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Friday: June 19, 2009

Are My Tastes Hopelessly Proletarian?

Filed under: — site admin @ 10:03 PM GMT-0500

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell twice quotes a song popular among the proles of his imagined future, “composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator”. He calls it “dreadful rubbish” and a “driveling song”, but it seems to me that it would fit right in to the Great American Songbook. Of course, we cannot judge the music, but I have certainly heard worse words. Here are the lyrics, with the proletarian (Cockney) mispronunciations edited out:

It was only a hopeless fancy,
It passed like an April day,
But a look and a word and the dreams they stirred
They have stolen my heart away!

They say that time heals all things,
They say you can always forget;
But the smiles and the tears across the years
They twist my heartstrings yet!

(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, II.iv and II.x)

It is not deep, but other than the awkward rhythm of the fifth line, I don’t see anything embarrassingly wrong with it. Do I need a taste-bud transplant?

Announcement

Filed under: — site admin @ 9:11 PM GMT-0500

I have gotten comments working for the first time in months. That should make blogging more fun, and therefore more frequent. Watch this space. (Comments are moderated, so don’t expect them to appear instantly.)