Comments | chickenfeet2003: Humiliation and Orwell

chickenfeet2003

Humiliation and Orwell

Jul 03, 2007 08:06

In the great Humiliation stakes minx_minx with Animal Farm beats out, by one point, cassandre with 1984. Once again, there were quite a few books of the sort that people feel they ought to have read but hardly anyone has. Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Conrad always seem to be solid contenders in that department ( Read more... )

humiliation, polls

Comments 11

wuduaelfen July 3 2007, 12:30:03 UTC

*curtsy*

shezan July 3 2007, 13:26:08 UTC

I am a Frog. I discovered Orwell on my own, aged 21; and I'm not understating it in saying it changed my life. More specifically, the essay How The Poor Die in Inside The Whale (and afterwards the rest, natch.) Once you learn a truth, Orwell said elsewhere, it cannot be unlearned. The minute I saw how the complete absence of bathos cut through everything to show things clearly from 60 years away, I was unable to stand the pathetic fake sentimentality of 95% of contemporary French journalism. Led me to work on the other side of the Channel in short order.

chickenfeet2003 July 3 2007, 14:59:59 UTC

Orwell, it seems to me, stands in a long tradition of English reportage of reporting awful things, as they are, without exaggeration, relying on the sheer awfulness to speak for itself. Engels The Condition of the English Working Class and the work of Rowntree in York and the Webbs in London stands in the same tradition.

cassandre July 3 2007, 13:52:39 UTC

Thank you, I am suitably (dis)honored. I would like to dedicate this award to my former boss, Stanley Fish, who claims to have invented the game Humiliation. (He once declared proudly in a department seminar that David Lodge stole the idea off him.)

ironed_orchid July 3 2007, 14:32:53 UTC

You failed to mention my commie pinko thesis. ::pouts::

chickenfeet2003 July 3 2007, 14:43:14 UTC

Unfortunately the most avid Orwell reader (shezan) is rather definitely not a commie pinko.

besideserato July 3 2007, 16:19:44 UTC

Now I want data about the sample, weird facts about all the people who responded to the poll!

chickenfeet2003 July 3 2007, 16:55:47 UTC

100% of them friended me on LJ and are therefore weird.

besideserato July 3 2007, 18:24:33 UTC

Is there a correlation between you and Orwell?

chickenfeet2003 July 3 2007, 18:32:48 UTC

Well possibly as I certainly used to know people who had known Orwell and we were both members of the ILP.

Thread 5