time. You do not have to have cable TV. And if you do wish to watch them on television, you can view and download and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule. Below I list a couple of readings I recently found interesting.
Terry McDonell. The Accidental Life: An Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers. New York: Knopf, 2016.

As editor of Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, McDonell reveals scintillating details about his relationship with such writers as Hunter S. Thompson. His fascinating presentation sustained my interest throughout. First aired February 18, 2107.

 
Dean Baker. Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Washington DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2016. In this book Baker “argues that government policies, not globalization or the natural workings of the free market, have led to the upward redistribution of wealth seen around the world over the past four decades.” His logical and comprehensive lecture offers one of the most compelling arguments I’ve ever heard on the subject. First aired January 17, 2107.
 
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
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Lady Day Still with Us

3/6/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
​
Gabriel García Márquez
Born March 6, 1927
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García Márquez

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average 
** March 6, 2017, Zadie Smith, “Crazy They Call Me”: Billie Holiday addresses herself, Lady Day, in essence making the reader privy to a two-page biography of a woman who is still larger than life though gone for nearly sixty years.

NEXT TIME: My Book World
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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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