As I can assume you are already aware, it is my understanding that, context has an extensive impact upon meaning. Sometimes it is evident in the broad cultures from which a text emerges and sometimes it is seen in the very particular circumstances of a moment or of the form that the text is written in.
Reading this popular history is very difficult given the topic. The battle of Stalingrad is brutal and horrific. The author, who has a military background, details the battle in a systematic almost daily approach to the swings of fortune. The repetition of horror upon unfolding horror makes it very difficult to cope with - it is not that it is graphic or indulgent. But because if at any point, the reader attempts to comprehend such a brutal and inhumane situation - they are left dumb-founded, bereft, powerless and deeply pessimistic.

One superb example of context and form influencing meaning and its potentiality is when Beevor quotes letters home by the soldier participants.
p199
"when soldiers sat down in the corner of a trench or ill-lit cellar to write home, they often had trouble expressing themselves. The single sheet, which would later be folded into a triangle, like a paper boat, because there were no envelopes, seemed both too large and too small for their purposes. The resultant letter stuck, as a result, to three main themes: enquiries after the family at home, reassurance ('I'm getting along all right - still alive'), and preoccupation with the battle..."

One context that Beevor also overlays this letter-writing is the official censor...to give you a sense of the scale of censorship Beevor states (p201)
'In 62nd Army alone, in the first half of October, military secrets were divulged in 12,747 letters.'

Breathtaking...

Finally one letter..
" 'People might reproach me', wrote a Red Army Lieutenant in Stalingrad to his bride of a few weeks, "if they read this letter about the reason why I am fighting for you. But I can't distinguish where you end, and where the Motherland begins. You and it are the same for me.' " p(200)

I am about halfway through this battle of 'Stalingrad' and will soldier on toward its 400+page end.

p.s. I will find another Simonov war poem later tonight.

Hero of the most important front of WW II



The T-34 was a Soviet medium tank which had a profound and permanent effect on the fields of tank tactics and design. First deployed in 1940, it has often been described as the most effective, efficient, and influential design of World War II.[5] [6] At its introduction, the T-34 possessed the best balance of firepower, mobility, protection, and ruggedness of any tank (though its initial battlefield effectiveness suffered due to a variety of factors). Its 76.2 mm (3 in) high-velocity gun was the best tank gun in the world at that time; its heavy sloped armour was impenetrable by standard anti-tank weapons; and it was very agile. Though its armour and armament were surpassed later in the war, when they first encountered it in battle in 1941 German tank generals von Kleist and Guderian called it "the deadliest tank in the world."


With death an inch above my head

With death an inch above my head
Upon the blackened ridge I lay
And I was grateful in my heart
That you were very far away.
And thunder was not in your ears,
And hell was not before your eyes,
And somewhere in a distant town,
A peaceful house and garden lies;
And water flows there to refresh,
And peaceful shade beneath a tree
- Yes, I was glad to tell myself
You could not share this day with me.

And yet I want you to be here,
Through every day and every night
And like a shadow, follow me
Through every battle that I fight.
I want you here to share my bread,
To share my grief, to share my tears,
To share my anger when I rage
And when I fear, to share my fears;
If I am frozen, you must freeze;
If I am blinded, you'll be blind;
My voice must be upon your lips,
My every thought be in your mind.

The friends with whom I share my fate
Must not say (as they seem to do)
"She's far away and I am here!
What can that woman mean to you?
"It wasn't her in the attack!
It wasn't her who got you through!
It wasn't her who saved your life!
What can that woman mean to you?
How can you say she's at your side?
How can her name be on your breath?
How can she take the place of friends
Who share with you this life, this death?"

I should be able to reply
"Did you not see her as she lay
Curled up beside me on the ground
When death was but an inch away?
"Have you forgotten, in the days
When things were blackest, she was there,
And when you came to save my life,
She helped you as you pulled me clear.
"And when - perhaps you did not see -
I raised my grateful glass to you
To celebrate my near escape -
Beside us there - I saw her too."

1942
K. Simonov

Zemlyanka was the name for a German-Soviet War song written by Alexey Surkov (verses) and Konstantin Listov (music) in 1941 during the Battle of Moscow. The use of zemlyankas by soldiers is mentioned in the song.

The fire is flickering in the narrow stove
Resin oozes from the log like a tear
And the concertina in the bunker
Sings to me of your smile and eyes

The bushes whispered to me about you
In a snow-white field near Moscow
I want you above all to hear
How sad my living voice is.

You are now very far away
Expanses of snow lie between us
It is so hard for me to come to you
And here there are four steps to death.

Sing concertina, in defiance of the snowstorm.
Call out to that happiness which has lost its way.
I'm warm in the cold bunker,
Because of your inextinguishable love.



What a soulful song.

enjoying the discussion of the Eastern front. If you haven't watched Come and See (1985), a Belgium film on the horrors of the War, I highly recommend it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See

It's Russian.

The Stalingrad Madonna is an image of the Virgin Mary drawn by a German soldier, Kurt Reuber, in 1942 in Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Russia, during the Battle of Stalingrad.

The Madonna of Stalingrad


Kurt Reuber

The picture was drawn by Lieutenant Kurt Reuber, a German staff physician and Protestant pastor, in December 1942 during the Battle of Stalingrad.[1] Reuber wrote:


I wondered for a long while what I should paint, and in the end I decided on a Madonna, or mother and child. I have turned my hole in the frozen mud into a studio. The space is too small for me to be able to see the picture properly, so I climb on to a stool and look down at it from above, to get the perspective right. Everything is repeatedly knocked over, and my pencils vanish into the mud. There is nothing to lean my big picture of the madonna against, except a sloping, home-made table past which I can just manage to squeeze. There are no proper materials and I have used a Russian map for paper. But I wish I could tell you how absorbed I have been painting my madonna, and how much it means to me."
"The picture looks like this: the mother's head and the child's lean toward each other, and a large cloak enfolds them both. It is intended to symbolize 'security' and 'mother love.' I remembered the words of St.John: light, life, and love. What more can I add? I wanted to suggest these three things in the homely and common vision of a mother with her child and the security that they represent"


Will be finished Stalingrad sometime in the next couple of hours.

The scale of the horror is not really comprehensible. You can do your on research, if you are interested in the numbers of 'casualties' , civilian and military, German and Russian in the Battles of Stalingrad. It was brutal, sadistic and 'criminal' warfare on all sides - the totalisation of humans towards the needs of the omnivorous master, 'War', left nothing but shells of beings and a landscape which was to be revealed across the continent in the years to follow.
It is very difficult for C21st Westerners from the Anglosphere to sympathise with 'wounded' German soldiers captured by Russian guardians in POW hospitals in the aftermath of Stalingrad. It is also understandable given the strain of resources on the whole Soviet State in its 'survival mode' - not to have provided basic duty of care for those under her guardianship. But, I would argue that you are forsaking your own humanity if you cannot be horrified by passages like the following, detailing the condition of the main POW Hospital for German wounded in the Tsaritsa (Stalingrad) gorge.

p408 Beevor

" The death rate in the so-called hospitals was terrifying. The tunnel system in the Tsaritsa gorge, redesignated 'Prisoner of War Hospital No 1.', remained the largest and most horrific, only because there were no buildings left offering any protection from the cold. The walls ran with water, the air was little more than a foul, sickly recycling of human breath, with so little oxygen left that the few primitive oil lamps, fashioned from tins, flickered and died constantly, leaving the tunnels dark. Each gallery was not much wider than the casualties lying side by side on the damp beaten earth of the tunnel floor, so it was difficult, in the gloom, not to step or trip on feet suffering from frostbite, provoking a hoarse shriek of pain. Many of these frostbite victims died of gangrene, because the surgeons could not cope. Whether they would have survived amputation in their weakened state and without anaesthetic is another matter."


Having fought street by street versus the Russians, by Day shelled by the Luftwaffe, by night the Russian air force. Forsaken by Hitler and his demands for heroic sacrifice, victim of the inability of their General ,Paulus , to note the encirclement of the Russians or to defy his superiors to defend his men. Months without anything but horseflesh and 100grams of bread. Whether they are seen as heroes or villians, criminals or victims or both - the young men of both sides if they were so lucky as to survive this battle - were still left to rot in the cold, with the rats and the lice, the typhus and the frostbite with only the despair of the doctors and nurses to accompany them on the dark, lonely road filled with the agonised screams of their comrades in their ears as they greeted death.

So very, very sad.

Finished Stalingrad, moving on to Keep the Aphidistra Flying By George Orwell.

I will complete a summary of my thoughts on Stalingrad in the next 24 hours.

This is the third novel of George Orwell's that I will be reading, the other two being Nineteen Eighty Four (2) and Animal Farm. Hopefully this novel is more optimistic than Nineteen Eighty Four as I need a pick me up after the slog of Stalingrad.

It is intriguing that the finishing of a book can give the feeling of relief. It is as if, in my own small way, I was carrying the moral weight of war upon my imagination. Even though the first passages of Keep the Aphidistra Flying are hardly a 'laugh-a-minute' - given Gordon Comstock's lonesome poverty, it is as if I am drinking a sweetly tea after days of bitter coffee.


Do you remember the age you were when you first read Nineteen Eighty Four?

I think I must have been 15. I do not recall my reaction exactly then but I think it was that Big Brother was like a 24 hour a day school supervision but extremely efficient and competent. It was only when I returned to read it, last year, that I gained a fuller appreciation of the work. Although that is not to say that it was an abrupt change given that Nineteen Eighty four is one of the peculiar books where your view of it can grow and change without even returning to it. I hope that last sentence makes sense.

Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor

The text does tick all the important boxes for the genre of popular historical non-fiction.
1) It is of an important event
2) It seeks to identify for the audience the historical debating points and provides a view without entering into the debate.
3) It seeks to provide the audience with a variety of perspectives: the leaders, the generals, the soldiers and the civilians.
4) It provides images and maps for the key moments of the 'Battle' and its context.

Any history of World War II has to confront a series of issues: Hitler's and Stalin's decision-making or more generally the role politics plays in military decisions, the ethics of military leaders decisions re: civilians and their opponents and what lessons should be learnt from them. I think he deals with the first two quite comprehensively and the third subtly but perhaps slightly inadequately.

A feast for hardcore fans of War non-fiction but for novices stick to broader overviews of WW II.

Preston Hall 'sanitorium'

Sanitorium - became a euphemistic term for psychiatric hospital during the 20th century particularly in the US.
Which led me to think, upon reading that George Orwell, was placed into a Sanitorium that he must have suffered depression or some illness such as 'shock' as a result of his time in the Spanish Civil War.

In fact, to my suprise, sanitoria were hospitals that were specifically quarantineed for the treatment of patients with tuberculosis. Thus, despite Preston Hall looking like it might be a 'mental home' and parts of his biography perhaps suggesting vulnerability to mental illness, Preston Hall is a specific type of hospital and Orwell, to the extent any of us are, was of sound mind.




"I've come to fight against Fascism".
You can contruct your own narrative about who Big Brother is, fascist or Communist or both, but the time Orwell had in Spain clearly influenced his attitude towards the two big movements of his time.

The connection between Stalingrad and the Spanish Civil War and Orwell, is the totemic event in the history of modern warfare - Guernica. Guernica and its odious, indiscriminate carpet bombing by the Fascist and Nazi aircraft would be the dubious precedent played out by the Nazi's in Stalingrad and London, the Allies in Dresden and Tokyo.


Guernica, Pablo Picasso - 1937.

If you look at images of the broken shell of cities - Ypres France 1916-18 or Dresden, London etc. perhaps the distorted images of Picasso are more meaningfully drawn into context. How disrupted symbols are imaginatively 'real'- ised through the witnessing of such horror begins to make alot more 'sense'.

A taste of Orwell's sardonic outlook from Apidistra p 40 penguin

Gordon Comstock is imagining his grandfather's headstone and commenting on the legacy of his familial heritage...preceding the quote is a transcription of the etchings on the headstone, the final line reads 'He sleeps in the arms of Jesus'

No need to repeat the blasphemous comments which everyone who had known Gran'pa Comstock made on that last sentence. But it is worth pointing out that the chunk of granite on which it was inscribed weighed close on five tons and was quite certainly put there with the intention, though not the consious intention, of making sure that Gran'pa Comstock shouldn't get up from underneath it. If you want to know what a dead man's relatives really think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone.

I love that - if ever I am in a graveyard and someone comments about the wonderful headstone in front of us, I am quite sure that that observation will spring to mind.

Intextuality in Keep the Apidistra Flying

Gordon has taken the object of his affections, Rosemary, out for a walk in the country.
They are in a state of wonder and happiness in nature .

Gordon began to tease her by finding ugly similes for everything they passed. He said that the russet foliage of the hornbeams was like the hair of Burne Jones maidens, and the smooth tentacles of the ivy that wound about the trees like the clinging arms of Dickens heroines. Once he insisted upon destroying some mauve toadstools because he said they reminded him of a Rackham illustrations and he suspected fairies of dancing round them. Rosemary called him a soulless pig. She waded through a bed of drifted leaves that rustled about her, knee-deep, like a weightless red-gold sea.
'Oh Gordon, these leaves! Look at them with the sun on them! They're like gold. They are really like gold.'
'Fairy gold. You'll be going Barrie in another moment. As a matter of fact, if you want an exact simile they're just the colour of tomato soup.'
'Dont be a pig, Gordon. Listen to how they rustle. "Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa." p142 penguin

Gordon is trumped by Rosemary and her citation of one of the most discussed similes of one of the most important poems in the history of Literature.

Paradise Lost by Milton Book I

Nathless he so endur'd, till on the Beach
Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call'd [ 300 ]
His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans't
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades
High overarch't imbowr; or scatterd sedge
Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion arm'd [ 305 ]
Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew
Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursu'd
The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore thir floating Carkases [ 310 ]
And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,
Under amazement of thir hideous change.
He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Deep
Of Hell resounded.

Vallombrosa - is a valley in Tuscany.
A photograph of Vallombrosa in the autumn.


But the simile is comparing a view like the Legions of Satan in the time before time and the Battle for Heaven...which Gustav Dore illustrates as


They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprung Gustave Doré

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/gustave-dore

Whole series of Gustav dore found above.


Of course, I will leave it to you - to think about what we should make of this literary allusion of Rosemary to her poet suitor Gordon...the levels of irony are as rich as the leaves of the simile.

Perhaps it would be better if I led you part way down the path of interpretation of the quoted passage. Gordon is a frustrated poet who hates money and has rejected society. His internal justification for being unable to find poetic insipiration is his poverty, which is almost wholly his own choice. He is mocking the beauty of the scene to his companion Rosemary, who then retorts with one of the most important similies in literature. It is one of a number of similes that 'paint' the pre-eminent symbol of evil Satan in a beautiful way. One could argue that Rosemary is pointing out that even the figure of Satan can be poetically imagined as beautiful. Or one could take an ironic position about middle-class cultural practices which can quote the 'Greats' but not appreciate the irony that her quote whilst entirely appropriate is actually that of a great evil.

Have I quoted this poem before, how dreadful that thought is.

Gordon Comstock, near his nadir, is visited by Rosemay and he quotes the following line...


HIS golden locks Time hath to silver turn'd

A Farewell to Arms

HIS golden locks Time hath to silver turn'd;
O Time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurn'd,
But spurn'd in vain; youth waneth by increasing:
Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

His helmet now shall make a hive for bees;
And, lovers' sonnets turn'd to holy psalms,
A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers, which are Age his alms:
But though from court to cottage he depart,
His Saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

And when he saddest sits in homely cell,
He'll teach his swains this carol for a song,--
'Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well,
Curst be the souls that think her any wrong.'
Goddess, allow this aged man his right
To be your beadsman now that was your knight.

George Peele

George Peele (baptised 25 July 1556 – buried 9 November 1596) was an English dramatist.

Peele was christened on 25 July 1556 at St James Garlickhythe in the City of London. His father, who appears to have belonged to a Devonshire family, was clerk of Christ's Hospital, and wrote two treatises on bookkeeping.[1] Peele was educated at Christ's Hospital, and entered Broadgates Hall, Oxford, in 1571.[1] In 1574 he removed to Christ Church, taking his B.A. degree in 1577, and proceeding M.A. in 1579.[1] In that year, the governors of Christ's Hospital requested their clerk to "discharge his house of his son, George Peele."[1] He went up to London about 1580, but in 1583 when Albertus Alasco (Albert Laski), a Polish nobleman, was entertained at Christ Church, Peele was entrusted with the arrangement of two Latin plays by William Gager (fl. 1580-1619) presented on the occasion.

He was also complimented by Gager for an English verse translation of one of the Iphigenias of Euripides. In 1585 he was employed to write the Device of the Pageant borne before Woolston Dixie, and in 1591 he devised the pageant in honour of another Lord Mayor, Sir William Webbe. This was the Descensus Astraeae (printed in the Harleian Miscellany, 1808), in which Queen Elizabeth is honoured as Astraea.

Peele had married as early as 1583 a lady who brought him some property, which he speedily dissipated.[2] Robert Greene, at the end of his pamphlet Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, exhorts Peele to repentance, saying that he has, like himself, "been driven to extreme shifts for a living." Anecdotes of his reckless life were emphasized by the use of his name in connection with the apocryphal Merrie conceited Jests of George Peele (printed in 1607). Many of the stories had circulated before in other jestbooks, unattached to Peele's name, but there are personal touches that may be biographical. The book provided source material for the play The Puritan, one of the works of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.

Peele died "of the pox," according to Francis Meres, and was buried on 9 November 1596. One of the eight boarding houses at the Horsham campus is now named Peele after George Peele and as a commemoration to the work of the Peele family with the ancient foundation of the Christ's Hospital school.


I am nearing the end of Aspidistra.

thought of you when I read this essay: http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/what-is-literature/

Sorry that a direct link isn't available; it's in the current issue.

Only an extract is available to non-subscribers.

Keep the Aphidistra Flying by George Orwell

Written during the 1930s, the unmistakable sense that we are living during the end days of capitalism is palpable. Funnily enough, I connected with the life and view of Gordon Comstock on an emotional level if not on a strictly political level. It is amusing to me because he is not a particularly empathetic character. I think there are two important observations made by Orwell: that principles is the preserve of the rich i.e. it is expensive to live according to your principles, and that, Culture co-opts you into its fundametals of its discourse through family, occupation and just general living no matter how you resist its conquest.
There is a pessimistic outlook in this book that is consistent with his other, more famous, works. There are some brilliant sentences that I enjoyed immensely. Not suprisingly, the more you dig the more you will find in this book.

If all Art is Propaganda - then I willingly submit to this author's propaganda.


Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Yes, the current issue should be on the magaZine rack in bookstores (do you Aussies have Barnes and noble?)

How to become a grumpy old man 101

The challenge of the reading list, is to devote sufficient time to reading and when you arrived at that designated time that you retain the focus and enthusiasm to actually read. The practicality of the above for me is that I think I devote somewhere between 3 to 5 hours each day most day to reading. Of these hours I would think that 2-3 hours is solid reading the rest is interrupted reading either via TV, internet or conversation.

I am not a particularly busy person - so there is no great tugs on my time most of the time. I grant myself one hour of reading in the afternoons I do not work. Sometimes I read whilst listening to something on the internet - a lecture or podcast which might be around 2 hours of an evening and the balance of my reading is prior to sleep.

My capacity to reach my goal is positively effected by the reality that my interest in TV is declining. My approximate consumption of television would be 90 minutes per day which when I thought about it is ALOT. Yet, when I considered my consumption in comparison to others it is actually not alot at all.

What I have found in two months of this more regimented or obligated lifestyle toward reading is that my capacity to persist with my reading has increased as opposed to fatigued. Also, I feel that I have been affected positively by reading - whilst I could not concretely point to being smarter, I do think that I am more engaged more often and that I am consistently thinking in a more sophisticated way more often. When I am listening or viewing other media - I have found that I am becoming more pedantic about meaning when consuming others text. This manifests itself by identifying mixed metaphors, extraneous adjectives and adverbs, and a more consistently intense examination of claims and perspective. Which if you could see it - would sometimes involve me ranting at the quality of the news broadcast or inadvertedly correcting some people more often than I otherwise should or would before. Ha - the impossible is possible I am becoming less socialable.

The only thing I think is left for my transformation is to start complaining about the young these days and how everything is going to the pot.

Free speech

I am firmly of the belief that information tends towards, if it can be said to have agency, wanting freedom. Eventually all ideas, hitherto conceived, are going to be aired in all contexts. So there is an element of futility to censorship and in many respects I believe that it is a fair judgement that the more a regime censors the more it infantilises its population. Which is not to say I believe all contexts are fair game - as I believe some speech should have priority over other types of speech.

Having said that, I do believe that often our media does not do our society any favours by its conduct. For example, the media packs outside of airports and courtrooms seeking comments when clearly the individual does not seek to do so - is a disgraceful form of behaviour. The whole of celebrity culture, to my mind, is pollution - both the celebrities and those that create them.

My media consumption, like many of this day and age, is quite narrow. I would like to think that I am open to a number of political viewpoints but that might be a self-delusion. Currently, my consumption of news media is limited to abit of Australian government news broadcasting and the BBC. This obviously has a bias but even though I am generally suspicious of government sources of news - I am currently less trusting of private sources of news.

The journalist I trust, respect and admire the most, has been for awhile and currently is:

BBC most senior foreign correspondent:


Lyse Doucet
Lyse Doucet (/liːs duːˈsɛt/; born December 24, 1958)[2] is a Canadian journalist who is the BBC's Chief International Correspondent and an occasional Contributing Editor. She presents on BBC World Service radio and BBC World News television, and also reports for BBC Radio 4 and BBC News in the UK, including reporting for Newsnight.


p.s. I have a crush on her, particularly her voice.

Against the background of Gordon Comstock and his war on money: it is interesting that Orwell voiced the fact that there were 3 main worldviews Capitalism, Socialism and Catholicism (Religion). I think it is true that they are the three main viewpoints of the world, although the language and culture of science does also have some small traction in our discourses.

Money and its language has never had greater influence in political discourse than now. Most counter-arguments that are put to constrain its pre-eminence in popular discourse have to adopt the assumptions of that dominant discourse to even get voiced. It is hard to foresee organising principles that do not entail the costs, benefits, success and failures defined through the language of economics and money - but I believe that just as the dominant discourses of previous ages end- so too will this one.

Matthew 6: 24

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.


Jesus and the Biblical writers understood that, although not explicitly on my terms, that society has a dominant culture and not dualist one; and that the organising principle of private religion and public discourse of money are somehow on a fundamental level incompatible. Although I do not have to attempt to reconcile those 'competing' ideologies as I am neither a contemporary christian nor a rampant capitalist, others do. One needs only see that, despite the clear doctrinal concerns of a 'church as a communion and community' struggles to compensate victims of criminal sexual deviancy and rape - despite the very clear core values of Jesus - it is the dominant values of the broader culture of risk minimalisation and institutional preservation that prevails over the scriptual values.

Of course, even the lived socialist Gordon Comstock ultimately had to submit to the power 'structures' or discourses (you can choose) of the money cult and sends his poetic ambition into the drains of London when faced with familial obligations of being a soon-to-be father.

Paradise Lost Book I

Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks and thoughts [ 680 ]
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Gold,
Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught, [ 685 ]
Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound
And dig'd out ribs of Gold.

Milton

Mammon George Frederick Watts (1885)


Of course, look around your cityscape and you see 'free expression' but that is not free speech. It is paid speech - the space is rented, the message is seeking to sell and sales perpetuate the proliferation of images like it. I do not want a world of no property but neither do I want my world and every 'sellable' space being sold to some of the lowest form of speech - the advertisement.

Of course I appreciate the irony of writing this in a forum that exists solely for the propagation of a money/gambling based game.

Maybe you'd be willing to copy your thoughts on free speech into our politics thread, so we can discuss it there, so as not to pollute your blog? I've been thinking a lot about it recently. Recent events in the UK and here in Australia have helped changed my views considerably.

If you want to quote it in another thread I do not mind.

I wonder if the proliferation of other forms of representations, such as film, TV and photography, pushed High Art's traditional forms into styles of greater abstraction and non-realist representation of life.


Bill Rauhauser - 1960s

Drowning Girl Roy Lichtenstein 1962

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (pronounced /ˈlɪktənˌstaɪn/; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art through parody.[2] Favoring the comic strip as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".[