George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
See also yesterday’s press conference.
Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)
Friday, February 17, 2017
“Past events”
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
Blog Archive
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2017
(929)
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▼
February
(72)
- Calling Congress
- “The Letter,” revised
- My (male) female intuition
- “An enemy of the people”
- The S.S. Lurk
- Civility at work
- Best Picture
- Words of the day: post, posthaste
- Grey day with squirrel
- Waiting for Godot Shimkus
- “Monkey, monkey, underpants”
- No melodrama
- How to improve writing (no. 70)
- “An integral part of nature”
- Fake News, an icon
- “Ug!”
- Anglophilia amok
- “And you’re right too”
- “If Trump were more rational and more competent”
- Blossom Dearie sings
- Elementary particles
- “Library hand”
- Gilmore Girls and phrasal verbs
- Overheard
- Elitists and liberal arts
- Dowdy-world brands
- Henry gets his shoes fixed
- Lucy, seeress
- “Past events”
- M. Proust?
- Neologism of the day
- Separated at birth
- Gilmores and Gilligan
- Extending a metaphor
- Valentine’s Day
- Doing without teachers
- English studies and adjunct labor
- “No challenge is to great”
- The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble
- Dante, Beatrice, and Nancy
- Publius Sluggo
- Domestic comedy
- Dictionaries rising
- Ties, misspellings, typos
- “Not even the President”
- Do Androids dream of Perry Mason?
- Gaslighting, moonlighting
- “When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism”
- “Foreigners”
- Svend Asmussen (1916–2017)
- “They simply swallowed everything”
- R. Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions
- Dream pants
- USPS postage calculator
- “The Revolutionary Post”
- Postcards of the future
- Daniel Schorr on journalism, politics, and truth
- #grabyourwallet
- Two Henrys
- Twelve more movies
- Culs-de-sac?
- Inept, or radical, or both?
- Be prepared
- Yet another Henry gum machine
- Ownlife
- Hamiet Bluiett needs some help
- Three rocks, no-release
- Du Bois and Niedecker
- Frederick who?
- Resignation and courage (again)
- Jon Stewart plays president
- Credentialing
-
▼
February
(72)
favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
- Obama revisions
- Obama thoughts
- On “On the New Literacy”
- On “Politics and the English Language”
- “On the Road”
- The Oteris and Marty
- The other little book
- Out of the past
- Peppa Pig and the Brontës
- Phones Are For People
- Politics and theory
- “The Poet”
- Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
- P.S. 131
- Pullum on Strunk and White
- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
- “The Spokesmen”
- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 3
In 1967, I worked as a cashier for Waterbury Drugstore, at the corner of Camp and Canal in New Orleans. I also worked with the pharmacist, taking orders for refills and logging in prescriptions for narcotics and other controlled meds when he was busy.
A customer brought in an order for Soma, a muscle-relaxer with a pain-blocking agent, which has mood-altering side-effects in some people. I had recently read "1984," and was chuckling when I handed the prescription to the druggist. I told him about the connection I'd made to the novel.
"You do know the name of the man who owns this store, don't you?"
I didn't.
"His name is Ford."
(The pharmacist later said I was uncharacteristically quiet for the rest of my shift.)
Yikes! It’s like living the novel. (I know you’re thinking of Brave New World.)
Yep, she says, face chagrin-red. That is a shade somewhere between blushing-pink and cardiac-arrest-maroon. :}
Working in that drugstore was frequently like what I imagine it might be like to visit the nexus of the continuum. I had the 10pm-6am shift. The night people in downtown New Orleans were (still are?) weird creatures from another dimension than those I knew about.
(Thank you for your gentle correction.)
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