Tuesday Thoughts: 1
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
Aldous Huxley to George Orwell in a letter of 21 October 1949.
The Joy of Books: a lovely short film.
Conservatism: “mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Lionel Trilling.
“What would one do without women? Explore other channels.” Samuel Beckett.
White, contemptuous, millionaires looking to be president of the USA.
In 1958 John Steinbeck had some words of advice for his teenage son, Thom, who believed he had fallen in love.
St Francis of Assisi was the guy who first pointed out that when you own something, it owns you.
Milligan and Murphy – a review
Perhaps this is as good a place as any, as our heroes wend their way towards the future, to describe in some small detail the countryside through which they trudged. If I were to provide you with a simple-to-understand expression to describe where Lissoy was, then ‘in the middle of nowhere’ would be fairly accurate: [...]
New Review for Winged with Death
Winged With Death by John Baker, Flambard Press (2009) ISBN 978-1906601027, 291pp £8.98 ‘It was 1972 and I was eighteen years old. I had jumped ship and watched while she sailed away.’ The narrator’s account of his decade in Uruguay gets off to a running start. A young man in a remote country is a [...]
Cock and Bull by Will Self
These two postmodern stories from 1993 have remained under my radar until now. Will Self writes irony and challenges gender roles along the way with immaculately timed black humour. The lead character in each of these stories wakes up to something of an anatomical surprise. In the first story, Cock, a woman grows a penis; [...]
A Poem by Mary Oliver
When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the [...]
