From: mabjo@pacbell.net   
      
   ROBBIE wrote:   
      
   > My current lavatory reading is the Oxford Companion to English Lit, Rock and   
   > Roll Confidental and The Letters of Kingsley Amis--perhaps I am unusual for   
   > my generation in prefering Amis Snr to his boy--who is without doubt a   
   > clever bollocks and a bloomin' good writer; well, I thoroughly enjoy his   
   > ability to get at the right word, put it that way, though of course Martin   
   > A's now very much in the position of an old rocker: greatest hit years   
   > behind him; fucking wealthy; suntan, new teeth and missis; not hungry   
   > anymore, indeed not even peckish; nothing much to say and a Nabokovian   
   > keyboard of a vocabulary to say it with; now he's fifty-five I bet he wishes   
   > he was PG Wodehouse. Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, this morning's browse through the   
   > Letters yielded this, from a letter to Robert Conquest in 1986:   
   >   
   > '...Bloody funny, looking through George Orwell's Notes on Nationalism and   
   > finding him saying that nationalist sods can't bear anything running counter   
   > to their obsessions but will usually disguise this by complaining about the   
   > *literary* quality of the offending piece, & then 2 pages later calling   
   > Lepanto* tawdry bombast...   
   >   
   > *Poem by GK Chesterton, forst published in _Poems_ (1915); reprinted in _The   
   > Amis Anthology_ accompanied by a note which begins 'This poem will never be   
   > tolerated by a progessive intelligentsia to whom there can be no such thing   
   > as a just feat of arms'. The Orwell quote calls Lepanto and Chesterton's   
   > other battle poems 'the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our   
   > language.''   
   >   
   > c/o   
   >   
   > ROBBIE   
      
   So, wot, you're vicariously calling George Orwell a wuss?   
      
   It's not enough he had a bullet hole in him, he should have been a jingo as   
   well?   
      
      
   /M   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)