Orwell on totalitarian history

George Orwell, in "The Prevention of Literature" (1946):

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

As I just discovered, I posted this passage in 2008. But it’s worth reposting. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be. Now more than ever, as the saying went.

I reencountered this passage in a new sampler, Orwell on Truth, ed. David Milner (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

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[About would and wouldn’t: Trump rearranged past events in order to claim that he did make a mistake. That’s another way to lie.]

From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is tough, mostly because of clues that point in several directions, or in no direction. For instance, 5-Across, five letters: “Puts out.” EMITS? OUSTS? No.

Two clues I especially liked: 25-Down, four letters: “Element of film noir lighting.” And 34-Down, “Film studied in physics labs.” No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Today’s headlines

[Zippy, August 4, 2018.]

Or if you’re a suspect in a murder investigation, like Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie, you could turn a single page into a house.

The headlines in The Dingburg Decoder, front to back: “Valvoline Tank Explodes,” “Thousands Flee Anne Bancroft,” “Polystyrene Is Edible,” “W.C. Fields Is Mean Anew.”

That’s Moe Strauss of the Pep Boys on the table. The Boys have appeared in several Zippy strips. You can search and find them all.

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[Uncle Charlie: in Shadow of a Doubt.]

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

Give this son of a gun eight stars! Lombardo! These people are keeping music alive — helping to fight them damn beboppers. You know, you got to have somebody to keep that music sounding good. Music doesn’t mean a thing unless it sounds good. You know, this is the band that inspired me to make “Among My Souvenirs.” They inspired me to make “Sweethearts on Parade.” They’re my inspirators!

That’s from a blindfold test published as “Lombardo Grooves Louis!” (Metronome, September 1949). Armstrong was listening to six recordings. He gave two, three, or four stars to Roy Eldridge, Bunk Johnson, Woody Herman, Art Hodes, and Benny Goodman. Guy Lombardo outranked them all. Genius confounds.

Here is the 1945 Lombardo recording Armstrong was evaluating: “Always” (Irving Berlin). And here is Armstrong’s 1942 recording of “Among My Souvenirs” (Edgar Leslie–Horatio Nicholls). And from 1930, a surreal “Sweethearts on Parade” (Carmen Lombardo–Charles Newman). Genius confounds.

Louis Armstrong’s recordings are now playing at Columbia University’s WKCR-FM.

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“A Sailboat in the Moonlight” (Guy Lombardo, Billie Holiday)

[“Lombardo Grooves Louis!” appears in Louis Armstrong in His Own Words: Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.]

“I can’t ‘take it’”

In The New York Times, Christopher Gibbs, a corn, soybean, and cattle farmer and Trump voter, offers his thoughts about tariffs: “I Am a Soybean Farmer Hurt by Trump’s Trade War. I Can’t ‘Take It.’”

Farm-to-table

Farm-to-table in four, or three-plus-one:

FARM
FARE
TARE
TALE
TABLE

The addition of a letter makes this sequence a variation on what Vladimir Nabokov called “word golf.”

Fred Rogers documentary coming to PBS

The Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (dir. Morgan Neville, 2018) is coming to PBS in 2019.

Now if only they’d run Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

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[Note: the article I’ve linked to characterizes Angela Santomero, creator of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, as Fred Rogers’s “protégé.” That seems to be the PBS line. Certainly Santomero learned from Rogers’s example. But protégé? Santomero says that she considers Rogers her “mentor from afar.”]

Dunning-Kruger geography

Our president, freestyling:

“I have great respect for the U.K. United Kingdom. Great respect. People call it Britain. They call it Great Britain. They call it — they used to call it England, different parts.”

From Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Great Britain consists of England, Scotland, and Wales — all three on the island known to the Romans as Britannia. (Modern usage routinely shortens the name to Britain.) It differs from United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland.

Some people wrongly think of Great Britain as a boastful name. But it’s not: it’s rooted in history. Great Britain was once contrasted with Little Britain (or simply Brittany), in France, where the Celtic Bretons lived. Although the OED’s last citation for Little Britain dates from 1622, the term Great Britain has persisted (though perhaps not without a sense of pride).

Don’t get me started on the Channel Islands, the Crown Dependencies, and the difference between the British Islands and the British Isles. So many parts!

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[The Dunning-Kruger effect: a lack of competence entails an inability to recognize one’s lack of competence.]

Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza

Jeffrey Salzberg is a lighting designer for theater and dance and an occasional college instructor. I learned about his Theory of Pizza from an episode of A Way with Words:

It is better to have pizza you don’t want than to want pizza you don’t have.

Salzberg says that he devised this theory as a college sophomore. He invokes it when explaining to students “the need to be prepared for any and all reasonable possibilities.”

Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza would give someone like Marie Kondo the fits, but I think it makes good sense. Better to have that book on the shelf than not. Better to pack that umbrella than not. You might need it! I think that Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza deserves to be better known.

[The hosts of A Way with Words turned this theory into “Any pizza is better than no pizza.” I’m not sure whether they were joking or really missing the point. See the comments.]

“Thanks to my evening reading”

Salvatore Altamura is reading, book close to his face, glasses on his forehead, when the narrator meets him outside a bar.


W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 2000.)

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