Evelyn Waugh

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This year is the centenary of the two greatest writers in English of the last century: Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell. I hope to put up a substantial post about them both at some point. But for now, check out this and this interview with Waugh.

A sample:

Interviewer: You are in favour of capital punishment?
EW: For an enormous number of offences, yes.
Interviewer: And you yourself would be prepared to carry it out?
EW: Do you mean, actually do the hangman’s work?
Interviewer: Yes.
EW: I should think it very odd for them to choose a novelist for such tasks.

This very good essay, about V.S. Naipaul astutely notes a certain type of “conservatism” which was shared by Kipling, Conrad, Waugh and (despite his being professedly a “man of the Left”) Orwell. Waugh is quoted as saying this about Kipling:

He believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

That still sounds about right.

Velvet Underground

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Check out this super cool Velvet Underground website.

There’s some really great live stuff on this site. Check out especially “Foggy Notion” here.

Damn. Makes you wish you were there.

Mo Tucker’s drumming is so solid. What a drummer. Steady as a rock. Her drumming reminds me of this line from Clark Ashton Smith’s “Soliloquy in an Ebon Tower”:

In my room
The quick, malign, relentless clock ticks on,
Firm as a demon’s undecaying pulse,
Or creak of Charon’s oar locks as he plies
Between the shadow-crowded shores.

The true fanatics probably already know all about this site, but I just found it, and I pass it along for the rest of you.

Old News: English as a World Language

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Susan Sontag has this piece entitled “The World As India”. She engages in a lot of tortured and empty agonizing about what it means to do a translation. Pure academic navel-lint gathering. She then embarks on a trivial and superficial discussion of the idea that the world is (linguistically) India writ-large, which it isn’t. Then in her last few paragraphs she gets to what one might reasonably think is the point, the establishment of English as a world language.

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Whither Hutchins?

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Columbia man John Coumarianos raises questions about the state of liberal education in the U.S.

Since Robert Maynard Hutchins was president of the University of Chicago, no major American university, with the possible exception of Boston University under the rule of John Silber, has had a president who has had an inkling of what liberal education is all about. This is staggering to contemplate, but it is the awful truth.

Strong words. It’s been a [cough] while since my own experience at the U of C, so I don’t know how Chicago stacks up today. John’s thoughts are worth reading.