Doug’s Page
Category: Satire
Complete Works of Jonathan Swift — Jonathan Swift
The Satires
A Tale of a Tub
The Battle of the Books
The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers
The Swearer’s Bank
Gulliver’s Travels – 1726
Gulliver’s Travels – 1735
A Modest Proposal
An Examination of Certain Abuses
A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation
Directions to Servants
Minor Satires
The Sermons
Three Sermons
Brotherly Love and Other Sermons
Other Religious Works
List of Religious Works
The Political Works
Drapier’s Letters
List of Political Works
The Historical Works
The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen
An Abstract of the History of England
Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne
Remarks on Lord Clarendon’s “History of the Rebellion”
Remarks on Bishop Burnet’s “History of His Own Time”
Note on the “Freeholder”
The Journalism
Contributions to “The Tatler”
Contributions to “The Examiner”
Contributions to “The Spectator”
Contributions to “The Intelligencer”
The Poetry Collection
The Poems of Jonathan Swift
The Poems
List of Poems in Chronological Order
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
The Memoir
A Journal to Stella
The Biographies
Sketch of the Life of Dr. Jonathan Swift — R. Phillips
Dean Swift — James McGee
Jonathan’s Page
#delphicompleteworks #poetry #jonathanswift
March of the Lemmings — Stewart Lee
It came up for £1.19 on an Amazon deal, or something like that, so i gave it a go.
As a stand up comedian i think Stewart Lee is really good and very enjoyable to watch: if you’re a person of lower intelligence then you will probably disagree with that statement, that’s fine, really, we can’t all be part of the liberal intelligentsia.
But as a newspaper columnist, he pretty much sucks donkey balls. So why did i buy this book when, after all is said and done, it’s just lots of his newspaper columns regurgitated with foot notes? Because i don’t read newspapers and had no idea that he sucked so badly at writing columns for them. But i do now.
To be fair though, it’s hard to ridicule and take the urine out of a bunch of narcissistic psychopaths and sociopaths — the career politicos of our age — when they themselves revel in being caricatures of their own urine, faecal and menstrual stains and happily parade their utter incompetence across all public realms for all to see: which bizarrely does actually encourage middle england to eagerly clamour and queue to vote for more. Why even attempt this satire and/or parody or whatever it is? Because the newspaper offered him money to make the attempt because David Mitchell wasn’t up for it and he’d have been a fool to not take said money: he’s got a mortgage to pay after all.
So i got 11% into this and mostly got utterly fed up going back and forth to the footnotes that explain the minutiae of every column that no one really cares about other than broadsheet newspaper readers just in case these things become part of a clue in the cryptic crossword the next day.
So if you are one of those broadsheet readers then this might amuse you, or not, i don’t really care. After 11% i’m done with it as i have many other more interesting looking books clamouring for my reading hours. The problem with brexit now is that there’s nothing more to say or read on the matter that hasn’t already been said or read — all we’ve so far achieved is the creeping erosion of our legal rights and a trade deal with Japan that’s worse than the one we had when we were in the EU — all the other trade deals we were promised have not emerged. The NHS is a complete mess, the economy is in tatters, unemployment is sky rocketing, Boris is determined to spend 100 billion to create 20,000 jobs building a new toy train set for the rich and wealthy while the old, decrepit, poor-people’s trainset’s franchises are all handing their franchises back to the government and are merrily washing their hands of the whole affair: the post brexit future is exactly what every remainer said it would be — but oh, thank heavens for corona virus, at least the leave camp have something else to blame for the mess we’re all in.
Stewart’s Page
#brexit #comedy #stewartlee
Digging Up Mother — Doug Stanhope
Flatland — Edwin A. Abbott
Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift
I decided to read this after reading The Toymakers, in which Gulliver’s Travels gets more than a passing mention.
I used to think that Gulliver’s Travels was a children’s book, but how wrong i was. Maybe that’s the way the establishment wants everyone to think about it, but it really isn’t for children. It’s an incredible critique/satire of the society at the time, but unfortunately it is just as relevant today as it was back then. It’s a shame that society took no notice of what Swift had to say and simply condemned this book to a child’s bookshelf as fantasy nonsense.
For example… hypertension, and its complications, is one of the human race’s biggest killers globally, and it is simply caused by consuming sodium chloride (salt). Swift knew back when he wrote this book that salt was a luxury of no use to humans and that you soon adjust to not using it and realise that you actually don’t need it. Yet here we are today stuffing our faces with this debilitating substance that our bodies simply don’t need making ourselves sicker than ever:
I was at first at a great loss for salt, but custom soon reconciled me to the want of it; and I am confident that the frequent use of salt among us is an effect of luxury, and was first introduced only as a provocative to drink, except where it is necessary for preserving flesh in long voyages, or in places remote from great markets; for we observe no animal to be fond of it but man, and as to myself, when I left this country, it was a great while before I could endure the taste of it in anything that I ate.
So if you are one of those people who thought that this was a children’s book, then go and read The Toymakers and then read Gulliver’s Travels, you may just get a different view of it.
Jonathan’s Page