Tag: Anthony Burgess

Round up the (un)usual suspects

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“No, not the trans antifa, you fool! The irony-poisoned, terminally online, neonazi groyper types!”

Some days I feel the weight of every nanosecond of the 71.5 years I have spent on this planet.

I’m so old that when some fresh young bit of news rears its pimply head, references from books — yes, books! — leap to what remains of my mind.

For instance, there’s P.R. Deltoid, the “post-corrective adviser” to the ultraviolent 15-year-old Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess:

“What gets into you all? We study the problem and we’ve been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You’ve got a good home here, good loving parents, you’ve got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?”

Or the bruiser in the cowboy hat in Thomas McGuane’s “Something to be Desired,” who, upon seeing a used tampon land on his windshield at a drive-in movie theater, steps out to make a few inquiries among the usual suspects, which include the hapless Lucien, who had been preparing to continue a mutual infidelity with a casual acquaintance until a rare burst of discretion — “spraying ancient drive-in gravel” in headlong flight — came to seem the better part of valor.

“I got my fiancée here!” shouts the cowboy. “She don’t want to know about your little world!”

Alas, it seems that to gain some insight regarding the suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing I must leave the library and take a deep dive into the wonderful world of … Helldivers2?

In addition to everything else, I’m supposed to worry about whether the asshole on my six with two wheels in the bike lane is “a Nick Fuentes groyper and gamergate 4chan douchebro?” 

No thank you, please. I just finished an oldster’s breakfast of oatmeal, fresh fruit, and tea. It looks like rain. And I’m feeling the cowboy’s confusion here, with a geezerly side of These Kids Today.

I remember when games meant Monopoly, Scrabble, or just tossing the ol’ pigskin around. I don’t want to know about their little world.

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“We are all droogs, but somebody has to be in charge. Right? Right?”

Appy polly loggies, droogies, but I could not watch last night’s “debate” between Coach Walz and Clockwork Orange.

I made it past the explanation of the rules and maybe two questions in and then yelped “Out out out out!” like a doggie.

Bedways was rightways as I saw it. We weren’t going to learn anything from this gloopy chepooka that would change our rassoodocks about these two chellovecks.

The Coach seems a proper moodge who plays by the rules while Clockwork Orange is anything but. He’s a smart, mean grahzny bratchny who would steal the coppers off his dead granny’s eyes for his ante into the Big Game, with a few aces up the old sleeve courtesy of his prestoopnik pals.

And you don’t fight him with facts. A cutthroat britva is what a lewdie needs for this lot, O my brothers.

• O my brothers (and sisters): If you’re not conversant with the nadsat dialect Anthony Burgess devised for his characters, you’ll have to hunt down a glossary. Burgess was opposed to such assistance, but one of my copies went against his wishes.