Sherry Chandler

Three Shakespeares

George W. Bush to Brian Williams in an interview in NOLA on the Katrina anniversary:

I was in Crawford and I said I was looking for a book to read and Laura said you oughtta try Camus, I also read three Shakespeare’s. [sic] …The key for me is to keep expectations low.

From “The Mad Russian,” Priya Jain’s review in Salon of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920s dystopian novel We (precursor to Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury et al.) :

One of the remarkable things about the One State is that it doesn’t seem to need to censor the past. There is an Ancient House at the edge of town, where D and I-330 meet up, that serves as a museum to the creaky history of opaque walls and jumbled apartments. Early in the novel, D attends a lecture on music that features a classical piano performance. He frequently refers to Kant and Pushkin, and he’s familiar with Shakespeare. Yet none of these things move him or the other ciphers to feel, to revolt. Orwell’s dystopian tyrants rewrote books, and Huxley’s simply destroyed them, because they feared such things might awaken the humanity in their citizens. The real-life tyrants under whom Zamyatin lived feared art’s power as well. There’s something comforting in that thought — that as long as we have books and music, religion and history, humanity can be brought back to itself. And yet Zamyatin gets at a scarier idea: For people without humanity, art has no effect.

Possibly related posts:

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Voyager’s Golden Record

Orwell’s Diaries

Steamboat Round the Bend

Simic named Poet Laureate

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