Zooey has done his job well

I have finished reading "Franny and Zooey". I can say that this a case of sympathy rather than empathy. One of the reviews of this book, said that the reviewer knew of no-one who had read it twice (Though they did admit that many people contacted him to say they had). You cannot help but admire the complex construction of the world of the Glass family but at no time do they make you love them. You may want to be them in the same way you want to win the lottery but it would only be to provide you with an interesting and comfortable life, not a satisfying one.

A bad admission here. I have just started reading nineteen-eighty-four again. It was April 4th yesterday (This post is a day late), the day on which Winston Smith started his Diary (as far as he knew any actual dates). nineteen-eight-four is a schizophrenic book. Just as you don't know what is supposed to be the real view of Big Brother, you don't really know who Orwell was trying to get at. Of course there are the obvious targets (who are even more obvious in "Animal Farm") but it seems that people of any political or social leanings can use nineteen-eighty-four as a satire on their own enemies. This always suprised me as the two factual Orwell books which I have read - "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" - are both written in a very straightforward style which at some times borders on the naive. Nineteen-eighty-four on the other hand, has a power in the writing which takes it beyond the descriptive. You are pointed at the essay on Newspeak very early on in the book and after reading it I began to wonder why Orwell didn't use much Newspeak after that, though with reflection the reason for that is very obvious. All the way through, I think I can see echoes of our own society in the abstract behaviour of Big Brother, but that is probably because I am a Prole and not a party member. Educate people along a specific path rather than teaching them how to learn - a sort of meta-education. In the buzz word of today, no-one is taught to "think outside the box". Thinking about thinking.

I read somewhere yesterday about an automatic advertising Jingle composer which takes melodies from the charts, chops them up just enough to avoid any copyright problems and reassembles them into Jingles which are proven by being composites of the tunes in the Top 40. Novel Writing machines anyone?