Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Bookstores, piracy and the decline of language

It seems that Amazon deleted two of George Orwell's books from their Kindle list.I've read about the mixup that was due to some illegal piracy of copyright. It was cleared up and apparently customers got their refunds and nobody had to report to the Ministry of Truth. It does show how the transistion period from print to ebooks is going to have glitches and does have a passing nod to "1984". Personally I like to browse the bookstores not so I can find a book but so a book can find me. At the same time I find myself reading letters to the editor in my local Reno paper and they do annoy me. George Orwell was well aware that political creeds are often rationalizations of emotional problems, particularly these days. Most of the letters are rants against Obama and Socialism. Here is a mature, courageous and intelligent leader who is able to articulate a new form of social protection for the country and he is clobbered with inarticulate, uneducated clap trap. When in doubt just say go to hell and declare victory. In the film "Charlie Wilson's War" Wilson, who is a congressman from Texas boasts that he can spend taxpayer money any way he likes because his constituents only want to keep their guns and be left alone. By the way Orwell worked in a bookstore himself in Hampstead in the 1930's. He wrote about it in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying".

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