Decline and Fall
Subtitled "A Novel of Many Manners, " Evelyn Waugh's notorious first novel lays waste the "heathen idol" of British sportsmanship, the cultured perfection of Oxford, and the inviolable honor codes of the English gentleman.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
8mentions
8people
2011–2024years
13% recommend88% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Such a sharp thinker, with unbelievable wit and depth of memory.
You can get a sense of his political style from his fascination with the remark from Israeli peace activist Israel Shahak, "there are beginning to be some encouraging signs of polarization". Meaning that usually, well almost always, you have to choose sides. Draw the line between the sides yourself if necessary.
It's Hitchens' writings that introduced me to the early, dry, humorous works of Evelyn Waugh (best known is "Scoop", but also Decline and Fall, and the Sword of Honour trilogy). Some of Hitchens' best writing was literary appreciation, not polemics.
- The 2D histogram is very interesting, but difficult to interpret, because of the various samplings and normalizations that could be relevant: number of books published; number (fraction) of books digitized.
If I had to summarize the big picture, taking the contour at the top of the dark blue band: coverage was sporadic until ~1700; then more books were published, and the references gradually moved back to 1500 over the next 100 years, but did not consider the future very much. 1800 seems to be a singularity (but perhaps due to sampling effects), where interest in the deep past and the future exploded in a short period.
There are also interesting lines in the plot. First the vertical lines. There seems to be one (or more) books in 1530 that discussed the far future up to 1900. Then another futurist work around 1610. There's a history book published ~1580, that covers then recent past, and another cluster around 1650, perhaps including Hobbes's 'Leviathan'. Of course we miss Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' because it covers antiquity, off the chart.
Secondly, the horizontal lines. There is a bright line at ~1100, perhaps the First Crusade, and more at ~1300, ~1600 ~1800. The line at ~1350 could be the Black Death.
Finally, there are the shadows of the 20th century wars, when history was not so popular, because there were more pressing current events to be written about, and all the historians were fighting at the front.
- Captain Grimes says in Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, that they put you through perfect hell during a period of your life that is bound to be perfect hell anyway, then watch out for you for the rest of your life.
- Gatsby, like most officially great novels, is the least good of Fitzgerald's books. Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and the Damned were way better. There was something about critics of the time who needed to suffer to appreciate anything and it was good of Mencken to hold Fitzgerald to his own standards, but what made authors of the era great were the books that were actually enjoyable. When you look at other authors of the era, where W. Sommerset Maughm is known for his miserable slog, Of Human Bondage, when The Razors Edge, Cakes and Ale, and the Painted Veil were way better, and he's even credited with being the precursor of the spy novel with his Ashenden stories. Hemmingway was a short story writer, but somehow he is remembered for the fawning reception of Farewell to Arms. Evelyn Waugh was savagely funny if you have read Scoop, Decline and Fall or Black Mischief, but Brideshead Revisited was the critical success that got made into a sappy miniseries.
It's like critics take your least spectacular and most vulnerable work and tag you with it as your best so as to ensure you are never known for the great stuff that got you on their radar and that might put their own work to shame. However, it doesn't matter, their lives are absurd. Quite a number of them make a living criticising food now, mostly because it can't defend itself.
The era of great criticism that began with characters like Mencken and, earlier, Bierce ended with the death of Christopher Hitchens I think. None of them, including Vidal, or Hunter S. Thompson would survive the culture today. I think it's too bad that the idea of a literary rivalry now seems as dated as fighting a duel with sabres, and it's as though there is nobody writing today who is capable of putting down a challenger when instead they can claim to be the victim of harassment to attract a mob. Mencken was great, and given Fitzgeralds other work, his Gatsby review was an act of mercy, but I bet he would be banned from social platforms and probably have trouble getting a bank account if he were writing today. Hard to say what we lost, but reading Mencken now, it's definitely gone.
- We don't know that he got touched. We have a press story with some unlikely events that strongly suggests he got touched.
There's a between-the-wars novel by English author Evelyn Waugh called Decline and Fall. The main character gets involved in all kinds of unspeakable crimes, more out of naivety than inherent criminality, and at the end is "disappeared" out of jail and given a new identity.
Waugh was an Establishment insider and knew how the upper classes operated. It's a very interesting novel.
I'm not suggesting Epstein was naive - far from it.
But if you're in a position to bribe prison guards and authorities to cover up murder-by-fake-suicide, I suspect it's not significantly harder or more expensive to bribe prison guards and authorities to cover up an escape.
It's debatable if it would more expedient to remove the evidence permanently or have it moved to another location where some of its skills might continue to be useful. But I would be surprised if option 2 wasn't at least a possibility.
As for the Sacklers - we'll see if any of them do jail time.
- You might be surprised.
> Eisenman took his duty to create “disharmony” seriously: one Eisenman-designed house so departed from the normal concept of a house that its owners actually wrote an entire book about the difficulties they experienced trying to live in it. For example, Eisenman split the master bedroom in two so the couple could not sleep together, installed a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms. In his violent opposition to the very idea that a real human being might actually attempt to live (and crap, and have sex) in one of his houses, Eisenman recalls the self-important German architect from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall, who becomes exasperated the need to include a staircase between floors: “Why can’t the creatures stay in one place? The problem of architecture is the problem of all art: the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.”
From: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
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