Prufrock: Orwell at 70, Declaration of Independence Defaced, and the Problem with Contemporary Art

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Flaubert hated people, so he decided to become a writer. In his last work, the unfinished Dictionnaire des idées reçues, he hoped that “readers of his ‘encyclopedia of human stupidity’ would never dare say anything again in case they ‘inadvertently uttered one of the sentences in the book’. It might have been subtitled, ‘World, Shut Your Mouth’.”

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The problem with contemporary art is that unlike modernism it “‘isn’t even contemptuous of old standards—it is wholly indifferent to them . . . . Sincerity, formal rigor and cohesion, the quest for truth, the sacred and the transcendental—none of these is on the radar among the artists and critics who rule the contemporary scene.’ Instead, Identitarians are obsessed with ‘a set of all-purpose formulas about race, gender, class, and sexuality on the one hand and power and privilege on the other.'”

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Nonsense paper accepted by International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics: “Since I have practically no knowledge of nuclear physics I resorted to iOS autocomplete function to help me writing the paper…I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions.”

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Bill Savage reviews Deirdre Bair’s flawed biography of Al Capone: Blair’s “access to Capone’s descendants, and their family stories, makes compelling reading, and even fills in a few blank places in narratives of his evasions of the police and rival gangsters that Capone aficionados know well. But even here, Bair stumbles. Bair’s decision to focus on the family side of Capone’s life (and the lives of some of his compatriots) sometimes leads to statements that are simply astounding. Bair describes Capone’s criminal activities as his ‘professional life.’ Such diction exonerates unjustly. Another especially galling moment comes early in the book when she asserts that gangster Johnny ‘Torrio was a gentleman, and although he was never a father, he was a model husband. He was an excellent role model, even a mentor, for an unformed, uneducated boy who wanted to become a good man, and Al Capone was soon working for him full-time. It was a symbiotic relationship.’ Johnny Torrio was a gentleman? He needed Capone to work for him because he had become vice lord Jim Colosimo’s chief lieutenant. ‘After Torrio had masterminded several murders and other less drastic forms of persuasion.’ Torrio and Capone are presumed to be the unsubstantiated ‘gentlemen’ behind the murder of Colosimo, who was reluctant to expand his vice empire to include booze.”

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I reviewed Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh for the Free Beacon this past weekend. Short take: “We are told a great deal about Waugh—about what he said and did—but are rarely treated to any exploration of why he said and did those things. Eade chalks most of them up to Waugh’s bitterness at his father’s preference for his brother and Napoleonic competitiveness. (Waugh was short, we are reminded.) As real as Waugh’s bitterness and competitiveness may have been, surely there was more to the man.”

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Inside the sinister world of Scientology.

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Newly discovered letters shed light on life in a WWI POW camp: “Germany, starved for workers, ignored international conventions regarding prisoners’ rights and ordered them to perform some of the most dangerous labour. By one estimate, upwards of 75 per cent of POWs in 1916 (some 1.2 million men, many Russians) were working. When MacDonald and fellow prisoners refused to work in a coal mine after a friend died in a cave-in, they were made to stand at attention with bayonets at their back; MacDonald eventually collapsed onto a barbed-wire fence. On July 1, 1915, Canada’s 48th birthday, German guards punished Pte. Fred Ivey by tattooing an Iron Cross on his face.”

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Essay of the Day:

Why was George Orwell’s Animal Farm such a success in the United States? John Rodden and John P. Rossi explain in Modern Age:

“What havoc ‘a little squib’ can cause! Seven decades ago, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in the United States. Its publication launch was August 26, 1946, almost exactly a year after its appearance in England. Subtitled ‘A Fairy Story,’ the ‘little squib’—Orwell’s modest term for the book when he wrote the Russian émigré scholar Gleb Struve—was only thirty thousand words, a brilliantly original hybrid of Aesopian fable, Menippean satire, and historical allegory.

“Animal Farm hit a nerve at the right psychological moment in America, just when the pro-Soviet fellow-traveling movement was beginning to unravel. Published to reviewers’ kudos and good sales in the United Kingdom in August 1945, it nevertheless gained attention chiefly from the English literary-political elite, especially the London left-wing intelligentsia and serious literary-minded readers. Animal Farm, however, had only a moderate influence on the wider British public. Its full impact was not felt until it crossed the Atlantic a year later, and some of the long-term consequences proved highly ironic. Indeed, the circumstances shaping the American reception of this Englishman’s ‘squib’ generated cultural and intellectual tremors that contributed decisively to the decades-long ideological fault lines that surfaced between the United States and the Soviet Union.

“Communism was never a powerful political force in either the United States or England, albeit during the war broad popular support for the Russians in their struggle against Nazi Germany prevailed. Both countries, however, featured groups of prominent and influential fellow travelers whose sympathy, if not primary loyalty, was to the Soviet Union and its communist principles. In the United States, fellow traveling peaked during the war. The Russians became the darlings of the American progressive left, and Joseph Stalin acquired the image of the affable pipe-smoking ‘Uncle Joe.’ Unlike in the U.K., however, by the time Animal Farm landed on the desks of most American readers, the gloss was already beginning to fade from this rosy picture of the USSR. Even liberal-minded Americans’ affections for the avuncular wartime ally had cooled—and the Cold War was on the horizon. It would take another decade for a similar feeling of alienation to reach the left intelligentsia in England—in fact, not until Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called Secret Speech exposing Stalin’s crimes shocked the West in February 1956.

“Numerous other differences between the postwar U.K. and U.S. also accounted for the growing transatlantic rifts. For example, whereas the English were preoccupied with the devastation caused by the war, including postwar rationing and an economy in shambles (not to mention the July 1945 defeat of the Conservatives under Churchill and election of the first Labour government in decades), America was enjoying an unprecedented level of prosperity and global influence—the apogee of the ‘American Century.’

“Specific to Animal Farm‘s reception in the United States was a series of events that disillusioned all but the blindest admirers of the Soviet Union. The Russians began clamping down on communist-controlled governments in Poland and other Eastern European countries. In February 1946 Winston Churchill struck a fatal blow at the communist cause in his famous Iron Curtain speech, significantly delivered in the United States, not in Great Britain. His purpose was to warn the Americans of the inescapable reality of Soviet imperialism in Europe.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Dolomites

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Poem: John Drury, “Rebecca in the Shadows”

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