Thursday, August 25, 2011

Monday, August 22, 2011

Sketchbook Page Thirty-Five

[Billy Pilgrim] came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground…
to hide them cleverly…
so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating.
Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve…
…he supposed.

From Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Sketchbook Page Thirty-Four

Another go at Aldous' mug in hopes of saving face (you've been punned!). He's still screwed up (heh) but looks a little more like himself than before.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Sketchbook Page Thirty-Three

A failed likeness of Aldous Huxley .

You can't consume much if you sit still and read books. (From Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.)

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Sketchbook Page Thirty-Two


George Orwell (complete works online)
(Morewell)

In Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book Club, Orwell stated: "a real Socialist is one who wishes – not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes – to see tyranny overthrown". Orwell stated in "Why I Write" (1946): "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. Aldous Huxley writing to congratulate Orwell on the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this [act of] being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
    •    Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby (2002)