Llegits o acabats novembre-desembre 2015

Llegit, d'en Norman Douglas, Good-bye to Western Culture (Some Footnotes on East and West) (1930)


Com sempre, irritat per la estupidesa humana. Tocant-hi molt, i molt sovint.

Un llibre de notes. I aqueixes són les notes i els has! doncs de les notes.

[Trens a les Illes (Britàniques)] That railway carriage was not conducive to the reading of a book like this. The heat, the proximity to objectionable fellow-creatures, children squalling in the next compartment, the screeching of machinery, the perpetual coming and going, the banging of doors, the whistling: what a coarse, undignified mode of travel! Here we were,cooped up like hens in a basket; open the windows, and clouds of noisome smoke pour in; shut them, and you are suffocated.

The world has grown not only older since Pericles; it hasgrown stupider.

[Les rucades de la Índia a través de la púrria llevantina] In regard to local epidemics like typhoid, namely, that the natives "from long consumption of diluted sewage have naturally acquired a degree of immunity." They have also grown fairly immune to their own poisons of the intellect which, imported into Europe by people who ought to have known better, swept over our continent in a devastating epidemic of unreason called Christianity, from which we Europeans have not yet acquired immunity. This is a grave moral misdeed to be laid to thecharge of Mother India.

One single Biblical phrase, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"has led to the death by agonizing torture of unnumbered innocent old women; another one, "that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ," has condemned many hundred thousand young ones to lifelong imprisonment —to tears and misery in the cells of convents.

Curry is India's gift to mankind; her contribution to human happiness. Curry atones for all the fatuities of the 108 Upanishads.

Leave behind you the frowsy and fidgetty little hole called Europe. Savour the remedial effects of that other continent before you are caught in our humiliating machinery; before you are ticketed and labelled as to your monetary worth to a worthless "community"; before you are taxed, and overtaxed, for the purpose of keeping alive thousands of people who ought to be dead.

Education (...) instils uniformity, which is an enemy of civilization. It is a governmental contrivance for inculcating nationalism, another enemy of civilization. (...) Education is a State-controlled manufactory of echoes. (...) Imperialism is an undiluted mischief, and all its offspring are mischief. One of them is compulsory education. The chief result of such training on persons unfitted for it is that it begins by creating wants, and then proceeds to demonstrate that these wants are needs. Since these needs cannot always be gratified, it lies at the bottom of many varieties of discontent and unhappiness. Discontent and unhappiness are evils. This is what the education-fetich has hitherto accomplished in Europe. For every evil remedied, it has implanted the germs of ten new ones.

[Sembla no veure que hi ha una altra educació possible que la que existeix amb el comercialisme generalitzat del capitalisme. Car no és la bona educació que crea els mals desigs (en tot cas la bona educació hauria de crear els bons desigs). Allò que crea els mals desigs és, és clar, el martelleig de la propaganda que els venedors venuts qui es diuen periodistes esbomben pels mitjans. I, a escola, i els currículums manats per l'estat i que els mestres esclaus de l'estat imparteixen com virus malignes. Diguéssim que l'educació generalitzada en mans de l'estat, a urpes sanguinolents d'esglésies i exèrcits (en mans dels venedors de falses necessitats, incloses les guerres) és sens dubte còmplice del desastre.]

As to the enslaving of men, Plato, and after him the Stoic moralists and lawyers, already censured slavery, which neither Christ nor any of his followers discovered to be wrong till twelve centuries later.

Our European rule runs to the effect that a man's mistresses are to be kept by their husbands. This is an advance on Eastern methods.

What is honesty? A time-saving contrivance. The eighteenth century was not pressed for time. The majority of modern people being dullards pressed for time, honesty is not only their best policy, but their only possible one.

INDIAN gods are apt to be grotesque, and Kali is no exception to that rule. She is, on the other hand, too unnatural to inspire either reverence or fear or loathing. [Un exemple de "fear and loathing"]

If the brutes would at least take a bribe, and get through with their work! Alas, incorruptibilityis the fetish of the half-civilized.

You can live without friends, without wife or children or money or tobacco; you can live without a shirt, without a reputation; you cannot live without a document establishing your servitude to bureaucracy.

People are rushing about needlessly, groaning under a load of duties to be performed and puzzling how to avoid them. When a duty ceases to be a pleasure, then it ceases to exist. I recommend this maxim to those who would like to be masters of their own lives.

(Els europeus imaginen...) that they are driving a machine because they happen to be tangled up in its works.

(Els hindús) adapt themselves to reverses of fortune. They bend. In circumstances where a European can think of nothing more sensible than to commit suicide, they find no difficulty in maintaining their equanimity.

The ferocious sentences meted out to rustic half-wits for indulging in the bucolic sin of "bestiality" —a fragment, and not the most noxious one, of our legacy from those pastoral goat-keepers and Jahveh-worshippers.

[Nietzsche metafísic] Nietzsche was proud of the Polish blood of the Nietzkys in his veins: can it be a drop of that? Whatever the reason, his disparagement of men who brought order into our conceptions of human development is a queer feudal trait, and vitiates his cosmic outlook here and there.]

THE business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is amockery.

I cannot visualize the soul of a prude; it must be something in the nature of a cesspool. [Són mentalment uns podrits.] If the "clean-minded" accuser could be forced by hypnotism or otherwise to give the Court a glimpse into the workings of his imagination, to reveal his inhibitions, and set forth something of his own habits of life... (com riuríem!)



Europe may be heading for Colney Hatch (casa d'orats). This impatience or strenuousness is the White Man's characteristic, and his curse. It is converting him into a harassed automaton, the slave of machines and unhealthy legislation.

By the time we reach, if we ever do, the age of Mother India, some pious Hindu, travelling westwards to observe the condition of our crazy Kindergarten, will discover the last European among the ruins of strange machinery, hugging his passport-talisman and dribbling at the mouth, in a state of mellow dementia.

[Excuses de la malignitat de la bòfia] A man may find himself committing some infringement of the code —they are easy to commit, since new ones are invented every day— for which a police inspector is delighted to run him in. The safeguarding of society is the inspector's pretext; love of man-hunting his basic instinct.

The law invents a crime, and then spends its morning collecting fines to swell the revenue. Even so the Church used to invent sins, inorder to fill its coffers. [Cal dir que metges I farmàcies s'inventen malalties per al mateix.]

[Ajudant els pobres qui, ajudats, encara crien més] Private philanthropy directed towards such ends is bad enough. Public philanthropy, which forces us to contribute to the upkeep of this scum, demonstrates how the intelligent and prudent members of the community are penalized for their superiority.

[Qui creu imbecil·litats és un imbècil...] A two thousand years' course of "believing the impossible" (les corruptores religions) cannot but debase the general standard of intelligence.

The Catholic races extirpate all living things save their own lice and bed-bugs.

Our dogs produce nothing but fleas and bad smells and a choice assortment of microbes in mouth and elsewhere, some of which can, and do, bring death to human beings. Which is absurder: cow-cult or dog-cult?

The peculiar downcast look in the eyes of Londoners walking about their streets; they attribute it to a kind of insular bashfulness or modesty. "These English must be a shy race," they say. That earthward glance has a more practical origin. Londoners are concerned for their boots. It has been suggested that dogs be taught to use the roadways for their purposes. In vain._Gentlemen prefer blondes_. Dogs prefer pavements.

The European stomach ache from which all of us are suffering, that moral constipation, has been traced to a variety of sources. I become more and more convinced, with increasing years, that the roots of the mischief lie far back, in the Roman point of view. The shoddiness of our ideals —the shoddiness of all our ideals social and political— is a heritage from those unimaginative Roundheads, with their ingrained vulgarity, their imperialism, their pernicious doctrine of the _raison d'etat_, and the welcome they gave, as vulgarians naturally would give, to imported pinchbeck like Christianity.

Bo. Divertit.

Acabat, d'en Frederick R. Karl, The Contemporary English Novel (1962)


Estudi de la novel·la a les Illes (Britàniques), en anglès, i de 1930 a 1960.

Els millors apartats els dedicats als millors autors, quina casualitat. Beckett. Waugh. Henry Green. Compton-Burnett... i alguns dels més joves (de llavors!).

Se'n fot de l'incoherent belief d'en Waugh. La seua religiositat, quan l'empra, espatlla el relat.

The real rebel even disdains what will come of his own efforts. (...) Perhaps the true English rebel in our day is the sensualist: Durrell's Alexandrians or Isherwood's perverted Mr. Norris. (...) A rebel, that is, a person who functions by virtue of what he is rather than by what is expected of him. (...) He is, at best, true to himself no matter what the consequences, and often they are unfavorable. [Els personatges d'en Proust, d'en Beckett.] Beckett's rebel is the supreme realist. (...) Beckett is great fun for those with little hope and much staying power.

(Waugh el farsant.) Religious fakery. False patriotism and sentimentalized sense of duty. (...) Waugh... with obvious debts to Firbank ans Saki. (...) His early novels close in their nihilism to Firbank's fruity nonsense.

[Els herois d'en Beckett falleixen en la tasca mateixa de fallir.] In all instances, they become increasingly aware of the absurd difference between their small expectations and their even smaller fulfillment. (...) His characters mean well, and unlike Céline, they do not hate; but their fate is even worse. Céline's Bardamu at least gains his identification through what he opposes.

Conrad, with his self-destructive protagonists, persecuted his heroes while he probed their central corruption.

[Un altre religiós (fotrem goig!), Graham Greene.] (Amb ell,) the novel declines into a tract. (...) Sink into bathos and melodrama. (...) Seduced by doctrine. (Millor seduït per una puta!) (...) Marred with specious arguments. (...) The novel becomes meaningless as a work of art. [Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! Greene una merda, talment com un d'aqueixos venedors de Djizass.]

[En diu "felí" per "femení", hà.] Bowen showing allegiance to (...) Henry James, perhaps de most feline of male authors. (...) All the persons in the novel, then, operate at a pitch close to hysteria.

[Orwell, com Dickens.] The poor man feels inferior and loses his potential as a male, for without money or means he is, as it were, demanned. (...) The clownish ridiculousness of the fat man.

[Tard o d'hora, l'espasa cau del sostre.] Beneath the English assumption of superiority is the great fear which underlies all imperialistic action, an anxiety which Orwell prophetically catches. This fear dictates that the conqueror deny completely the natives' intelligence. Accordingly, (la colònia cal que ignori o tracti de servents els colonitzats, car després de tot, el colon prou endevina que) the natives are bidding their time. [Mateix exemple amb els canfelipencs. Els catalans només esperem l'hora.]

[Waugh al començament és bo, abans la por (és a dir, la religió) no l'espatlli.] He assumes that everyone can be bought, everyone can be made acquiescent to any idea, no matter how ludicrous. The more ludicrous it is, in fact, the more chance of its being believed. [Llavors, amb la "conversió", és clar, els seus escrits es converteixen en merda.] (Ara,) the pretentious people that Waugh takes seriously are the very ones he once would have unsparingly taunted.

(Henry) Green theorizes as if the novel springs into being through a spontaneous creation and then lives on its own terms.

[Els "joves emprenyats".] They ask (en llurs obres) how an "honest" lowerclassman can move into genteel society with its sophisticated and frequently phony tastes... and retain his innocence. (...) Maugham had once called the Angries and their kind scum. (...) One can reject the world only if he can replace it with himself. The arrogant anti-heroes of the Angries, swilling beer in the corner pub, have nothing to draw upon; as empty as the people they attack, they too are parasites.

The Professor (en Rex Warner), armed with humanitarian ideals, attempts tho meet the opposition: the killers, the treacherous, the tyrannical

Força útil, au.

Llegit, d'en Peter Ustinov, Dear Me (1977)


Un altre rus zagranitza [Nabòkov, Brodsky, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner...] qui es veu, més o menys, centre del món.

[Una curiositat. Per casualitat, llegia això de n'Ustinov en aquest llibre: —I have never learned to type. Quan el dia abans havia llegit a un llibre que no he llegit encara del tot, a Portrait of Max, el que hi diu en Max Beerbohm: —I have never had the secret knack of typewriters. Com si les màquines d'escriure guardessin cap secret.]

Ustinov, ben larvat rere la seua màscara d'albardà, tanmateix un intel·lectual de pes.

—Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.

—What is a more irrefutable proof of madness than an inhability to have a doubt?

—The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticent [ep, tret que els estúpids els amunteguis en partits i cercles i exèrcits i corts i esglésies...!], while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops.

[Un dels seus avantpassats, pintor criticat per fer bé el que feia bé i no fer altre (aplicable a Ustinov ell mateix)] He was accused of an overriding facility, but (...) to heed criticism to the extent of refraining from (...) your particular forte is to go the way of many facile people who scandalously betray their facility in order to work hard and masochistically at things thay are not good at, while the critic who is not much good at anything himself breathes down their necks with the sterile satisfaction of a sadistic schoolmaster. [Hà!]

[Se'n fot de l'esperit rus — rígid fins a la propera revolució per a reprendre la mateixa rigidesa amb ídoles diferents.] Stalin, who was well fitted for his role of dictator, having been brought up in a seminary. [Exacte!]

[Converses obligades, durant la infantesa, amb un lloro (tantes de dones i de marietes qui enraonen com lloros — tot n'és ple!)] There is nothing more boring in this world than someone else's love story, especially if your are told it by a parrot.

What is the difference between small audiences and large ones except their size?

—D'you remember that horrid boy who used to stick a rusty hypodermic needle into his victims?
—Quiet! He's probably a high court judge by now, and utterly respectable.

[Al exèrcit, res més escarransidor de l'ésser] —You have to realize that most of your casualties are not caused by the Hun, but by your own covering fire. —Eighty percent (said the colonel), but I don't think we ought to frighten the public.
Words are always misunderstood in the army — at least intelligible ones.

There is no profession in which the books are easier to cook than the military. Generals are capable of mistakes so gross that they would lose their jobs in any other walk of life, but since the losses are not so much financial as merely human, they are either given posts of more responsibility or else left where they are.

The Academy is, as ever, the temple of mediocrity, and the ideals it imposes are strictly useful only for those with nothing to say.

The French, a nation of hero-worshippers. [Hà!]

[Per què els italians, qui són en general gent valenta, són a l'exèrcit poc complidors] They prefer not to die under anonymous, or worse, under stupid circumstances.

[Contra el nazi McCarthy, l'imbècil senador, màxim representant del provincialisme maligne i assassí de tant d'americà enverinat per bíblies i patriotismes de pobre miserable pec; i com es caguen els americans, sobretot els uniformats, davant l'autoritat] To watch one brave bemedalled façade after another collapse under the specious pummelling of this sinister clown was more than one's sense of workaday decency could stand.

[Que estudia les sempre inútils "ciènces socials"?] Social sciences were the overflow [entre els estudiants a la universitat] for those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation. [Tant de jovent enrabiat amb ell mateix qui no pot reconèixer que és un pobre desgraciat, i es torna violent fotent-ho pagar a totdéu i sobretot als qui no hi tenen res a veure. La culpa és tota seua, per haver nascut tan negat.]

—Once the human animal must face the terrifying fact of his solitude, it is unnatural to deny him the few advantages attached to being alone. —Such as freedom of choice? —All the freedoms possible. [Qui està sol ha de poder fotre el que vol. Tantes de prohibicions dels maleïts de ment podrida eclesiàstica qui en llocs d'autoritat, ço és, de repressió, et neguen tot oli que t'ajudaria a fer el passatge una miqueta menys patètic. Els repugnants sempre vigilant que ningú no obtingui en re que sigui de franc (i no fa mal a ningú) cap mena de plaer, en re altre, doncs, que en el que els aporta calers.]

Bo!