Virginia Rounding's Blog, page 11

The idea of ‘progress’ lambasted in Aldous Huxley’s “Point Counter Point”

‘Progress!’ [Lord Edward] echoed, and the tone of misery and embarrassment was exchanged for one of confidence.  ‘Progress!  You politicians are always talking about it.  As though it were going to last.  Indefinitely.  More motors, more babies, more food, more advertising, more money, more everything, for ever.  You ought to take a few lessons in my subject.  Physical biology.  Progress, indeed!…  That’s the trouble with you politicians.  You don’t even think of the important things.  Talking about progress and votes and Bolshevism and every year allowing a million tons of phosphorus pentoxide to run away into the sea.  It’s idiotic, it’s criminal, it’s… it’s fiddling while Rome burns…  You think we’re being progressive because we’re living on our capital.  Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre – squander them all.  That’s your policy.  And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talk about revolutions.’

Sukhdev Sandhu on capitalism

“Capitalism detests sleep because it’s a time when nothing gets sold or consumed.”

A cab driver anecdote from Sukhdev Sandhu’s “Night Haunts: A Journey through the London Night”

‘A woman went to get a taxi with her son at the Isle of Dogs.  At the street corner it was all whores hanging around waiting for trade.  “Mum, mum: what are all those women doing?”  Mum was embarrassed, but quick-thinking: “I expect it’s the sailors’ wives waiting for their husbands to come back from their ships.”  The taxi driver leaned back: “Don’t give him any of that shit, love.  They’re whores, that’s what they are.  Whores.”  The boy says, “Mum, do whores have babies like normal women do?”  “Of course they do, Tommy.  Where do you think taxi drivers come from?”’

Aldous Huxley in “Point Counterpoint” on the British Empire

There was no breeze except the wind of the ship’s own speed; and that was like a blast from the engine-room.  Stretched in their chairs Philip and Elinor watched the gradual diminution against the sky of a jagged island of bare red rock.  From the deck above came the sound of people playing shuffle-board.  Walking on principle or for an appetite, their fellow passengers passed and repassed with the predictability of comets.

‘The way people take exercise,’ said Elinor in a tone positively of resentment; it made her hot to look at them.  ‘Even in the Red Sea.’

‘It explains the British Empire,’ [Philip] said.

Guest post: Procrastination Conference at OCLW

Originally posted on Oxford Centre for Life-Writing:

For your those of you supposed to be working right now, but are reading this blog instead, conference organizers Liz Chatterjee and Danielle Yardy share their  illustrated and humorous summary of the ‘Procrastination: Cultural Explorations’ conference at OCLW in July. This conference was the winner of the OCLW-TORCH postgraduate conference award, and the competition will be repeated this year. Stay tuned for further details!

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Procrastination: Cultural Explorations
2 July 2014
Wolfson College, Oxford
http://procrastinationoxford.org

Frontispiece of Anthony Walker’s The Great Evil of Procrastination (1682)

Thomas de Quincey claimed it was worse than murder. Krishna declared it a sign of a degenerate soul. For Abraham Lincoln’s wife it was her ‘evil genius’. Estimates suggest that 80-95% of college students engage in it, and 20% of people are chronic sufferers. Even the Ancient Egyptians bitched about it in hieroglyphics.

Lollygagging, swithering, dithering, dillydallying, shillyshallying. Procrastination is ubiquitous—perhaps especially among academics and writers. Yet it…

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An Anthony Powell character on being a writer

From Books Do Furnish A Room (Dance to the Music of Time)
 

“[Trapnel] borrowed literally to keep alive, a good example of something often unrecognized outside the world of books, that a writer can have his name spread all over the papers, at the same time net perhaps only a hundred pounds to keep him going until he next writes a book.”

Too true.

Oscar Wilde on beauty

From The Picture of Dorian Gray (Dover Thrift Editions):
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”

Anthony Powell on beards

From Books Do Furnish A Room (Dance to the Music of Time)
 “[Trapnel] looked about thirty, tall, dark, with a beard. Beards, rarer in those days than they became later, at that period hinted of submarine duty, rather than the arts, social protest or a subsequent fashion simply for much more hair.”

Clea in Lawrence Durrell’s “Justine” on the artist

‘An artist does not live a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings.’