“This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing… Political language is designed to make our lies sound truthful, and murder respectable”
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946.
“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in… to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
— George Bush, May 24th, 2005.
George Washington was a famously distant figure, intent on retaining aristocratic rules of etiquette in the White House. Lincoln demonstrated the virtues of a sober, almost impersonal state of mind. Roosevelt, creator of the Fireside Chats, spoke more as a guiding parent than as a sympathetic friend. Johnson never smiled and favoured a monotonous tone. And Nixon wore dress shoes and black socks on the beach.
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Posted 2 years, 9 months ago. Add a comment
- A few thoughts on using dreams in a novel
The average amount of time we spend asleep is between six and eight hours a night, depending on how rich you are. Taking seven hours as the median, the average hundred year old will have spent twenty-nine years of his life with his eyes closed and, for a significant part of that, dreaming his best and worst. First thought to be messages from the gods, the meaning of dreams has been interpreted by every culture we know of, from Ancient Egypt, through the Greeks, Romans, and Christians, to Freud, Jung, and now MRI and EEG scanners. A necessary part of our health, indicative of our weakness, dependent on our relaxation, full of anxiety and always cryptic, dreams have rightly become a useful space to allow for subjective analysis on the part of the reader. Putting the reader to sleep is so useful, in fact, that it is cheap.
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To help with an essay I was writing, I decided to do a character study of one of my characters. Any relation to non-fictional characters is probably not a coincidence.
Name: Jerry W.S. The W is his grandfather’s name, a man he feels a distinct connection to. The story is that Jerry felt W.’s spirit push his car a little back from a cliff edge, thus saving his life, and proving that he was his grandfather’s favorite. S., of course, can be traced all the way back to the Mayflower…
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I wrote this after I realized I was in love with a friend. Obviously, this will have to go in the “romance” section, R.
We’re laying there, wine bottle in hand, slowly passing it back and forth from one to the other. We’re talking a little, but mainly our focus is on the film. The light from the television set is the only in the room, it flickers across our faces. The pillows against which we rest are dimly visible.
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- Republished without the permission of Our Town
A Meal for the Proles, Carnegie Hill Style
Melt-in-your-mouth liver and a generous BYO policy at Square Meal
By Nick Broad
June 17, 2009
My armchair-socialist father, an Englishman, taught me that real food is blue-collar, like steak and kidney pie or mashed potatoes and liver. But after living for four years with my grandmother (his mother-in-law), a German nonagenarian brought up as the daughter of prosperous steel industrialists, I’ve developed a blooming taste for gourmet.
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