1984

About a week ago, I read George Orwell's 1984. I did the majority of my reading on in the airport, in the plane, in the car, and in the hotel in Halifax. Living in in the GTA, I would have thought I would have spent more time enjoying the outdoors of Halifax (especially considering the spells of nice weather that we had for two of the four days spent in Halifax), but I spent most of the time indoors at Dalhousie University and the University of King's College. The time I spent outside was mostly the 20 minute walks to and from the university and the hotel. I would have gone out more often, but it always seemed to be quite late when I finally came to the hotel, and by that point, my parents were quite tired to go with me, and they did not want me wandering around an unfamiliar city on my own at night.

So, I spent my evenings reading. Orwell's 1984 is a captivating and fast-paced dystopian novel. It is a social critique. Published in 1949 and set in the then-future 1984, the novel follows protagonist Winston Smith as he quietly attempts to challenge the oligarchical dictatorship of Big Brother's Party.

The premise of the dictatorship is the Party's ability to limit all thinking. There is no critical thinking in the society of Oceania. The language, Newspeak, is so limited in its vocabulary that it lacks all the beautiful subtleties and colours of today's English, known derogatorily as Oldspeak. Newspeak users speak in a quick staccato, and the language's quickness makes it so much easier to rush over the meanings of the words. You don't dwell on the words meanings because you don't have time. The word "Minipax," for example, which refers to the Ministry of Peace (which, oddly enough, concerns itself with war), is so easy to roll off your tongue that you don't think about the word "Ministry" and its meanings of institutions and hierarchical judgement. You don't think about the word "Peace" and its corresponding ideas of contentment, values, safety, security, and its opposing associated ideas of war, violence, discontentment, etc.

The book makes me wonder about Tumblr. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good (few hours?!) spent on Tumblr -- there are some posts that are absolutely hilarious! I wonder whether the pace at which we scroll through Tumblr though means that we don't have time to actively think about the images and text that we see and read. Instead we just digest it, without any sort of critical thoughts. We talked about this in English class a bit. It stuck with me, and came up again while reading 1984.

Twelve Angry Men and a Phoenix Wright

I just finished reading "Twelve Angry Men" by Reginald Rose, and I loved it! The teleplay is about twelve jurors trying to come to a verdict in regards to a sixteen-year-old boy who supposedly murdered his father. The play starts with an initial vote between the jurors. It's 11-1, in favour of guilty.

There's only one man who believes that there's enough room for doubt. This one man, juror number eight, doesn't believe that the defendant is innocent. To contrast, Eight simply doesn't KNOW that the boy is guilty. Eight looks past prejudices in order to prolong the jury's decision. He is determined not to sentence the boy to death on the basis of assumption.

There's a similar video game for Nintendo DS called Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney which follows the story of a newbie defense attorney who fights for the truth. The entire while I was reading Rose's masterpiece, I had Phoenix Wright music playing in my head.

So here's a YouTube link to some of the music from the first game (Phoenix Wright has a whole series. A wonderful series.):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_VTviC5dc

I hope you enjoy the music. Hopefully you'll check out the games (they're really good!) and either read or watch "Twelve Angry Men".