The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls (’Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!’ she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was ‘not clever’, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallibIe mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub- section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

““Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.””

Tattoos

In a world where memory is porous, how do we recognize the signs of history repeating?

longreads.com|Aaron Rabinowitz

Dry-erase ink is not similar to tattoo ink, but it is almost identical to ink from a permanent marker. And if you leave it on a surface for long enough, especially a porous surface, it will remain. The brain is a porous surface. Memory is a porous surface.

Dry-erase ink is not similar to tattoo ink, but it is almost identical to ink from a permanent marker. And if you leave it on a surface for long enough, especially a porous surface, it will remain. The brain is a porous surface. Memory is a porous surface. As it stands, the group of boys in that room could have left with the confirmation that Adolf Hitler is a man to be admired. We asked the principal to follow up with the students in that group. To communicate to them that Hitler sucks. The principal is welcome to use his own words to make that case. [...] The high school offers an elective on genocide studies, which my daughter takes. There was a special, in-person lecture delivered by Mariette, a woman who lived through the Holocaust. She was fortunate not to have a tattoo, was hunted but never captured. She told story after story that my daughter could only recount to me in whispers, like being 5 years old and hiding in a bale of hay that was being stabbed at with pitchforks. Like the man who had aided her and was later tortured by Nazis, fingernails removed. And as Mariette spoke, two teens in the audience were leaning into one another, intertwining arms, making out. Look, one 15-year-old boy blurting out his prejudice isn’t a state-sponsored book burning. Students conflating civilian Jews in Upstate New York with a military six thousand miles away isn’t a poster in Nazi-occupied Poland proclaiming Jews are lice: they cause typhus. Granting Hitler equal billing with Gandhi in a violence prevention workshop isn’t Kristallnacht. Kids snogging while a Jewish woman describes her harrowing World War II childhood isn’t Holocaust Denial. I am not lost in the wilderness, in the desert, like the Hebrews of old. I can still make out landmarks, make my way around town. At the same time, we are living through a precarious time for irony and a worldwide recalibration of what is considered normal and I am no longer confident in my ability to read The Signs. Jews like Barney Miller—my Zaydie, not the character—tend to catastrophize, overanalyze, make too much out of the misbehavior of others. But I cannot see beyond this moment. I cannot be certain if history will chronicle me as one of those great-great uncles who waited too long to forge their way out.

“We’re talking literal bread and circuses shit, if not exactly meant to distract us from creeping autocracy to at least have that effect. When I was growing up reading Mike Royko, thinking that looked like a good gig, are young people now dreaming of a future where they make money torturing people desperate for material security, Mr. Beast style?”