Avuncular American

Avuncular American's First Anniversary

With all the excitement over the elections in the States, I almost let the anniversary of my first year of blogging slip by.  Looking back at my first posts in November 2007, I see that I wrote a good deal more about Iraq than I have done recently (that is likely to change once Barack Obama is inaugurated).  There were several posts on the complicated Belgian political situation, which though it has calmed somewhat, remains complicated and never-ending.  It's the national sport.

One topic - torture, as in US practice of - is one that I would much prefer never having had to write about.  If today's article by Mark Benjamin in Salon is right - "Obama's Plans For Probing Bush Torture" - we may all be learning more about the truth behind Bush's assertion that "This government does not torture people."  In the past year of blogging, I've noticed that whenever I do a post about torture, much of my readership seems to fade away.  Denial?

During this strange post-election, lame duck, transition, phony war period, there will be plenty to write about.  Like many others who supported the candidacy of Barack Obama, I will be scrutinizing the news coming out of Transition HQ, to make sure that realpolitik does not trump the wishes of real people who elected the next president.

But the advent of a new, popularly elected administration, one which has to undo so much that harmed the very foundations of the United States, should account for a slight change of tone in the months ahead.  After all, "avuncular" is in my URL: "In the manner of an uncle, pertaining to an uncle, hence, kind, genial, benevolent or tolerant" according to Wiktionary.

I think Barack Obama should bring out the avuncular in me.

Posthumous Blogging: The Orwell Diaries Start Saturday 9 August

This post is in the realm of a public service announcement: the good people of the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly, and the Media Standards Trust will start publishing George Orwell's diary, 70 years day for day, starting tomorrow. Check it out here. This is their concept:

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

I'm so enjoying Graham Greene's "Collected Essays" from the same period that I think I'm going to be a regular reader of Orwell's "blog."

Update 10 August: the first entry on 9 August did not disappoint, though Orwell's entry was on snakes, not civil wars.  According to a very nice article in The Telegraph, "George Orwell Would Have Blogged," Allan Massie shows that Orwell's eye for detail included an infinite array of subjects:

He delighted in trivia: "C, of my section of the Home Guard, a poulterer by trade but at present dealing in meat of all kinds, yesterday bought 20 zebras which are being sold off by the zoo. Only for dog-meat, presumably, not human consumption. It seems rather a waste" (April 24, 1941)

Glad to see that even during the Blitz the stiff upper lip allowed such niceties for doggies.  Massie reminds us that "the diaries have already been published in the 20-volume Complete Works, edited by Peter Davison, while excerpts from his wartime diary were included in the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, first published by Secker & Warburg in 1968, and then by Penguin two years later."  For those who like to read in bed or along a gurgling stream, this might be a better bet.