My Orwell, Right or Left

Guns vs. cigarettes?

I review Orwell's Diaries over at The American Spectator, my new home as of today.

Me on Bradford on Amis

Mart: semper, err, edgy. . .

I review Richard Bradford's life of Martin Amis over at The Millions.

Declaring Waugh

Auberon, Alexander, and Evelyn.

I sit down with Little, Brown's new Waugh reissues over at First Things.

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour

Milton would (and should!) be ashamed of his countrymen.

I'm not much of a Milton enthusiast, I'm afraid. (His theology is a cartoon version of Arianism, and most of the verse has all the subtlety of a riot shotgun. Don't even ask me what I think of his whinging pamphlets.) But he was certainly a lover of liberty, in marked contrast to today's London serfs, who now let their masters tell them how much their hamburgers must be cooked. The "mansion house of liberty" is now a place where those "Who durst defie th'Omnipotent" (read: smoke, take a photo without "permission," fail to give one's name to a thug) dwell in adamantine chains etc.,

BTW: Could anything be more repugnant to anyone of conservative temperament than the idea of a council having a CIO, an acronym whose meaning I didn't know till just now? Whence all this professionalization? Whatever happened to the delightful idiosyncrasies of local government?

My Man Dave

While Mr. Slippery slouches towards Gomorrah (and irrelevance -- this is never going to pay off for the pseudo-Tories), I'm thinking about prime ministerial fashion, which, it seems to me, has been in decline for some time. Since when did bland presidential blue/grey (you know what I mean: here, here, here, and here are examples) become de rigueur?

Whatever happened to this:

or this:

or this:

or, for that matter, this:

Why do we even have bland presidential blue/grey/whatever anyway?

Forget the Footnotes

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

I've just reviewed Wallace's posthumous Both and Flesh and Not for Prospect.

I have never been fond of Wallace’s abundant footnotes. (He once told Charlie Rose that they were “very, very addictive.”) Many of his admirers argue that they serve some high-flown purpose, such as wry commentary on postmodern information overload. Forgive me for thinking this so much rot. Wallace was a dexterous writer. If the footnotes had been meant as commentary, they would have appeared once or twice at most. Nor do I believe that, as a friend recently suggested to me, Wallace was simply too lazy to do the hard work of incorporating stray thoughts into the main body of his text. My preferred explanation is that he simply liked the way footnotes looked at the bottom of the page—a sort of Nabokovian chic.

Rest here.

Dave Brubeck, R.I.P.

Saddened to learn of the passing of one of jazz's greatest musicians. I narrowly missed seeing him last fall at the Detroit Jazz Festival, from the lineup of which he withdrew apologetically.