Amazing, a book review that actually mentions the title of the book and the author's name in the first paragraph! Is this the first time this has happened in this series? Yay!!!!!
I went back and checked, you’re absolutely right, a few others do indeed have the title and author in the first paragraph. But not as prominently as this one.
Unless you're the person with initials SH, I haven't received any emails from you. Are you sending to scott@slatestarcodex.com ? What email are you using?
Thanks for giving me your email (I've deleted it from this thread so it's not public longer than it has to be). I've confirmed that all your emails have gone to spam, sorry. I'll check them out and respond to them sometime in the next few days.
This Orwell review was in the Second Chance bin (I thought it was one of the better ones and gave it a nine), are you already putting some of those in the main line-up?
"Disappointing, to say the least. I wonder if Orwell is attempting to be funny, using his callousness to reflect the callousness of everyone who sits around sipping their drinks as Charlie tells poetic stories about raping prostitutes. Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment." I thought, when reading the book, that the last option was obvious, and that, moreover, Orwell had been successful in making the reader share his extreme if stiffed-lipped disgust. After all, it is Orwell who recreates "Charlie"'s words, which paint him in full.
I don't think Orwell was a misogynist, but I don't think he had the greatest sympathy or respect for women -- particularly when they treated poor men badly, something we see in the review. In an article about the novelist George Gissing, he writes, "Doubtless Gissing is right in implying all through his novels that intelligent women are very rare animals, and if one wants to marry a woman who is intelligent and pretty, then the choice is still further restricted, according to a well-known arithmetical rule. It is like being allowed to choose only among albinos, and left-handed albinos at that." There's the well-known quote from 1984 about women being the most relentless enforcers of Party orthodoxy. Other quotes could be furnished. I agree with the people who think Orwell doesn't believe Charlie's story. But I suspect if he were a little more sympathetic to women, he would not have recounted the story in exactly that way. (Incidentally, a huge amount of Orwell's work is available at https://orwell.ru)
Thinking intelligent women are rare is very different from being OK with rape. But if Orwell thought women tend to be the enforcers of orthodoxy, he would be right. In every society, women are more religious than men, and there's no better example of the enforcement of orthodoxy than religion.
I've seen a study about this, which found that women do indeed enforce orthodoxy moreso than men, but I can't remember where the hell I saw it.
IIRC they divided people into groups, gave them some rules, established this as the "normal" way of things, and then created situations in which an exception seems reasonable and had the subjects a) vote on whether to grant the exception and b) do a self-report on how important they think the rules are — something like that. Women not only voted against granting the exceptions more, but also explicitly reported valuing orthodoxy moreso than men.
This is why I love this community, I learn so much. Do you happen to have more information about where to find this study? I have observed something like this in my personal life as a female and as a parent, and becoming a parent caused me to be subjected to great social pressure to be an orthodoxy-enforcer "for the sake of the children" eg bedtime, mealtime, structure, etc etc. It has been quite noticeable over the last decade I've parented and I have privately doubted its efficacy on multiple occasions - but I can't completely reject it. Might be that moms generally have a rule in teaching the offspring what a habit is and how to form it, and that's valuable knowledge (I'm not very good at teaching it, but I can recognize it is valuable.) Might also relate to the need to get obedience from the offspring in hazardous situations. If you can point me to the study it would be great. Thank you.
Little kids don't follow reason, but they follow habit. If you enforce rules strictly, without exceptions, they will learn to follow them without much resistance.
If you make an exception, in a special case where it makes sense, you set a precedent. Now the kids will demand an exception in all situations, even when it does not make sense.
Your choices as a parent are to become an orthodoxy enforcer, or listen to many tantrums. "Doing what makes sense" is not an option with little kids.
That might just mean that religious orthodoxy has been more successfully enforced in women than in men.
Still, it makes intuitive sense to me that women would often be orthodoxy-enforcers, if not orthodoxy-creators. A class of people who traditionally can't get away with the breaking of rules may well resent and try to stop those who can.
I think also that to the extent that women are associated with home roles and men are associated with outside-the-home roles, it makes sense that women would be associated with tradition and men with novelty.
I think this dichotomy springs logically from the differing reproductive strategies. Women, spending lots of time on few offspring, value a stable society where people follow the rules. They are therefore have incentive to work to create that. Men, who in theory at least can have many offspring and invest very little time in any of them, have less incentive to enforce social rules. Unless of course they are rich or otherwise privileged in which case their incentive is for social stability as well.
But there are people on this post arguing for completely different interpretations, so obviously it isn't clear. And maybe one of those people is right.
The review wonders why Orwell is so detached from the report of the rape. The description of the 'rape' is rather lengthy and altogether not very believable. I think Orwell is trying to say: "Charlie clearly said that, and enjoyed hearing himself speak. None of it is true, obviously. But what a colorful lie!"
This wasn't clear to me reading the review, but the paragraph with "And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness..." is Charlie's words about it, not Orwell describing what he saw.
"You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life."
Who, I say who among the boulivardier hasn't had this experience. Don't get me started on tailors...
I get the feeling that you're thinking of "using a laundress" as being a behavior for much higher up the socioeconomic ladder than Orwell was at the time. But of course this is the 20s - nobody had washing machines. Cleaning clothes properly was a somewhat skilled task that a poor man wouldn't have the knowledge or equipment to do (you can wash your undies in the sink but, lacking an iron, you're probably going to look more respectable wearing your shirt as long as you can get away with rather than try that trick on your outerclothes)
The relative value of different life necessities in different eras is always hard to wrap your brain around
The first electric washing machine was from 1908 but the first automatic washing machine was from 1937. So there would have been washing machines but they still required someone to operate them.
It's interesting to read a review of a book I've already read (listened to in this case, along with Homage to Catalonia), the parallels to modern society are interesting.
I've done enough volunteer work with the homeless to get a decent idea of modern British homelessness, and it's definitely different to the "tramps" Orwell describes. There was a great 99% Invisible Series "According to Need" on homelessness in the Bay Area which I'd also recommend if people are interested.
People are at least allowed to stay in the same city these days, which is definitely an improvement over enforced vagrancy, but homeless shelters remain a pretty unpleasant place to stay, although most of the complaints I've heard are about the people in them. People at least no longer suffer under a bread and margarine diet, the invention of the pre-packaged sandwich (and the need to throw a load of them out each day) offers some variety and flavour, although even homeless people refuse to eat halloumi and beetroot sandwiches. We no longer have state-run Spikes, but soup kitchens and homeless shelters seem to play a similar role
Drugs and mental illness (usually both) seem to be the main cause (or symptom) of homelessness these days, definitely a change from Orwell's time - it seems like alcohol's become a lot cheaper and drugs are much easier to find? Most homeless people still come across as relatively normal though once you talk to them, I felt like I could have an employee-customer type relationship with them while volunteering. In three years of weekly volunteering, there were only two incidents of threatened violence - in my experience, people tend to be on their best behaviour when they're getting something for free.
There always seems to be a debate over whether some people are just naturally inclined to crime, addiction and homelessness or whether it's simply bad luck. I see it as a spectrum - some people have just fallen on hard times, a few probably belong in an institution (prison or hospital), most are somewhere in between - they're not the most functional people, but its still mostly bad luck, it's not like everyone with a drinking problem or schizophrenia ends up on the street.
I think there is great underestimation of how much general wealth has increased in absolute terms in the last century. And yet the relative cost of shelter might even be going backwards. So homelessness is high even as those without home can frequently afford drugs if they want them enough.
I spent a summer working in a homeless shelter in Boston, MA and my impression was that we were serving three pretty different clienteles with radically different needs. Roughly 1/3 drugged, 1/3 mentally ill, and 1/3 hard times.
[I don't mean to ontologize these distinctions--obviously sustained hard times can lead to mental illness, mental illness can lead to drugs, etc. But people who are doing a lot of drugs mostly just come off as intoxicated, which maybe indicates that self-medication kinda works. At any rate they're different from the shelter's immediate perspective.]
The hard times people really benefitted from the system because they could use the job training and interview services, could sign up for government benefits and spend them wisely, etc. So a lot of what we offered really targeted them, and they didn't tend to stay more than two weeks before getting into some better program that didn't require day-to-day shelter living. On the other hand, shelter living was really hard on them, because they weren't used to the chaos.
I worked at a 'dry' shelter which meant you couldn't be super-intoxicated when you showed up; those were funneled off to a much rougher private shelter or the city shelter, but if you showed up intoxicated at the city shelter you had to check in to a two-week detox. And obviously the 'wet' shelter was a disaster, so these people tended to spend a lot of time on the streets, and is maybe why people's experience of homeless tends to be disproportionately involving drugs. They went to the 'wet' shelter when it was really cold, and came to us when they were off drugs for a little bit and trying to get their acts together (since we had all the job services) but that rarely seemed to work, both because drugs are addictive and because unlike the hard luck cases they didn't have recent employment history (which both matters to employers and to understanding the cultural aspects of holding a job).
So most of our long-termers were the mentally ill segment, which we did basically nothing for other than bathe, feed, show movies, and a little arts and crafts. That's not nothing, of course, and at least they had freedom to come and go unlike the state mental hospitals of yore. But we didn't really have any resources to help them.
So I guess my overall point was that I learned that the people you see on the streets, the long-term shelter residents, and the people receiving government aid are really three distinct populations to a large degree, with distinct problems, even though they do overlap and people move from one to the other over time.
That accords with my experience, there's definitely overlap between the categories but the people who'd recently fallen on hard times didn't tend to stick around long, whereas the people who came along every week had some combination of drug addiction, mental health issues, physical disability and a criminal record that made it seem unlikely that they'd ever stop coming. They weren't bad people (even the most dangerous guy I met just wanted a phone to call his mother), they just seemed ill suited to society. They're the kind of people who probably need some sort of institution to care for them, but it probably reflects badly on our society that that's often a prison.
One thing to note was that not everyone was technically homeless, some of them had more permanent accommodation but they still came along to soup kitchen/sandwich handout stuff because that was their community (plus they were still pretty poor).
In the US at least most income-sensitive housing has a general rule that people with felony convictions cannot live there. Some complexes make case by case exceptions but not all. I think it is a holdover from the 1996 welfare realignment (not sure) about the same time when they put in the drug felony equals ineligible for college financial aid part. In a way it is understandable - keep the felons out of the housing projects - but in another way, that is not what happens, people stay there but not on the lease - or, they have nowhere to go that they can afford to live.
An example of a rule worsening/creating the problem.
I really enjoyed this review! It's also one of the first where I've noticed a distinct *absence* of an attempt to imitate Scott's writing style, and that worked well for me. Although I did wonder when the author used the word 'queer' whether Orwell's style was rubbing off instead...
I agree, this style was very refreshing. I hadn't thought of it as a lack of attempting to imitate Scott, but once you pointed it out it was clear that was part of what was making this review stand out to me.
Would it be impolitic to ask how, if Henri never speaks, Orwell [or indeed, anyone Orwell may have spoken to] obtained the epic tale of Henri's downfall?
> "Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment." Because it does.
That was my reaction too. If I were writing a book for children, I might add "And that, children, is why we shouldn't rape prostitutes." But this was a book for adults.
Aside from that one remark that rankled, this was a great review. It was the first one that caused me to go and order the book.
I don't think the writer was necessarily saying the immorality of rape should've been plainly spelled out, but that there are a large number of moral reactions Orwell could have had to the specific details of the incident because the incident is well, frankly, very weird.
This was fantastic. It was very plain and straightforward in the best way possible. I wish I could write so clearly. I also appreciate that the reviewer remained humble, and refrained from elevating themselves and their ideas over the subject of the book.
So many other reviews tried to capture Scott's style, which is insanely hard to do well. This reviewer has their own voice. I'm looking froward to see who wrote it.
"Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day instead often or fifteen."
I would steelman Orwell here as calling for a de-escalation of a wasteful arms race of zero-sum status-signaling. Conspicuous consumption consists partly of consumption for its own sake, and partly of status signaling. It seems like Orwell thinks fancy restaurants are mostly the latter. Reducing the waste caused by the latter is a type of coordination problem. There is no "instinct to perpetuate useless work", only the individual restaurant owner's incentives pushing him to provide what the market is demanding, until such time as people can agree that conspicuous consumption is gauche.
I would guesstimate that a majority of the US' current economic output goes towards the status signaling arms race rather than fulfilling actual non-arms-race needs.
(Silicon Valley has eliminated some kinds of wasteful status signaling by e.g. replacing fancy suits with t-shirts. But maybe there's a conservation-of-status-signaling and it just got sublimated into other areas, like virtue signaling. And not virtue in terms of mastering the basic virtues that everyone agrees on (because that would be no use in signaling one's difference from others) but in terms of novel divisive causes that come out every few years.)
That seems right, but it's hard to know what to do about it. Rich people have both (a) sunk enough capital into technology that most low-end jobs are close to zero marginal product and (b) really enjoy status games since they have way more money than can serve ordinary human wants. So it's hard to avoid having a lot of people employed in lame status signaling for the rich.
I guess this actually makes a really good case for some kinds of status signaling, though. Philanthropy looks good because everybody uses the hospital and the library, and even the orchestras are enjoyed by the middle class (with occasional park concerts for everybody). Art and artisanal products also look good because people generally really like making them and they're not as interchangeable as starched tablecloths so the creators have more market power. And aren't these things what upper-class rich spend their money on? So maybe the problem is really with the "Americans" aka the nouveau riche. When you have a lot of them, as was the case in Orwell's time and in ours with the tech and finance bros, maybe status games tend toward the lamer sort with more BS jobs.
Well, as the reviewer points out, philanthropy can be useless or worse when it's done for virtue signalling type reasons instead of genuine concern with whether it actually helps anyone. I always enjoy seeing those types of "philantropists" squirm when they are confronted with EA style arguments.
Seems to me that status games are an intrinsic and unavoidable part of human life, and to some extent necessary for sorting out who does what in a social group of any size or scale, so my view is that it's more productive to try to shape culture so that the status games are directed toward things that are actually good, or at least harmless, rather than trying to get rid of them altogether.
For a more modern book in the same genre I recommend "On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City" by Alice Goffman. It documents the lives of some people in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia.
I read this book when I was 15. A few minutes before the starting bell in 4th period English, I asked the teacher if we were going to read 1984 in her class this term. She said "no", saw the disappointment on my face, and said "but come with me". She took me to the school library and looked for a copy. All copies were checked out. She grabbed "Down and Out in London and Paris", handed it to me, and told me to check it out. She wanted me to write a book report about it.
Starting bell happened. She headed back to the class she had put on hold for me and I checked the book out and wrote the report.
Pretty sure your review is better than mine was, though I'm impressed I didn't manage to miss too much. Seems like I remembered it, with the same lessons.
"I get the sense that people who lived before the mid-twentieth century had opposite feelings about cleanliness: if your chicken shank falls in the mud, who cares? Wipe it off and eat it."
Here's a cultural anthropologist (and not the newfangled kind who's given up science for activism) on that:
>Disappointing, to say the least. I wonder if Orwell is attempting to be funny, using his callousness to reflect the callousness of everyone who sits around sipping their drinks as Charlie tells poetic stories about raping prostitutes. Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment. Luckily Orwell doesn’t do this very often.
What should he have written instead?
I do think this is revealing, but not of Blair's inner character. It's revealing of how recent the modern complex about rape actually is. It's not a good thing, nor is it even a neutral thing, but it needn't be the horror we've made it into.
They also used to hang people for a lot of other things. On the one hand, hanging is a really strong punishment. But on the other hand, they did it for enough things that it doesn't necessarily indicate the same level of outrage as it would now.
I'm also not sure what the author of the review finds disappointing. It's already kind of a given that these 'tramps' commit all kinds of crimes and rape is another of those crimes. And Orwell is under no illusion that his readers need a reminder that rape is bad and he strongly disapproves it. So why state the obvious? Of course the modern politesse requires that he should spend a paragraph agonizing about how horrible this particular crime anyway, but I think the fact that he's writing half a century before this norm was established should be counted as an excuse.
I would certainly disagree that 'it needn't be the horror we've made it into'. The 'complex about rape' is only modern for the men who instigate it; for the women who are the victims of it it has always been a horror.
Apologies for taking a while to get back to you on this; I didn't notice your reply at the time.
I am in the camp that thinks much of the trauma of many things comes from the cultural expectation of such trauma, which reifies itself through dissonance in the mind of the (soon-to-be) traumatised. Applying a traumatic event to everyone in a population does not result in societal collapse; it simply becomes a rite of passage. (Since we're on the topic of rape, the obvious example would be ancient pederasty.) The obvious conclusion here is that trauma, while certainly partly "real" (i.e., independent of culture), is much more socially constructed than common knowledge would seem to think.
As I said above, rape is a bad thing. But it is, at present, worse than it needs to be because of the mythos built up around it. Someone who is raped and enjoys it (this is a thing that often happens) is currently, unless he/she is superhumanly capable of shrugging off society's expectations, doomed to question his/her normality and virtue until it drives him/her mad. I've been hit by this kind of dissonance myself, though I have not personally been raped.
As an aside, rape's really not that one-sided. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf is an apparently-decent source I found. (Note that their definition of "rape" as being forcibly penetrated by another naturally produces a massive skew toward female victims - but they do have statistics for "physically forced to penetrate another" and once you include those it's nowhere near as disproportionate.)
As an American luxury hotel worker in 2021, I chuckled in recognition of Orwell's descriptions of luxury hotel workers.
Because while of course working conditions have improved immensely and the restaurant kitchens and employee-only areas are now only moderately grimy as opposed to shockingly filthy, it remains true in 2021 that hotel employees aren't necessarily doing what a guest expects.
For example, I'm sure luxury hotel guests expect that the highly breakable glass drinking vessels in the bathrooms and/or minibars be collected, transported down long halls and multiple floors to a commercial dish-washing machine where they are washed, sterilized, dried, polished, and then lovingly replaced by white-gloved hands every time the room is cleaned.
And that that process happens every day in the dozens or hundreds or thousands of rooms on a property.
Whether the glasses appear to be used, or not.
When there's a sink *right there* in the bathroom of every guest room and housekeeping has *some* sort of cleaning product that will make the glass sparkle.
LOL!
I mean, who would even do the job of taking room glasses to a dishwasher?
Not housekeeping, who perform hard labor on a tightly-monitored schedule eight hours a day for minimum(ish) wages and who have neither the calories nor the time to make extra trips in and out of rooms to a dish-washing station.
Not restaurant/room service staff (assuming there is a restaurant), who are a totally separate department from housekeeping and wouldn't have the slightest idea when to go into a particular room to collect and replace glassware, even if they had the inclination.
Not managers, who are specifically tasked by ownership with getting maximally efficient labor out of their employees.
Not ownership or the industry as a whole, who never face lasting consequences for failing to perform this task despite countless "shocking" hidden camera exposes on the topic.
And that's the crux of it. I fully assume that everyone in every industry is only performing to the level that won't get them fired/sued/arrested, a level which is a level significantly below what their customers expect. It's the consumer version of Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy.
(Add in a pandemic and the level often falls below the bar to be "fired/sued/arrested," but what isn't noticed, isn't punished.)
Lemme tell you, judging by what I've seen, the literally formal public guarantees of COVID-19 cleaning protocols aren't a guarantee of good hygiene in any business, anywhere.
"We've laid off 3/4ths of our staff due to COVID-19 but we're well-staffed enough to sanitize every surface every 90 minutes for *your* safety!"
I hadn't heard of it! I just ordered a copy on Ebay, thanks for the tip!
(Although I'm occassionally skeptical of some of the really outrageous high end hotel shenanigans reported on Reddit and in expośes. I've been in high end hotel work for more than a decade and have never encountered any truly eccentric requests or terrible tragedies. But then, I'm in one of America's more relaxed cities, and have a somewhat resting bitch face, so perhaps I'm repelling most attempts without realizing it.
Or the real shenanigans only occur in NYC, London, Dubai, Las Vegas and other party cities.)
Like the author of this piece, I'd be leary of trying to draw too many parallels between the homeless of a century ago and the homeless of today. I think these are groups with rather distinctly different problems. Orwell's speaks of a kind of enforced idleness among his fellow tramps. If I look at homeless people today in my neck of the woods, I just see, well....idleness. When I still lived near downtown in my east coast city and used to see homeless people regularly in the park down the street or in the foyer of the office building next door on the weekends when no one was there, most of the time, they didn't seem to be begging or scrounging or harassing anyone for money or anything like that. They didn't seem to be doing anything at all, really. They were just kinda there.
From my limited experience there is often?sometimes? a street hierarchy such that street corners that yield more income are claimed. There can be a "shift change" type phenomenon at some corners. I suspect that many people don't want the hassle of having to negotiate that or being known to have money and potentially getting robbed. Also some shelters do not let people stay past 8 am in the morning; it prevents people from getting dug in, there are other reasons, but either way the people have to go somewhere. If there is no "day shelter" and they have no money and no job then they just watch over their small amount of belongings and wait for the next soup kitchen meal, wait until 4 or 5 in the evening when the shelter opens up again for dinner. If there is a public library people will go there. It is a holding pattern for sure.
I put on my high power readers and pulled out Volume VI of the OED and the listings go from grotesquerie (grotesque items collectively) to grotha (obscure for growth). I think this must be a coinage.
Feel free to point out the inevitable misspellings in the post I’m making now, because I’m sure karma will see to it that I don’t get away with complaining about word usage without rebalancing the scales. :)
I liked this review but it's mostly because Orwell writes really well and there are very long direct quotes from Orwell. It did make me want to read the book, but I think this writer produced less of their own content than some reviewers did.
"I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during the day, and yet the strain of the work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs—it is like sorting a pack of cards against the clock."
Oh, hell yes. I worked in kitchens during college. I was decent at prep but _terrible_ on the line. I can't tell you how many trays of breadsticks I burned at one job. Thank God I eventually got into computer programming where I can get absorbed in one elaborate task because juggling multiple simple tasks does not come easily to me. I can get dinner on the table at home but not much more than that. There is no such thing as unskilled labor.
I have not read _Down and Out_ but this review is a good spur to do so. Orwell's clear, unsentimental writing about work is one of his great strengths. The descriptions of coal miners' lives in the first part of _The Road to Wigan Pier_ lend so much strength to his analysis of political economy in the second part.
This review does a very good job summarising the book so full marks for that. However, it is far far too long for comfort. I'd humbly suggest trimming it to half the length.
For some reason, the review does not mention the name of the organization at which Orwell was lectured about folksy religion with his bread and tea. It was the Salvation Army, and Orwell states in the book that he would never support it.
Reading this reminded me of an opinion piece on poverty and homelessness I read a couple of years ago. Paraphrasing from memory, it said something like:
> When rich people think about solutions to poverty they of themselves as poor. But rich people are not poor people, even if they have no money.
This review highlights the fact that, though penniless, Orwell could always go back to his family and, even without that safety net, he knew that, deep down, something would go right and that there was a career waiting for him whenever he chose to pursue it.
I had a period in my early twenties where I was absolutely broke. I too stuffed my shoes with newspaper and walked a couple of miles to work in the City of London because I could not afford the bus. I only ate two or three times a week and only ate cheap, high-calorie foods. But, for the whole period that I was broke, I knew that the day would come when I was no longer broke and here I am, 30 years later, quite comfortably off with poverty a distant memory.
Orwell had the habits and upbringing of a rich man and was never going to be poor, even when he was down and out.
Fascinating topic, very well presented-- I feel like I've read the book. I found the analysis less than compelling but still interesting. There are connections to be drawn with Warren's *The Two-Income Trap* in how Orwell connects economic misery with a bidding war by the rich for status / positional goods and builds that into a kind-of-left-liberal worldview. There's plenty of good content here-- much of it from Orwell himself, of course-- and while the insights came up short it was still an enjoyable read.
I think what the reviewer may have missed is that the rape description is certainly a kind of literary game. I remember that when I read the book, it struck me as very similar in tone and theme with decadent and romantic French literature, in particular Lautreamont (a poet from Baudelaire's generation) whose Chants de Maldoror (Maldoror's Songs) describe a similar (fictional) child rape scene (The theme was also used many times in Sade's works).
This scene in Orwell's book was somewhat out of place and the style was colourful, especially compared to the rest of the book which is, as the reviewer said, pretty dry and matter-of-fact. I think these are other clues pointing towards a strange erudite game.
This is my favorite review thus far because it actually functions as a review - that is to say, it warned me in advance what the weak points of the book were and also discussed why I might want to read it, rather than simply summarising the book's points and then discussing them.
Or to put it another way - thus far this is the only review where, upon finishing it, I went to my library app and searched for the book and borrowed it.
(I do think the review could have been made shorter and stayed as good, but excessive length is a problem with the majority of these reviews)
Now THAT is news you can use.
Amazing, a book review that actually mentions the title of the book and the author's name in the first paragraph! Is this the first time this has happened in this series? Yay!!!!!
No, several of them have done that.
I went back and checked, you’re absolutely right, a few others do indeed have the title and author in the first paragraph. But not as prominently as this one.
Hey Scott, I haven't seen my book review in either list and emailed you a couple times. Just seeing if you know what happened-
Thanks,
Joel
Unless you're the person with initials SH, I haven't received any emails from you. Are you sending to scott@slatestarcodex.com ? What email are you using?
Thanks for giving me your email (I've deleted it from this thread so it's not public longer than it has to be). I've confirmed that all your emails have gone to spam, sorry. I'll check them out and respond to them sometime in the next few days.
Cool, thank you.
This Orwell review was in the Second Chance bin (I thought it was one of the better ones and gave it a nine), are you already putting some of those in the main line-up?
From Scott's Intro at the top of this post:
"This entry was promoted to finalist status by readers; thanks to everyone who voted!"
"Disappointing, to say the least. I wonder if Orwell is attempting to be funny, using his callousness to reflect the callousness of everyone who sits around sipping their drinks as Charlie tells poetic stories about raping prostitutes. Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment." I thought, when reading the book, that the last option was obvious, and that, moreover, Orwell had been successful in making the reader share his extreme if stiffed-lipped disgust. After all, it is Orwell who recreates "Charlie"'s words, which paint him in full.
Did Orwell not realize that in 2021 there would be no room for creative subtlety when virtue signaling was involved?
I don't think Orwell was a misogynist, but I don't think he had the greatest sympathy or respect for women -- particularly when they treated poor men badly, something we see in the review. In an article about the novelist George Gissing, he writes, "Doubtless Gissing is right in implying all through his novels that intelligent women are very rare animals, and if one wants to marry a woman who is intelligent and pretty, then the choice is still further restricted, according to a well-known arithmetical rule. It is like being allowed to choose only among albinos, and left-handed albinos at that." There's the well-known quote from 1984 about women being the most relentless enforcers of Party orthodoxy. Other quotes could be furnished. I agree with the people who think Orwell doesn't believe Charlie's story. But I suspect if he were a little more sympathetic to women, he would not have recounted the story in exactly that way. (Incidentally, a huge amount of Orwell's work is available at https://orwell.ru)
Thinking intelligent women are rare is very different from being OK with rape. But if Orwell thought women tend to be the enforcers of orthodoxy, he would be right. In every society, women are more religious than men, and there's no better example of the enforcement of orthodoxy than religion.
I've seen a study about this, which found that women do indeed enforce orthodoxy moreso than men, but I can't remember where the hell I saw it.
IIRC they divided people into groups, gave them some rules, established this as the "normal" way of things, and then created situations in which an exception seems reasonable and had the subjects a) vote on whether to grant the exception and b) do a self-report on how important they think the rules are — something like that. Women not only voted against granting the exceptions more, but also explicitly reported valuing orthodoxy moreso than men.
This is why I love this community, I learn so much. Do you happen to have more information about where to find this study? I have observed something like this in my personal life as a female and as a parent, and becoming a parent caused me to be subjected to great social pressure to be an orthodoxy-enforcer "for the sake of the children" eg bedtime, mealtime, structure, etc etc. It has been quite noticeable over the last decade I've parented and I have privately doubted its efficacy on multiple occasions - but I can't completely reject it. Might be that moms generally have a rule in teaching the offspring what a habit is and how to form it, and that's valuable knowledge (I'm not very good at teaching it, but I can recognize it is valuable.) Might also relate to the need to get obedience from the offspring in hazardous situations. If you can point me to the study it would be great. Thank you.
Little kids don't follow reason, but they follow habit. If you enforce rules strictly, without exceptions, they will learn to follow them without much resistance.
If you make an exception, in a special case where it makes sense, you set a precedent. Now the kids will demand an exception in all situations, even when it does not make sense.
Your choices as a parent are to become an orthodoxy enforcer, or listen to many tantrums. "Doing what makes sense" is not an option with little kids.
That might just mean that religious orthodoxy has been more successfully enforced in women than in men.
Still, it makes intuitive sense to me that women would often be orthodoxy-enforcers, if not orthodoxy-creators. A class of people who traditionally can't get away with the breaking of rules may well resent and try to stop those who can.
I think also that to the extent that women are associated with home roles and men are associated with outside-the-home roles, it makes sense that women would be associated with tradition and men with novelty.
I think this dichotomy springs logically from the differing reproductive strategies. Women, spending lots of time on few offspring, value a stable society where people follow the rules. They are therefore have incentive to work to create that. Men, who in theory at least can have many offspring and invest very little time in any of them, have less incentive to enforce social rules. Unless of course they are rich or otherwise privileged in which case their incentive is for social stability as well.
I wouldn't put too much stock in that kind of just-so story. It's far too easy to come up with a plausible one to explain just about anything.
If we were told women valued orthodoxy less than men, we could talk about how patriarchal orthodoxies have historically been.
I also thought that was clear when I read it.
But there are people on this post arguing for completely different interpretations, so obviously it isn't clear. And maybe one of those people is right.
The review wonders why Orwell is so detached from the report of the rape. The description of the 'rape' is rather lengthy and altogether not very believable. I think Orwell is trying to say: "Charlie clearly said that, and enjoyed hearing himself speak. None of it is true, obviously. But what a colorful lie!"
This is what I thought when I read the book. "Curious specimen" = "liar, but I can't print that here"
This wasn't clear to me reading the review, but the paragraph with "And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness..." is Charlie's words about it, not Orwell describing what he saw.
"You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life."
Who, I say who among the boulivardier hasn't had this experience. Don't get me started on tailors...
There was a barber in my hometown who had this attitude
I get the feeling that you're thinking of "using a laundress" as being a behavior for much higher up the socioeconomic ladder than Orwell was at the time. But of course this is the 20s - nobody had washing machines. Cleaning clothes properly was a somewhat skilled task that a poor man wouldn't have the knowledge or equipment to do (you can wash your undies in the sink but, lacking an iron, you're probably going to look more respectable wearing your shirt as long as you can get away with rather than try that trick on your outerclothes)
The relative value of different life necessities in different eras is always hard to wrap your brain around
The first electric washing machine was from 1908 but the first automatic washing machine was from 1937. So there would have been washing machines but they still required someone to operate them.
It's interesting to read a review of a book I've already read (listened to in this case, along with Homage to Catalonia), the parallels to modern society are interesting.
I've done enough volunteer work with the homeless to get a decent idea of modern British homelessness, and it's definitely different to the "tramps" Orwell describes. There was a great 99% Invisible Series "According to Need" on homelessness in the Bay Area which I'd also recommend if people are interested.
People are at least allowed to stay in the same city these days, which is definitely an improvement over enforced vagrancy, but homeless shelters remain a pretty unpleasant place to stay, although most of the complaints I've heard are about the people in them. People at least no longer suffer under a bread and margarine diet, the invention of the pre-packaged sandwich (and the need to throw a load of them out each day) offers some variety and flavour, although even homeless people refuse to eat halloumi and beetroot sandwiches. We no longer have state-run Spikes, but soup kitchens and homeless shelters seem to play a similar role
Drugs and mental illness (usually both) seem to be the main cause (or symptom) of homelessness these days, definitely a change from Orwell's time - it seems like alcohol's become a lot cheaper and drugs are much easier to find? Most homeless people still come across as relatively normal though once you talk to them, I felt like I could have an employee-customer type relationship with them while volunteering. In three years of weekly volunteering, there were only two incidents of threatened violence - in my experience, people tend to be on their best behaviour when they're getting something for free.
There always seems to be a debate over whether some people are just naturally inclined to crime, addiction and homelessness or whether it's simply bad luck. I see it as a spectrum - some people have just fallen on hard times, a few probably belong in an institution (prison or hospital), most are somewhere in between - they're not the most functional people, but its still mostly bad luck, it's not like everyone with a drinking problem or schizophrenia ends up on the street.
I think there is great underestimation of how much general wealth has increased in absolute terms in the last century. And yet the relative cost of shelter might even be going backwards. So homelessness is high even as those without home can frequently afford drugs if they want them enough.
Basically, cost disease.
Nailed it.
True, and if you can't afford shelter but can afford drugs, I can certainly understand the appeal.
I spent a summer working in a homeless shelter in Boston, MA and my impression was that we were serving three pretty different clienteles with radically different needs. Roughly 1/3 drugged, 1/3 mentally ill, and 1/3 hard times.
[I don't mean to ontologize these distinctions--obviously sustained hard times can lead to mental illness, mental illness can lead to drugs, etc. But people who are doing a lot of drugs mostly just come off as intoxicated, which maybe indicates that self-medication kinda works. At any rate they're different from the shelter's immediate perspective.]
The hard times people really benefitted from the system because they could use the job training and interview services, could sign up for government benefits and spend them wisely, etc. So a lot of what we offered really targeted them, and they didn't tend to stay more than two weeks before getting into some better program that didn't require day-to-day shelter living. On the other hand, shelter living was really hard on them, because they weren't used to the chaos.
I worked at a 'dry' shelter which meant you couldn't be super-intoxicated when you showed up; those were funneled off to a much rougher private shelter or the city shelter, but if you showed up intoxicated at the city shelter you had to check in to a two-week detox. And obviously the 'wet' shelter was a disaster, so these people tended to spend a lot of time on the streets, and is maybe why people's experience of homeless tends to be disproportionately involving drugs. They went to the 'wet' shelter when it was really cold, and came to us when they were off drugs for a little bit and trying to get their acts together (since we had all the job services) but that rarely seemed to work, both because drugs are addictive and because unlike the hard luck cases they didn't have recent employment history (which both matters to employers and to understanding the cultural aspects of holding a job).
So most of our long-termers were the mentally ill segment, which we did basically nothing for other than bathe, feed, show movies, and a little arts and crafts. That's not nothing, of course, and at least they had freedom to come and go unlike the state mental hospitals of yore. But we didn't really have any resources to help them.
So I guess my overall point was that I learned that the people you see on the streets, the long-term shelter residents, and the people receiving government aid are really three distinct populations to a large degree, with distinct problems, even though they do overlap and people move from one to the other over time.
That accords with my experience, there's definitely overlap between the categories but the people who'd recently fallen on hard times didn't tend to stick around long, whereas the people who came along every week had some combination of drug addiction, mental health issues, physical disability and a criminal record that made it seem unlikely that they'd ever stop coming. They weren't bad people (even the most dangerous guy I met just wanted a phone to call his mother), they just seemed ill suited to society. They're the kind of people who probably need some sort of institution to care for them, but it probably reflects badly on our society that that's often a prison.
One thing to note was that not everyone was technically homeless, some of them had more permanent accommodation but they still came along to soup kitchen/sandwich handout stuff because that was their community (plus they were still pretty poor).
In the US at least most income-sensitive housing has a general rule that people with felony convictions cannot live there. Some complexes make case by case exceptions but not all. I think it is a holdover from the 1996 welfare realignment (not sure) about the same time when they put in the drug felony equals ineligible for college financial aid part. In a way it is understandable - keep the felons out of the housing projects - but in another way, that is not what happens, people stay there but not on the lease - or, they have nowhere to go that they can afford to live.
An example of a rule worsening/creating the problem.
I really enjoyed this review! It's also one of the first where I've noticed a distinct *absence* of an attempt to imitate Scott's writing style, and that worked well for me. Although I did wonder when the author used the word 'queer' whether Orwell's style was rubbing off instead...
I agree, this style was very refreshing. I hadn't thought of it as a lack of attempting to imitate Scott, but once you pointed it out it was clear that was part of what was making this review stand out to me.
This was really terrific! In particular, the comparison to Anthony Bourdain seems apt.
This is really ending up as one of my favorite reviews, despite a number of good ones earlier. Very impressive.
Would it be impolitic to ask how, if Henri never speaks, Orwell [or indeed, anyone Orwell may have spoken to] obtained the epic tale of Henri's downfall?
Not having read the book, my best guess is that he asked people who knew him before he stopped talking.
"Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment." Because it does.
That's how the greats used to write, before we had to have everything earnestly spelled out for us in numbing detail.
I read this book around 1982 and I'm sure I still have it. Thank you for the review. I must dig out my old copy and re-read it.
> "Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment." Because it does.
That was my reaction too. If I were writing a book for children, I might add "And that, children, is why we shouldn't rape prostitutes." But this was a book for adults.
Aside from that one remark that rankled, this was a great review. It was the first one that caused me to go and order the book.
I don't think the writer was necessarily saying the immorality of rape should've been plainly spelled out, but that there are a large number of moral reactions Orwell could have had to the specific details of the incident because the incident is well, frankly, very weird.
This was fantastic. It was very plain and straightforward in the best way possible. I wish I could write so clearly. I also appreciate that the reviewer remained humble, and refrained from elevating themselves and their ideas over the subject of the book.
So many other reviews tried to capture Scott's style, which is insanely hard to do well. This reviewer has their own voice. I'm looking froward to see who wrote it.
"Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day instead often or fifteen."
I would steelman Orwell here as calling for a de-escalation of a wasteful arms race of zero-sum status-signaling. Conspicuous consumption consists partly of consumption for its own sake, and partly of status signaling. It seems like Orwell thinks fancy restaurants are mostly the latter. Reducing the waste caused by the latter is a type of coordination problem. There is no "instinct to perpetuate useless work", only the individual restaurant owner's incentives pushing him to provide what the market is demanding, until such time as people can agree that conspicuous consumption is gauche.
I would guesstimate that a majority of the US' current economic output goes towards the status signaling arms race rather than fulfilling actual non-arms-race needs.
(Silicon Valley has eliminated some kinds of wasteful status signaling by e.g. replacing fancy suits with t-shirts. But maybe there's a conservation-of-status-signaling and it just got sublimated into other areas, like virtue signaling. And not virtue in terms of mastering the basic virtues that everyone agrees on (because that would be no use in signaling one's difference from others) but in terms of novel divisive causes that come out every few years.)
That seems right, but it's hard to know what to do about it. Rich people have both (a) sunk enough capital into technology that most low-end jobs are close to zero marginal product and (b) really enjoy status games since they have way more money than can serve ordinary human wants. So it's hard to avoid having a lot of people employed in lame status signaling for the rich.
I guess this actually makes a really good case for some kinds of status signaling, though. Philanthropy looks good because everybody uses the hospital and the library, and even the orchestras are enjoyed by the middle class (with occasional park concerts for everybody). Art and artisanal products also look good because people generally really like making them and they're not as interchangeable as starched tablecloths so the creators have more market power. And aren't these things what upper-class rich spend their money on? So maybe the problem is really with the "Americans" aka the nouveau riche. When you have a lot of them, as was the case in Orwell's time and in ours with the tech and finance bros, maybe status games tend toward the lamer sort with more BS jobs.
Well, as the reviewer points out, philanthropy can be useless or worse when it's done for virtue signalling type reasons instead of genuine concern with whether it actually helps anyone. I always enjoy seeing those types of "philantropists" squirm when they are confronted with EA style arguments.
Seems to me that status games are an intrinsic and unavoidable part of human life, and to some extent necessary for sorting out who does what in a social group of any size or scale, so my view is that it's more productive to try to shape culture so that the status games are directed toward things that are actually good, or at least harmless, rather than trying to get rid of them altogether.
For a more modern book in the same genre I recommend "On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City" by Alice Goffman. It documents the lives of some people in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia.
Note to self, steal a copy of this book.
Hey, that was just advice for the Abbie Hoffman book. Not ALL books. [Joke, I’m case there was any doubt]
I read this book when I was 15. A few minutes before the starting bell in 4th period English, I asked the teacher if we were going to read 1984 in her class this term. She said "no", saw the disappointment on my face, and said "but come with me". She took me to the school library and looked for a copy. All copies were checked out. She grabbed "Down and Out in London and Paris", handed it to me, and told me to check it out. She wanted me to write a book report about it.
Starting bell happened. She headed back to the class she had put on hold for me and I checked the book out and wrote the report.
Pretty sure your review is better than mine was, though I'm impressed I didn't manage to miss too much. Seems like I remembered it, with the same lessons.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
"I get the sense that people who lived before the mid-twentieth century had opposite feelings about cleanliness: if your chicken shank falls in the mud, who cares? Wipe it off and eat it."
Here's a cultural anthropologist (and not the newfangled kind who's given up science for activism) on that:
https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2021/2/5/the-limits-of-the-proposed-behavioral-immune-system
Bryan Caplan recently did a book club on Orwell's "Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism" from 1984, and concluded with some notes on his socialism:
https://www.econlib.org/postscript-orwell-for-socialism/
That "behavioral immune system" post was an interesting read, thanks!
As for something comparable today, check out Chris Arnade's writings on 'back row' america:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/back-row-america
I think Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich is probably closest? Same deal, journalist living in poverty, reports on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed
The number is 17!
The number is 17!!
>Disappointing, to say the least. I wonder if Orwell is attempting to be funny, using his callousness to reflect the callousness of everyone who sits around sipping their drinks as Charlie tells poetic stories about raping prostitutes. Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment. Luckily Orwell doesn’t do this very often.
What should he have written instead?
I do think this is revealing, but not of Blair's inner character. It's revealing of how recent the modern complex about rape actually is. It's not a good thing, nor is it even a neutral thing, but it needn't be the horror we've made it into.
I was tempted to say something similar - I had a similar reaction - but couldn't think of a way of putting it that didn't provoke outrage.
Didn't they used to hang rapists?
They also used to hang people for a lot of other things. On the one hand, hanging is a really strong punishment. But on the other hand, they did it for enough things that it doesn't necessarily indicate the same level of outrage as it would now.
I'm also not sure what the author of the review finds disappointing. It's already kind of a given that these 'tramps' commit all kinds of crimes and rape is another of those crimes. And Orwell is under no illusion that his readers need a reminder that rape is bad and he strongly disapproves it. So why state the obvious? Of course the modern politesse requires that he should spend a paragraph agonizing about how horrible this particular crime anyway, but I think the fact that he's writing half a century before this norm was established should be counted as an excuse.
I would certainly disagree that 'it needn't be the horror we've made it into'. The 'complex about rape' is only modern for the men who instigate it; for the women who are the victims of it it has always been a horror.
Apologies for taking a while to get back to you on this; I didn't notice your reply at the time.
I am in the camp that thinks much of the trauma of many things comes from the cultural expectation of such trauma, which reifies itself through dissonance in the mind of the (soon-to-be) traumatised. Applying a traumatic event to everyone in a population does not result in societal collapse; it simply becomes a rite of passage. (Since we're on the topic of rape, the obvious example would be ancient pederasty.) The obvious conclusion here is that trauma, while certainly partly "real" (i.e., independent of culture), is much more socially constructed than common knowledge would seem to think.
As I said above, rape is a bad thing. But it is, at present, worse than it needs to be because of the mythos built up around it. Someone who is raped and enjoys it (this is a thing that often happens) is currently, unless he/she is superhumanly capable of shrugging off society's expectations, doomed to question his/her normality and virtue until it drives him/her mad. I've been hit by this kind of dissonance myself, though I have not personally been raped.
As an aside, rape's really not that one-sided. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf is an apparently-decent source I found. (Note that their definition of "rape" as being forcibly penetrated by another naturally produces a massive skew toward female victims - but they do have statistics for "physically forced to penetrate another" and once you include those it's nowhere near as disproportionate.)
Jack London's "The Abyss" about 1905 East End London, is similar. But London is slumming solely for purposes of reporting.
>His description of the old man’s cough, in particular, makes me never want to sleep in a room with another person ever again.
Notably, George Orwell subsequently died of tuberculosis at age 46.
As an American luxury hotel worker in 2021, I chuckled in recognition of Orwell's descriptions of luxury hotel workers.
Because while of course working conditions have improved immensely and the restaurant kitchens and employee-only areas are now only moderately grimy as opposed to shockingly filthy, it remains true in 2021 that hotel employees aren't necessarily doing what a guest expects.
For example, I'm sure luxury hotel guests expect that the highly breakable glass drinking vessels in the bathrooms and/or minibars be collected, transported down long halls and multiple floors to a commercial dish-washing machine where they are washed, sterilized, dried, polished, and then lovingly replaced by white-gloved hands every time the room is cleaned.
And that that process happens every day in the dozens or hundreds or thousands of rooms on a property.
Whether the glasses appear to be used, or not.
When there's a sink *right there* in the bathroom of every guest room and housekeeping has *some* sort of cleaning product that will make the glass sparkle.
LOL!
I mean, who would even do the job of taking room glasses to a dishwasher?
Not housekeeping, who perform hard labor on a tightly-monitored schedule eight hours a day for minimum(ish) wages and who have neither the calories nor the time to make extra trips in and out of rooms to a dish-washing station.
Not restaurant/room service staff (assuming there is a restaurant), who are a totally separate department from housekeeping and wouldn't have the slightest idea when to go into a particular room to collect and replace glassware, even if they had the inclination.
Not managers, who are specifically tasked by ownership with getting maximally efficient labor out of their employees.
Not ownership or the industry as a whole, who never face lasting consequences for failing to perform this task despite countless "shocking" hidden camera exposes on the topic.
And that's the crux of it. I fully assume that everyone in every industry is only performing to the level that won't get them fired/sued/arrested, a level which is a level significantly below what their customers expect. It's the consumer version of Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy.
(Add in a pandemic and the level often falls below the bar to be "fired/sued/arrested," but what isn't noticed, isn't punished.)
You mean that paper wrapper around the glass isn’t a formal guarantee of good hygiene?
Lemme tell you, judging by what I've seen, the literally formal public guarantees of COVID-19 cleaning protocols aren't a guarantee of good hygiene in any business, anywhere.
"We've laid off 3/4ths of our staff due to COVID-19 but we're well-staffed enough to sanitize every surface every 90 minutes for *your* safety!"
Lulz!
I’ve been around the track enough times to take anything that comes from a marketing or advertising department with a grain of salt. :)
Have you read Heads in Beds? I thought that was both funny and eye-opening.
I hadn't heard of it! I just ordered a copy on Ebay, thanks for the tip!
(Although I'm occassionally skeptical of some of the really outrageous high end hotel shenanigans reported on Reddit and in expośes. I've been in high end hotel work for more than a decade and have never encountered any truly eccentric requests or terrible tragedies. But then, I'm in one of America's more relaxed cities, and have a somewhat resting bitch face, so perhaps I'm repelling most attempts without realizing it.
Or the real shenanigans only occur in NYC, London, Dubai, Las Vegas and other party cities.)
Like the author of this piece, I'd be leary of trying to draw too many parallels between the homeless of a century ago and the homeless of today. I think these are groups with rather distinctly different problems. Orwell's speaks of a kind of enforced idleness among his fellow tramps. If I look at homeless people today in my neck of the woods, I just see, well....idleness. When I still lived near downtown in my east coast city and used to see homeless people regularly in the park down the street or in the foyer of the office building next door on the weekends when no one was there, most of the time, they didn't seem to be begging or scrounging or harassing anyone for money or anything like that. They didn't seem to be doing anything at all, really. They were just kinda there.
From my limited experience there is often?sometimes? a street hierarchy such that street corners that yield more income are claimed. There can be a "shift change" type phenomenon at some corners. I suspect that many people don't want the hassle of having to negotiate that or being known to have money and potentially getting robbed. Also some shelters do not let people stay past 8 am in the morning; it prevents people from getting dug in, there are other reasons, but either way the people have to go somewhere. If there is no "day shelter" and they have no money and no job then they just watch over their small amount of belongings and wait for the next soup kitchen meal, wait until 4 or 5 in the evening when the shelter opens up again for dinner. If there is a public library people will go there. It is a holding pattern for sure.
‘grotesquity’?
I put on my high power readers and pulled out Volume VI of the OED and the listings go from grotesquerie (grotesque items collectively) to grotha (obscure for growth). I think this must be a coinage.
Feel free to point out the inevitable misspellings in the post I’m making now, because I’m sure karma will see to it that I don’t get away with complaining about word usage without rebalancing the scales. :)
It seems like at least one image isn't displaying, is that just on my end? (The text suggests there should be a picture of a workhouse.)
I liked this review but it's mostly because Orwell writes really well and there are very long direct quotes from Orwell. It did make me want to read the book, but I think this writer produced less of their own content than some reviewers did.
I was surprised by the throwaway line about celibacy, but it does seem like the rate of people not having sex has increased over the past few decades, even if not as much as suggested by that comment: https://www.pilotonline.com/news/health/article_9258b60c-5233-11e9-a392-eb96842d90a8.html
I'll speculate that the biggest change since Orwell's time is that the price of prostitutes has risen.
SPELLCHECK PLEASE! And proofread. And parentheses work (like this), not(like this).
SPELLCHECK PLEASE! And proofread. Parentheses work (like this), not(like this).
"I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during the day, and yet the strain of the work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs—it is like sorting a pack of cards against the clock."
Oh, hell yes. I worked in kitchens during college. I was decent at prep but _terrible_ on the line. I can't tell you how many trays of breadsticks I burned at one job. Thank God I eventually got into computer programming where I can get absorbed in one elaborate task because juggling multiple simple tasks does not come easily to me. I can get dinner on the table at home but not much more than that. There is no such thing as unskilled labor.
I have not read _Down and Out_ but this review is a good spur to do so. Orwell's clear, unsentimental writing about work is one of his great strengths. The descriptions of coal miners' lives in the first part of _The Road to Wigan Pier_ lend so much strength to his analysis of political economy in the second part.
But Down And Out isn't the interesting Orwell book to review in this style. The Road To Wigan Pier is.
This review does a very good job summarising the book so full marks for that. However, it is far far too long for comfort. I'd humbly suggest trimming it to half the length.
For some reason, the review does not mention the name of the organization at which Orwell was lectured about folksy religion with his bread and tea. It was the Salvation Army, and Orwell states in the book that he would never support it.
Brilliant review and I just bought the book!
Reading this reminded me of an opinion piece on poverty and homelessness I read a couple of years ago. Paraphrasing from memory, it said something like:
> When rich people think about solutions to poverty they of themselves as poor. But rich people are not poor people, even if they have no money.
This review highlights the fact that, though penniless, Orwell could always go back to his family and, even without that safety net, he knew that, deep down, something would go right and that there was a career waiting for him whenever he chose to pursue it.
I had a period in my early twenties where I was absolutely broke. I too stuffed my shoes with newspaper and walked a couple of miles to work in the City of London because I could not afford the bus. I only ate two or three times a week and only ate cheap, high-calorie foods. But, for the whole period that I was broke, I knew that the day would come when I was no longer broke and here I am, 30 years later, quite comfortably off with poverty a distant memory.
Orwell had the habits and upbringing of a rich man and was never going to be poor, even when he was down and out.
This was fantastic. It took me back to my experience reading Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" essay. Looking forward to reading more from this author!
Brief review-of-the-review:
Fascinating topic, very well presented-- I feel like I've read the book. I found the analysis less than compelling but still interesting. There are connections to be drawn with Warren's *The Two-Income Trap* in how Orwell connects economic misery with a bidding war by the rich for status / positional goods and builds that into a kind-of-left-liberal worldview. There's plenty of good content here-- much of it from Orwell himself, of course-- and while the insights came up short it was still an enjoyable read.
I think what the reviewer may have missed is that the rape description is certainly a kind of literary game. I remember that when I read the book, it struck me as very similar in tone and theme with decadent and romantic French literature, in particular Lautreamont (a poet from Baudelaire's generation) whose Chants de Maldoror (Maldoror's Songs) describe a similar (fictional) child rape scene (The theme was also used many times in Sade's works).
This scene in Orwell's book was somewhat out of place and the style was colourful, especially compared to the rest of the book which is, as the reviewer said, pretty dry and matter-of-fact. I think these are other clues pointing towards a strange erudite game.
This is my favorite review thus far because it actually functions as a review - that is to say, it warned me in advance what the weak points of the book were and also discussed why I might want to read it, rather than simply summarising the book's points and then discussing them.
Or to put it another way - thus far this is the only review where, upon finishing it, I went to my library app and searched for the book and borrowed it.
(I do think the review could have been made shorter and stayed as good, but excessive length is a problem with the majority of these reviews)