George Orwell

OK, they must be working on The Matrix — there has been a sudden camel synchronicity.

First was this entry at the Orwell Diaries, “September 14, 1938, Marrakech”, which I read yesterday:

Saw a man carrying a hare, otherwise no wild quadrupeds at all. There are said to be literally none, except a few hares and jackals, in Fr. Morrocco°. A few camels in Sp. Morocco, but not common till south of Casablanca. In general a camel seems to stand about 18 hands high. All are extremely lean & have calloused patches on all joints.

Then this morning, one of the Flickr users I follow, La Route, happened to post this image of “A laid-back Dromedary for hire in Marrakech”, who looks to be in much better shape than the ones described by Orwell (click to see larger):

And as if that weren’t enough, here’s another item that showed up in my news reader this morning, “Keith Bellows: Celebrating the camel”, from a 2002 TED conference, just posted today:

Keith Bellows gleefully outlines the engineering marvels of the camel, a vital creature he calls “the SUV of the desert.” Though he couldn’t bring a live camel to TED, he gets his camera crew as close as humanly possible to a one-ton beast in full rut.

So I’m not sure what the universe is trying to tell me, but somehow camels are involved.

So I’m cruising through my NetNewsWire feeds this morning and happen to notice that the Orwell Diaries blog name was in a different color:

That particular color indicates a feed that hasn’t been updated in a while. A smidgen perplexing, especially since I’d read today’s entry earlier this morning. Looking up at the entries list, however, revealed the issue:

So, yes, 1938 is “a while” since it was last updated. ;)

I love how Orwell punctuates abstract thoughts with startling, concrete imagery in this excerpt from “Politics And The English Language” (1946):

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

The Orwell Prize (for political writing) is sponsoring a very cool site — the Orwell Diaries.

The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

Subscribed!

orwelldiaries.wordpress.com

Reading matters has a picture and post on what is currently the Senate House in London, but was during WWII the Ministry of Information — the inspiration for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984.

One of the ministry’s functions was the censorship of information. In 1944 it advised against the publication of Orwell’s Animal Farm on the basis that it might offend the Russian allies.

Orwell eventually found a new publisher willing to ignore the advice and the book was published the following year.

There are also connections with Graham Green’s Ministry of Fear and Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags.

This is part of Reading matters’ Literary London post series.