Well, just finished my latest book from the audio-book service Audible.com (if you end up signing up with them, I'd appreciate a referral - my user-name is "leviwallach").  For those of you unfamiliar with this service, it has various subscription options which bring the average price of an audio-book down to $10 a pop.  This is for any title, including completely unabridged tomes that would require 30+ CD's or tapes!  The catch is that it's all on your computer, or you can download it to certain MP3 devices.  If you don't have one of the devices they support, one of their subscription options comes with a free player, called the Audible Otis, which also plays MP3 and WMA files.  This is the device I have, although I am lusting after an iPod since the Otis only comes with 64MB of RAM.  I've been trying to get it to work with external SD Memory, but it looks like it will only take MMC.

Anyway, the book I just finished was Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  I got it primarily because it was one of the books recommended by Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, and it does, indeed, remind me a bit of that book!  It's about Orwell's days as as struggling young writer and how he worked as a dishwasher in France, and basically became a tramp on returning to London. 

Of course, this takes place in the 1930's, so one wonders really how similar things are now, but it is still a fascinating look back at poverty some 70 years ago in Europe, and probably there's still a good bit of this that is still relevant, if not in Europe as much, than assuredly in many other places. 

The first part looks at the restaurant and hotel industries from an inside (rather disturbing) view, and conveys the utterly exhausting 17-hour days put in by the workers (which could easily be done away with) for wages just enough to stay at the most modest of lodgings and eat and drink enough to keep working at the exhausting pace. 

Orwell, then takes you on his journey back to London where he ends up becoming a tramp for some time.  This world is even more fascinating because it is even further from what most people have experienced.  Even the homeless of today's America have some things much better than an English tramp of the 30's, where by law one could not stay at a given shelter more than one night, forcing one to walk miles and miles to get to a new one each day, and subsisting on only tea and bread with margarine.

Orwell offers lots of interesting social commentary about the futility of such existence, and even makes suggestions for solutions.  Most people know Orwell from his penning of 1984, so it was a bit surprising to come across an autobiographic piece that looks so critically on part of capitalism.  Communism does come into play here, but only very peripherally as an ideal that some poor attach themselves to, or conn artists pretend to belong to in order to swindle people's money.  Communism nor socialism, even in parts, are never suggested as a solution to these problems.  One wonders how Orwell would comment on the much more developed social welfare systems in Europe of today.

posted Tuesday, 10 June 2003

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