A non-Orwellian life

I just started subscribing to the NY Review of Books-which is excellent by the way but comes out every 2 weeks so it's difficult to keep up with.

I read a few things I wanted to jot down:

• There is a book on Barack Obama's mother that sounded surprisingly interesting (A Singular Woman by Janny Scott) given that political biographies are usually too sanitized. She spent many years teaching English in Jakarta and learning the Indonesian culture. She married an Indonesian after Barack's dad. She also worked for the Ford Foundation investigating and advising how and where to spend grant money by working with local cultures.
• There are two Bronzino (1503-1572) exhibits being stage currently, one in his native Florence and one at the Met. He painted in the service of Cosimo de Medici for most of his career until he lost favor due to some political gerrymandering with Rome. 
• Doctors are one of Cuba's primary source of income (this was hinted at in Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay.) There are medical missions in countries from Venezuela and Bolivia to South Africa.
• Unrelated to the NYROB, NPR just ran a story about how the death rate from AIDS in South Africa is so high, they are having to re-use graves. 
• There is also a new book out about the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White (Triumvirate by Mosette Broderick.) I'm not inclined to read a nearly 600 page book about an architectural firm but the story was interesting. Stanford White is perhaps better known these days as the guy who was shot by Evelyn Nesbitt's jealous husband as immortalized in Ragtime. Charles McKim designed Penn Station in 1910. They didn't realize how beautifully designed and built it was until they were demolishing it in the 1960's for Madison Square Garden. Demolished 50 years later. Such waste. Here is a story about Penn Station with some great pictures.

Actually all of that is just prelude to my favorite article in the issue by Simon Leys about Eric Blair, the real name of author George Orwell. I knew hardly anything about him but he was kind of a charming and sometimes sad eccentric. He took the pen name Orwell at random when he published his first book Down and Out in Paris and London so as to not embarrass his upper class parents. The name just stuck.

In 1936, he moved into a small grocery to live the life of a simple man, a notion he was smitten with. The grocery barely made money. The attached cottage's kitchen flooded when it rained and it stank from blocked drains. Amazingly, he was living here when he married his first wife Eileen who was the love of his life (she died suddenly in 1945.) The grocery went out of business by the end of the year but Orwell didn't care as by this time he wanted to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences there were recounted in Homage to Catalonia.

Speaking of, here is a great passage from that about how he saw a man jump out of the enemy trenches running while holding his pants up. Orwell was unable to fire:

I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at "Fascists"; but a man who is holding up his trousers isnt' a "Fascist," he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.

Orwell came to hate imperialism after time spent in his youth in Burma. He also contracted the Tuberculosis there that would eventually kill him at only 46 in 1950. He described himself as a Tory Anarchist. I must steal this title and find a way to use it.

In 1947, Orwell went on a boating trip with his son, niece and nephew to his farm in the Outer Hebrides. In the region of a notorious whirlpool near Corryvreck, the boat was sucked in. The author of the article said the area was only passable during low tide so Orwell either was ignorant of this or didn't check the tide chart. He also didn't secure the motor to the boat so it was blown away. Miraculously, they were able to get to shore on a small island where they were later rescued by a passing lobster boat (also something of a miracle for that time of day and year) although the boat capsized and they had to swim. The funny part of the story (other than the bit about the motor) is Orwell recorded this story in in his journal but barely mentioned almost drowning and wrote a long passage about the species of puffin on the island. He simply didn't have much of a reaction and scouted out fresh water for the party. Conclusion: not useful at sea but terrific in a crisis.

He really loved nature. In an essay on the Spanish Inquisition, he detoured to discuss the hedgehog who visited his bathroom every day. There's something so charming in his lack of guile. While he was serving in the Spanish War, he wrote to a friend to ask how his cottage, goat and vegetables were doing. About his goat, Muriel:

I hope Muriel's mating went through. it is a most unedifying spectacle by the way, if you happened to watch it. .. Did my rhubarb come up I wonder? I had a lot & then last year the frost buggared it up. 

Something about the author of 1984 discussing his goat's mating habits and rhubarb crop just amuses me to no end.

Even when he was in the hospital on his death bed, he was making plans to return to his cottage with a pig and was working out the logistics of impregnating her ("I suppose one could buy a gravid sow in the Autumn to litter about March, but one would have to make very sure that she really was in pig the first time.")