I am glad I found this quick read for under 6 dollars.

This line stuck with me, given general Reddit/online discourse and the world sitting at a knifes edge.

The men fighting on the front lines, very often, had a unspoken treatise not to fire at each other. The fighters with half a boot, covered in mud and lice, using jammed rifles, and taking lead through the neck are the ones that are sharing tobacco and jokes and truces with the "enemy" at the front.

All the while, the gawking rabble is where the most vitriolic language takes place. The hate back in Barcelona is ten times the hate of the men with the guns in their hands. This goes for any medium. The commenters at the back, are the furthest from reality and able to factionalize themselves via an avatar and spew hate. I think of hateful content creators, and how far away from reality their followers are. We Organize ourselves to live a vicarious revolution through the world view of other fallible men, and use those characters as shields to lob bombs from way behind the lines, often with much more hate than anyone at the front could ever stomach.

When we get face to face with ourselves; with humanity, we find a reason not to be violent with one another. We looks for the reasons that led us to the battlefield in the first place, and when we find those reasons, we get literature: men who are angry about it, men who are taken by the rhetoric of the state, men who make a joke of it, men who lose limbs and lives over it.

Personally, I accept this as a challenge to temper my behavior unless I'm on some battlefront myself. Because Orwell is absolutely correct. These factions are driven by men behind desks, the fighting and the blood all fly at the very front lines only, and that's where the most humanity takes place during wartime. When you're running on 2 hours of sleep per night, and 200 calories per day, and holding a photo of your family in one hand, with a rifle in the other, all of a sudden "maxxing" and "mogging" and the online anger and online hate become such silly temerities that we'll have been embarrassed to have published.

I don't have a tight polemic here on the book, I just enjoy finding important messages that relate to present day reality inside of books where you'd least expect it. I wish there was more to read by Orwell. I'll take any suggestions from here. Best.

One of her books was shortlisted, "The Adventures of China Iron", and one longlisted "We were green and trembling". I recently read both and ended up feeling lukewarm on her, was wondering if anyone had an opinion to share.

The first is a reversioning of an Argentine poem, Martin Fierro, from the perspective of his wife, an unnamed character in the original. Okay, feminist revisits of classics is nothing new, let's see how it goes. I found the meta aspects of it to be the most interesting aspect, was left not impressed by the "the natives have a perfect society" angle or the vulgar sex descriptions. "Our pussy jucies made us sticky", "his cock in my ass showed me Paradise". I found her prose to actually be good elsewhere, that just seemed a bit unnecessary.

"We were green and trembling" is based on the real story of a nun that crossdresses as man and becomes a conquistador in America in the early 1500s. I liked this one better. Her prose got to shine, loved all the descriptions of nature, but again, was left not fully satisfied with the extreme environmentalist ending that feels more like wish fulfilment.