I’m happy to see that long-time friend Nicholas Corwin has a ‘blog up. He’s one of the few folks whose erudite emails are very much in the old and near-dead tradition of Letter Writing, unlike the non-punctuated, non-capitalized emails that folks toss off. Plus there’s a free German lesson with each one.
An excerpt…
It is very tiresome to listen to half-educated and unread people who persistently dub “Orwellian” any architecture, especially that of public facilities such airports, train stations and the like, which features stainless steel or a sleek, stark look. In aesthetic terms, this sort of design is anything but Orwellian. The world of 1984 was anything but sleek, cool, modern or efficient: it was an impoverished, totalitarian state in which all the resources were plowed into the military and the secret police apparatus. As a result, everything was old, shabby, and dilapidated; Orwell’s Winston Smith gazes out upon great expanses of rotting nineteenth-century houses, shored up with corrugated metal and plywood. Nothing gets repaired, rebuilt, refurbished or renovated; elevators don’t work; people manage to survive increasing entropy and decrepitude.