/lit/ - Literature

Does anyone on /lit/ write essays? If so, how do you share them (other than posting on /lit/)? I know there's shit like medium, but that seems more like a platform for ranting about your job or plugging your dumb invention than for sharing actual essays. Are essays just a dead media outside of school assignments?

>>10671289
>>10671191
>As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents. [...] In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Orwell was woke af.

>The human orgasm will be banned
>You can't criticize the state

Is there a bigger meme than him on predictions?

‘I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early months of the war, we were on the march, and we had halted at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my billet. I asked him what he wanted. “Your honour,” he said, “I have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.” “Thank you,” I said, “you can take her away again. I don’t want to catch any diseases.” “Diseases!” cried the Jew, “mais, monsieur le capitaine, there’s no fear of that. It’s my own daughter!” That is the Jewish national character for you.

http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/DownandOut/downandout_6.html

>But none of Orwell’s silly predictions would really irritate if the canonisation of 1984 was not a net negative for our political debate. This is not to say the novel is not a decent evocation of Stalinism—it is. It’s just that its lodging itself as the English language’s only universally-read dystopia hampers awareness of what really threatens democracy today. It strikes me as rather glib to say that 1984 is relevant because Orwell was worried about surveillance and “newspeak” words losing their meaning. Orwell’s actual warnings—about homogenization, the destruction of information, a world without wealth and only unlimited powers of the state—are now miles away. If anything, the threats to democracy are the opposite of “Orwellian.”
>This is the problem of bringing everything, always, back to Orwell. He has nothing to say about social fragmentation, financialisation, ethnic splintering, unaccountable corporations, offshore kleptocrats, or echo chambers, to name but a few. Instead, he leaves too many political minds forever chasing, Quixote-like, the totalitarian windmill of untrammeled state power. They ignore the real anemic state before their eyes, which struggles to keep up with corporate algorithms, is unable to fulfil its promises, or tax the super-rich.
>Orwell was no visionary when it comes to economics, either. Recall his Floating Fortresses in 1984, explicitly designed to eat up the surplus production of a population. His inability to meaningfully reflect on the dynamics of capitalism (beyond moralising condemnation), let alone imagine a consumer society, is a fascinating wooly mammoth frozen in ice from the postwar era. It is a reminder of how utterly written-off by European intellectuals the market economy was immediately after the war—and what a shock the 1950s consumerist takeoff in living standards proved to be.
>https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/11/20/ive-enough-george-orwell/

Does this article BTFO Orwell for the rest of time?

"I don'r understand politics, but they scare me"

Pic related wanted to talk about coal mine workers in Road to Wigan Pier.

So he climbed into a coal mine. Took several hours just to get to site. Steaming hot. Tons of short men, Orwell was 6'2 himself, sweaty and naked or almost naked men covered in black soot and glistening sweat mining coal nonstop. He couldn't even hit the rocks right because the mine was only dug wide enough for a manlet to swing a pickaxe while on his knees with a good bit of momentum.

Would he have ever went in a coal mine other than to research a book? No. Lots of writers are just fuck lazy and somehow get their fuck lazy writing published.

>It is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads.

Wrote another book with a more ham-fisted version of the message that he wrote in his earlier book and people still don't get it.

Why was he the only writer that could describe the misery of the working class, without sounding like a condescending prick? All other socialist writers write like they're dsescribing alien beings who are hopelessly below them in intelligence. But Orwell seems to really empathize with how working class conditions affect the psyche. At the end of the day he still seems them as just normal people. And yet no other socialist writer seems to capture this quality like him.

>The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level.'

>They have all the leisure in the world; why don’t they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude — and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home — you also need peace of mind. You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

>She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that’ It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her — understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

Just read animal farm for the first time... I have put off Orwell for a long time because I felt like I had already internalized the stories via cultural osmosis.

It's a pretty funny satire to start off, I laughed out loud at the description of the Marx pig having overgrown tusks, but the depiction of the Jews involved in the Russian Revolution and subsequent years as pigs and their complete betrayal and destruction of Christian farmers (Boxer the Horse) seems a tad anti-semitic.

I might go ahead and read 1984 as well...I heard there is a certain nefarious character coincidently named Goldstein. Was Orwell an anti-semite?

Since this is a very broad question, lets go with an example that most of /lit/ will have read - 1984. 1984 is a book that was clearly trying to make a few points and ultimately had a lot going on, but how would you go about extracting as much value from it as possible?

>the first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from. the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

What exactly did George Orwell mean by this? Did he not like most socialists?

>Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Rewrite this in your most aesthetic prose.

>The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.

What did he mean by this?

>It is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation.

Was he right /lit/?

>slays troll

>Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
>Never use a long word where a short one will do.
>If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
>Never use the passive where you can use the active.
>Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
>Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Thoughts?