Shannon Tweed

How long has it been since we watched a Shannon Tweed movie? “Nightfire” is streaming for free for we Amazon Prime members. When I began watching it, I was surprised to see her name rolling in the opening credits, and I figured that she must be really old now, doing an honorary cameo. But, no, it turns out that the movie is really old. Looking at the movie reviews, someone said that the movie is from the early 1990s. Yup, that was when Ms. Tweed was at her cable prime. Maybe I’ll finish the movie, if only for sentiment’s sake. During my first years back home, she was the queen of my late-night cable-TV, or at least one of my queens. It is not exactly Internet rape-porn, and we don’t even get bush, but she is a dream blonde with nice tits, and in the opening minutes of this movie she is tied spread-legged to a bed wearing only a tiny pair of panties and a wide-open robe. I do believe she was indeed one of my dreamgirls for a while there.

Orwell

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When Eric Blair died in 21 January 1950, one of the brightest brains of the twentieth century cooled and darkened. They buried Blair in a country churchyard in Berkshire, but George Orwell, the character he created, did not die. He remains a personal presence in his writings, more so than almost any other English writer. ‘Orwellian’, like ‘Dickensian’ has become a word in the language. But whereas ‘Dickensian’ stands for an area of the imagination, the dark side of Victorian London, ‘Orwellian’ stands for an attitude to life. It is composed of many strands … There is the plain-speaking, the down-to-earth style, the hatred of all luxury and pretentiousness and showing-off. There is the honesty with which he dissects his own contradictions and prejudices. There is the determination to get at the facts and to experience life as others - coal miners, down-and-outs, soldiers - live it. Allied to this, there is the impatience with prating lefties who have never known anything tougher than public school and university. There is the love of books and the commitment to the art of writing, and, at the same time, the insistence on manual work, on growing one’s food, keeping goats, not being just a pampered drone. Above all there is ‘decency’ and Englishness and faith in the common man. The virtues and values of our present civilization - wealth, consumerism, celebrity - were not Orwell’s. For Orwell they stank. Against them, he offers an example of how to think and live - and write.

-- John Carey, Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy

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Pop's Facebook

Pop asks me for help in writing a response to a Facebook friend. I perhaps get a little haughty in telling Pop repeatedly that I am not going to write all his e-mails. I tell him that they want his words, and I actually say, “not a writer”.

I wasn’t just taking a shot, though. I genuinely do not want to spend my energy helping him look smarter on Facebook. And there’s something depressing about it, that sense of my helping him with his social life, instead of he helping his son, me, with my social life, even if it is true that there is not a lot that can be done for one who is not willing to get a job.