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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well, I understood about half of that, Cap.
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Carpal Tunnel
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A Clockwork Orange was one of the drivers behind the early punk movement. If you remember, the early punkers wore neat - if extremely unusually - dressed with highly polished boots and clean clothes. Didn't stop their amorality, forced or otherwise, but they were more-or-less conscious copies of Alex and his droogs. It was only later that the Sid Vicious/filth/Vivian the Young Ones punk style took over. Like most "movements", the origins were quickly forgotten in the day-to-day reality of punkdom.
I read an article in the early 1970s in something (could have been an English newspaper) which interviewed some (not well-known) punkers, who claimed that Anthony Burgess was their godfather and that A Clockwork Orange was their Bible. I remember being doubtful, from their barely coherent responses to the interviewer's questions, that any of them had actually read it all the way through ... page 1. Sounds like the usual relationship most Christians have with the Bible, doesn't it?
I've had a quick trawl through the A Clockwork Orange sites, and while all of them laud Burgess' good/evil process plot, none of them look more than cursorily under the bonnet. Some of the underlying implications of the book (Russian-style socialism and a Politburo-style government, apparatchik-style bureaucracy and, of course, the heavily Russian-influenced Nadsat counter-culture jargon) are pretty much ignored in most analyses. Burgess wrote the book in 1962 when he believed he was on borrowed time - he'd been diagnosed with a brain tumour which, in the end, completely failed to kill him - and A Clockwork Orange was one of several books he wrote that year. He believed, I think, that the Russians would eventually triumph over the West. I think that in reality, and although it was never stated by Burgess, A Clockwork Orange was set (lightly, I will admit) in a post-conquest communist England.
That satisfactorily explains Nadsat and the other Russian influences as no other explanation is likely to be able to do. Of course, the Minister for the Interior looked and sounded a lot like - well, Tony Blair does today.
Oh well, FWIW.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Pooh-Bah
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One year around Halloween the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show had a costume contest for all the people who liked to dress as one of the flamboyant characters in the film. The decision was based on applause from the crowd. My friend Ray dressed as "Alex" from A Clockwork Orange and he had a very complete costume with the false eyelashes on one eye, bowler hat, maybe even the codpiece. Anyway, he looked the part. There were so many of us there who knew him that our wild cheers won him the prize, much to the confusion of the cast of Rocky Horror transvestites, half of whom had no idea just who Ray was supposed to be. http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/pix/clockwork-orange2.jpg
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vika, When I read A Clockwork Orange I didn't know any Russian, and I'm pretty sure my edition of the book didn't have translations at the back. So basically I just picked up on all the Nadsat by context, as I would any new language where I had no explicit dictionary (or as with "learning by ear"). It worked well, in that I'd gathered the meaning of practically every new term by the end of the book. Sometimes this meant I had to refer back, and pick up on a further level of meaning in what I'd already read. Not a problem. The use of Nadsat also provided for the "feel" of the book, imparting an air of the surreal, sort of drug-infused. This may have made some of the violence more readable (even acceptable, for want of a better term) - helping maintain a degree of empathy with Alex. You don't just switch off and dismiss him as a more or less featureless psychopath. That's important. What's also important is that the film (recently shown on British TV for the first time) didn't maintain the surreal air quite as well. Indeed it couldn't. I could do with re-reading the book, but the film struck me as hugely prophetic in some ways - particularly in the amoral political wheeling and dealing, "spin" and whatnot. As an aside, I recall that my first reading of A Clockwork Orange was around the same time as a musical (play) version was released.. I think with music by some members of U2. 
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in fact, I liked the movie - Steven Spielberg at his best - and its screening in UK promted me to ask the question. may be I liked the movie because I forgot the book (I red it 10 years ago) or because of the translation, where the wordplay was inevitably lost
I think Faldage had a brilliant idea that in Russian the translation of slang words should have been in a third language. I am not sure what exactly mid to late 20th century Russia did for the Westbut I would have used German, probably
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Pooh-Bah
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In reply to:
in fact, I liked the movie - Steven Spielberg at his best
Also known as Stanley Kubrick...
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I am not sure what exactly mid to late 20th century Russia did for the WestI think the significant thing is that there was an incredible lack of knowledge of anything that happened behind the "Iron Curtain" - and hardly anyone knew any Russian. The USSR was peopled exclusively by shadows and stereotypes. It still isn't a lot better, but at least you can learn Russian without immediately becoming suspicious.  Hard to replicate that sort of perspective for any other country, and even for any other time, I think. What slang/language would Burgess pick if he were writing the book now, I wonder?
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in fact, I liked the movie - Steven Spielberg at his best -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also known as Stanley Kubrick...I've done it again!  I am not writing after 7 pm anymore
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Carpal Tunnel
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My "mor-far" (Hi satin) said that 7 pm was the ealiest hour in which he could take a drink... [crossthreading-e]
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btw, the movie was in the list of 100 best American thrillers nominated by the members of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
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