2009

"Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle"

Brain trust

My new Astral Weeks column looks at BoingBoing brain trustee Cory Doctorow's cool new YA novel Little Brother. A tantalizing extract!

Marcus' voice is seamless for the most part, but when he says, "My brain was really going now, running like sixty," I thought: No 21st century teen would say "running like sixty." In fact, that expression was last in currency at the tail end of the 19th century, in Adenville, Utah, to be precise. That's where John D. Fitzgerald's "The Great Brain" books take place; in the first chapter of "The Great Brain," for example, we see the phrase "working like sixty." Could this yoking of "brain" and "like sixty" -- I thought wildly -- be an unconscious hommage to those delightful books?

(As much fun as reading Little Brother was re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Great Brain!)

Automatic for the people

“It was only an ’opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred
They ’ave stolen my ’eart awye!”

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound....

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four