Hacker Cinema
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
1997 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Robert Bierman
Gordon Comstock is a copywriter at an ad agency, and his girlfriend Rosemary is a designer. Gordon believes he is a genius, a marvelous poet and quits the ad agency, trying to live on his poems, but poverty soon comes to him.
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"Keep the Aspidistra Flying" is very funny. It's been made into a movie twice. The 1965 one is closer to the original.
It used to be available on line, but with the copyright crackdown, films only of historical interest, with near zero revenue potential, are no longer available.
"Orwell, the Lost Writings" is quite useful. It makes it clear where Orwell got many of the ideas for "1984". During WWII, he worked for the British Ministry of Information. Part of his job was translating news reports into the Basic English 1000 word vocabulary, for transmission on the BBC to the colonies. Mostly India. He discovered that translation to Basic English is a political act. Basic English cannot express much ambiguity. So ambiguous political statements had to be hammered down into simple unambiguous statements.
Hence Newspeak and the Ministry of Truth.