$8 meals? Inside the hidden world of Facebook Marketplace food sellers
In Reflections on a Ravaged Century(2000), Conquest writes:
“All in all, unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities. The accompanying falsifications took place, and on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, real statistics, disappeared into the realm of fantasy. History, including the history of the Communist Party, or rather especially the history of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons disappeared from the official record. A new past, as well as new present, was imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet population, as was, of course, admitted when truth emerged in the late 1980s.”
Conquest writes of our age in lines from his great polemical poem “Whenever”:
“An age of people who are concerned, or care,
With schemes that lead to slaughter everywhere.
“An age of warheads and the KGB,
An age of pinheads at the Ph.D.
“When churches pander to advanced regimes
Whose victims fill our nightmares with their screams,
Age that ignored the unavenged Ukraine
‘Imperialist Britain’ seething in its brain,
An age of art devised for instant shock
an age of aestheticians talking cock.”
Conquest was born on this date, July 15, in 1917 (soon after the July Days when the Bolsheviks were agitating in Petrograd, and three months before the October Revolution) and died in 2015 at age ninety-eight (twenty-four years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union).
[“Whenever” can be found in Conquest’s Collected Poems (ed. Elizabeth Conquest, Waywiser Press, 2020.]
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“There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: ‘You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.’ To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.”
Glib but true. Here is the late Terry Teachout’s replyto the same question:
“Er, who are all those ‘famous’ book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.”
Go to David’s blog, A Commonplace Blog, and scroll down to the bottom of the left column to read the entire symposium.
