Famous Writers with Dogs: George Orwell

Writers need inspiration somewhere in life, and for many that inspiration comes from their pet dogs.

This is a running series where we post pictures of famous writers with their canine companions--the cute, the cuddly, the creepy. And that's just the writers.


Today:  George Orwell

Nothing says it's a great beach day quite like wearing a suit under a blanket while huddling with your dog.

Fido looks like he's pondering his life's decisions that resulted in his ending up half buried under Orwell's body.

And is that a cat over Orwell's shoulder? Another dog? Did Orwell bust out a whole kennel with him to the seaside?

Newsweek Magazine: Which country today is most like George Orwell's '1984'?

Turkey!

Turkey is the big winner, according to Newsweek. Not Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, or even Turkmenistan. (Get a load of Turkmenistan's president and his personality cult. He's a winner at oppression, too!)

No, it's Turkey that's living up to the Orwellian horror show, mainly because they're a bit more nuanced.

And that's what you want from your countries winning at fear--a little bit of nuance with that oppression.

Two hundred movie theaters showed '1984' last week as a protest to the government.

According to the website United State of Cinema, two hundred art house cinemas showed the dystopian movie 1984 last week, which is based on George Orwell's novel of the same name.

Over 184 cities and 44 states had a showing, while locations outside the country--five in Canada, and one each in England, Sweden, Holland, New Zealand, and Croatia--also joined in.

The collected group of theaters decided the week of April 4th was timely, as the protagonist in the book and movie begins his diary on that day.

The theaters' goal?


"The endeavor encourages theaters to take a stand for our most basic values: freedom of speech, respect for our fellow human beings, and the simple truth that there are no such things as 'alternative facts.'"


Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming--all states with their fingers on the pulse of the excitement--were the six states that didn't have a single cinema in their entire state show the film. By comparison, California had 28 locations. Even Alaska and Alabama had a single location feature the film.

Delaware has a history of never involving itself in anything. It's like the agoraphobic of American states, the geographic and political equivalent of a pasty man with no calf muscle definition who enjoys white rice, low sodium saltines, and the smooth, smooth taste of filtered water.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a bad sign when even Alabama outdoes you.

Everything old is new again: George Orwell and John Steinbeck are hot commodities.

In the past few weeks, George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 has been steadily climbing the bestseller lists, most notably at Amazon, where as of January 26, 2016, it's the bestselling book overall. Not James Patterson, Jodi Piccoult, Stephen King, an Oprah book club selection, Harry Potter novella, or a Twilight spinoff.

No.

George Orwell.

Largely, this is due to a new political climate that is--how shall we say this in a nuanced fashion?--surreal compared to the previous 240-years of American history.

As The Atlantic points out, though, Orwell isn't the only one finding a revival. Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here has risen to #26 on Amazon, while John Steinbeck's 1961 tome The Winter of Our Discontent has seen an abnormal uptick as well.

Then there's political theorist Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published in 1951. While not usually nearly as well known as 1984 or The Winter of Our Discontent, Arendt's book examines the rise of fascist governments in Europe over the previous two centuries. Clearly, if there's anything Americans love doing, it's kicking back with a expansive examinations of political philosophies.

In the end, the misery of the past two years of political campaigning--the yelling, the finger-pointing, the glad-handing, the falsehoods--has had one bright spot: Americans are reading, and they're rediscovering what was once forgotten--in many ways.

Twenty academic books that changed the world--at least according to the U.K.

In advance of Academic Book Week next month, a panel of librarians, booksellers, and publishers in the U.K. have whittled down a list of two hundred academic books to twenty, creating a list they claim are the tomes that changed the world. Now, they want the general public to vote which book is the singularly most influential book that stands heads and shoulders above the rest.

Two works of the twenty are fiction: George Orwell's 1984, and the complete works of Shakespeare. (I gather they couldn't pick just one.)

The remaining eighteen books are all nonfiction, with a heavy leaning toward writers from Europe, and especially the United Kingdom. Indeed, only two writers are Americans by birth (Rachel Carson and Germaine Greer), and two were born elsewhere and moved to the United States at a later point in life (Albert Einstein and Thomas Paine).

Poor France only has one writer on the list: Simone de Beauvoir

I know I'm shocked--stunned, really--that a bunch of British experts find no use for anything French.

The complete list:

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Orientalism by Edward Said

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Complete Works by William Shakespeare

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson

The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Republic by Plato

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Ways of Seeing by John Berger



Don't kid yourself. No one from Asia, Africa, or South America ever wrote anything that changed the world. Everyone in the U.K. knows this.

Fashionable Words: Codswallop

[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]

Word:
Codswallop


Definition:  noun
Nonsense, drivel.


Origin:
This is one of those words in history that people start guessing at. No one really knows where it came from. If you feel like making up a history on your own, it might hold as much truth.

What a wallop!

The OED claims--hopes--suggests--that maybe the word originates from Hiram Codd, who loved patenting mineral water manufacturing techniques in the 1870s. Otherwise, the second half evolves from wallop, an old Northern French word that goes back nearly 800 years and is the origination for the modern word gallop. This evolved over the centuries from Old French to Middle English into our still-modern wallop.

Wallop has a variety of modern definitions though, but with regard to codswallop, the word probably originates from the early 20th century definition for an alcoholic beverage.

Wallop reached its peak in 1949 when George Orwell used the word in his acclaimed novel 1984, specifically in the sentence, "When I was a young man, mild beer--wallop we used to call it--was fourpence a pint." Well, if it's mild, you don't want to overspend.

Wallop has generally died off ever since. Thanks, Orwell.


Most obscure UrbanDictionary.com definitions of codswallop:
(verbatim)

1. Something that doesn't make sense and sounds like utter nonsense can be described as codswallop, also, in some places of devon, there are cults that use the walloping of a cod as a method of induction into their sect...

3.  Often said by Hagrid in Harry Potter movies and book. The actual definition is believed to be a sack tap done by a pissed off fish after it is caught.

[Ed. Note: I'm not sure what a 'sack tap' is.]


Used in a sentence:

1.  Don't give me that codswallop--you're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.


Why you should use codswallop in your daily life:

It blends the allure of northern Atlantic fish with the mild allusion to physical abuse.


Word Awesomeness Scale (1-to-5):

Two.

Fishy sounds don't sell.

Admittedly, George Orwell probably hoped to write a story more like Finding Nemo.

Nothing went better with a juice box and some Teddy Grahams in kindergarten than reading a dystopian novel with a socio-political angle.

Now, all those years of my childhood wondering when someone would get around to turning hellscape novels into family funfare are not for nothing.

Andy Serkis, the actor who portrayed Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, recently bought the rights to Animal Farm and, as he told The Hollywood Reporter, plans to create a stop-motion film aimed at "a family audience." Stalinism has never been more approachable!

It's only a matter of time before we get a Disney musical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

So you want to go to grad school? (Part Three)

Congratulations! Because of your love of literature (or self-flogging) and education (or need of a good laugh) you've made it as an English major into grad school! Now is as good a time as any to learn the ins and outs of fitting in with the grad school culture.

First up: How to speak like a grad student!

Word-A-Day calendars needn't be used for just an office cubicle. Now they can get a second lease on life as a grad student-to-English translation guide.

To be a grad student you MUST use the following words during every class if you want to fit in. Bonus points if you can use them all in a sentence at the same time. (Note: do not high five yourself if you accomplish this. It just looks sad.)

WORDS YOU MUST USE:

a.) anachronistic: (also acceptable: anachronism, anachronically)
    
What it means:
Something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological period, especially a thing or person from an earlier time.

What it doesn't mean, but you might think it does:

Anarchist--as in busting up a Starbucks during a protest while you wear a bandanna across your face, screaming about the injustice over energy prices and health care, while you dig into your hemp bag for a Molotov cocktail to lob at another anarchist by accident.

Why grad students use it:

Because it's five syllables long and easily dropped into just about any conversation about literature. Also, because grad students believe it makes them sound like they've aced the GREs.

Ratio-of-use:

Within 15 minutes of a 2hr+ class someone will use it--sooner if the class is about pre-20th century literature. Within 15 minutes of that initial use, four other students will rapidly fire it off in quick succession to prove, indeed, they passed the GREs, too.

Pretentiousness Scale (scale of 1 to 5):

Four!  Can reasonably be used 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time you just look like you're auditioning to host Masterpiece Theater.

b.) paradigm: (pronounced: PARA-dime, not PARA-dig-em)

What it means:
a set of forms all of which contain a similar element

What it doesn't mean, but you might think it does:
"Pair of dimes"--as in, "I'm so broke, all I have to my name is a pair of dimes."

Why grad students use it:
It sounds techy and modern. It's like the iPhone of words. You want to whip it out and make everyone coo at what a pretty word you have.

Ratio-of-use:
It's used by the smartest/most pretentious classmate at least once per class. Three to five other classmates will follow, using it correctly in a sentence only 50% of the time.

Pretentiousness scale:
Five!  Never needs to be used in an English class unless Alex Trabek has shown up to do a little impromptu Jeopardy. "I'll take 'Polysyllabic P-words Potpourri' for $800, Alex."

c.) narrative:

What it means:
A story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious. A book, literary work, etc., containing such a story.

What it doesn't mean, but you might think it does:
Narrator. So close, but no.

Why grad students use it:
Anything with letters in it is referred to as "the narrative." A thousand page Dickens book? It's "the narrative." A poem? It's "the narrative." A bibliography? It's "the narrative." A recipe for American Chop Suey? It's "the narrative." A sudoku puzzle? It's "the narrative."

Ratio-of-use:
The narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative...

Pretentiousness scale:
Two!  Legitimately can be used once in awhile. Preferably if that "awhile" isn't every 2.3 seconds.

Little Known Fact: Once you enter grad school, books are no longer books, and stories are no longer stories.

d.) agency:

What it means:
Grad students use the tenth definition listed under "agency" on dictionary.com, which is: the means of exerting power or influence; instrumentality.

What it doesn't mean, but you might think it does:
The FBI, CIA, or some super-secret government organization that is tapping your phones and reading your emails. Don't worry. It still means that, too. But grad students never mean it that way.

Why grad students use it:
They like to dig deep into the definition list to throw classmates for a loop.

Ratio-of-use:
Once a class, maybe. This is usually because many grad students are too busy thumbing through a dictionary looking for the eleventh and twelfth definition for "agency."

Pretentiousness scale:

Five! Somewhere, George Orwell is rolling over in his grave.