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good gracious thunder and lightning INDEED
Antichrists Anonymous, a Family Guy/Good Omens crossover. Stewie/Adam of the it's-slashy-if-you-squint variety.
In-between my social theory readings, I have been perusing the limited preview of Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life and absorbing Marx/Engels innuendo. "Self," I tells me, "this is not the right way to approach either a study break or supplemental course reading."
BUT COME ON. There have got to be more of you in the Marx/Engels camp? The following are choice excerpts from Wheen, not only for my personal reference, but also for YOURS. You know, just in case in the future you want to write about their beautiful 19th-century revolutionary love.
MARX/ENGELS FOREVERRR
"Marx and Engels complemented each other perfectly. ... [T]he 'complete agreement in all theoretical fields' didn't extend to their respective habits and styles. One might almost say that the two characters were Thesis and Antithesis incarnate. Marx wrote in a cramped scrawl, with countless deletions and emendations as blotchy testimony to the effort it cost him; Engels's script was neat, businesslike, elegant. Marx was squat and swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing; Engels was tall and fair, with more than a hint of Aryan swagger. Marx lived in chaos and penury; Engels was a briskly efficient worker who held down a full-time job at the family firm while maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism.
... [Engels] deferred to Marx from the outset, accepting that it was his historic duty to support and subsidize the indigent sage without complaint of jealousy - even, come to that, without much gratitude. ... Marx's friendship, and the triumphant culmination of his work, would be reward enough.
a brief sketch of Marx
"There have been thousands of books about Marxism, but almost all have been written by academics and zealots for whom it is a near-blasphemy to treat him as a figure of flesh and blood - a Prussian emigre who became a middle-class English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes."
Engels's double life
"Back home in Barmen [Engels'] parents knew nothing of their son's democratic fever. ... Even in middle age, when he and Marx were joyfully awaiting the imminent crisis of capitalism, Engels was always on his best behavior during Friedrich senior's visits to Manchester, playing the part of a dutiful heir who could be trusted with the family fortune - just as, out riding with the Cheshire Hunt, he was able to pass himself off as a conservative local businessman. His communism, his atheism, his sexual promiscuity: these all belonged to his separate life." pg 79
"Though Engels soon assumed the outward appearance of a Lancashire businessmen - joining the more exclusive clubs, filling his cellar with champagne, riding to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt - he never forgot that the main purpose was to support his brilliant but impecunious friend. He acted as a kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade, expert observations on the state of international market and - most essentially - a regular consignment of small-denomination banknotes, pilfered from the petty cash box or guilefully prised out of the company's bank account."
Marx and Engels' first meeting
"Although the two men had met once before - when Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung on 16 November 1842 - it had been a cool and unmemorable encounter: Engels was wary of the impetuous young editor who 'raves as if ten thousand devils had him by the hair', as Edgar Bauer had forewarned him; Marx was equally suspicious, guessing that since Engels lived in Berlin he was probably an accomplice to the Free Hegelian follies of the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer. Engels redeemed himself soon afterwards ... [with his] review of Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, and a lengthy Critique of Political Economy which Marx described as a work of genius. One can see why: though he had already decided that abstract idealism was so much hot air, and that the engine of history was driven by economic and social forces, Marx's practical knowledge of capitalism was nil. ... Engels, from his vantage point in the cotton mills of Lancashire, was well placed to enlighten him." pg75
excerpt from a letter Engels wrote when he was drunk
Written during his apprenticeship in Bremen, working as an unpaid clerk in an export business: "Excuse me for writing so badly, I have three bottles of beer under my belt, hurrah, and I cannot write much more because this must go to the post at once. It is already striking half-past three and letters must be posted by four o'clock. Good gracious, thunder and lightning, you can see that I've got some beer inside me. What a lamentable state! The old man, i.e. the Principal, is just going out and I am all mixed up, I don't know what I'm writing. There are all sorts of noises going on in my head." YA THAT'S RIGHT, COMMUNIST NOISES. pg 77
This requires no lj-cut: "They had no secrets from each other, no taboos; if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn't hesitate to supply a full description."
AND how about the part where Engels taught paleography to the German Social Democrats that wanted to organize Marx's unpublished papers because Engels and Marx's wife were the only two people who could understand his writing. Not only was it messy, but they would correspond in "Anglo Franco Latino German mumbo jumbo." THEY HAD THEIR OWN SECRET LANGUAGE, GUYS sort of.
And if you haven't signed up for the Narnia Fic Exchange, do so here!
...There is so much about this post that would have had me blacklisted, once upon a time.
In-between my social theory readings, I have been perusing the limited preview of Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life and absorbing Marx/Engels innuendo. "Self," I tells me, "this is not the right way to approach either a study break or supplemental course reading."
BUT COME ON. There have got to be more of you in the Marx/Engels camp? The following are choice excerpts from Wheen, not only for my personal reference, but also for YOURS. You know, just in case in the future you want to write about their beautiful 19th-century revolutionary love.
MARX/ENGELS FOREVERRR
"Marx and Engels complemented each other perfectly. ... [T]he 'complete agreement in all theoretical fields' didn't extend to their respective habits and styles. One might almost say that the two characters were Thesis and Antithesis incarnate. Marx wrote in a cramped scrawl, with countless deletions and emendations as blotchy testimony to the effort it cost him; Engels's script was neat, businesslike, elegant. Marx was squat and swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing; Engels was tall and fair, with more than a hint of Aryan swagger. Marx lived in chaos and penury; Engels was a briskly efficient worker who held down a full-time job at the family firm while maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism.
... [Engels] deferred to Marx from the outset, accepting that it was his historic duty to support and subsidize the indigent sage without complaint of jealousy - even, come to that, without much gratitude. ... Marx's friendship, and the triumphant culmination of his work, would be reward enough.
a brief sketch of Marx
"There have been thousands of books about Marxism, but almost all have been written by academics and zealots for whom it is a near-blasphemy to treat him as a figure of flesh and blood - a Prussian emigre who became a middle-class English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes."
Engels's double life
"Back home in Barmen [Engels'] parents knew nothing of their son's democratic fever. ... Even in middle age, when he and Marx were joyfully awaiting the imminent crisis of capitalism, Engels was always on his best behavior during Friedrich senior's visits to Manchester, playing the part of a dutiful heir who could be trusted with the family fortune - just as, out riding with the Cheshire Hunt, he was able to pass himself off as a conservative local businessman. His communism, his atheism, his sexual promiscuity: these all belonged to his separate life." pg 79
"Though Engels soon assumed the outward appearance of a Lancashire businessmen - joining the more exclusive clubs, filling his cellar with champagne, riding to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt - he never forgot that the main purpose was to support his brilliant but impecunious friend. He acted as a kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade, expert observations on the state of international market and - most essentially - a regular consignment of small-denomination banknotes, pilfered from the petty cash box or guilefully prised out of the company's bank account."
Marx and Engels' first meeting
"Although the two men had met once before - when Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung on 16 November 1842 - it had been a cool and unmemorable encounter: Engels was wary of the impetuous young editor who 'raves as if ten thousand devils had him by the hair', as Edgar Bauer had forewarned him; Marx was equally suspicious, guessing that since Engels lived in Berlin he was probably an accomplice to the Free Hegelian follies of the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer. Engels redeemed himself soon afterwards ... [with his] review of Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, and a lengthy Critique of Political Economy which Marx described as a work of genius. One can see why: though he had already decided that abstract idealism was so much hot air, and that the engine of history was driven by economic and social forces, Marx's practical knowledge of capitalism was nil. ... Engels, from his vantage point in the cotton mills of Lancashire, was well placed to enlighten him." pg75
excerpt from a letter Engels wrote when he was drunk
Written during his apprenticeship in Bremen, working as an unpaid clerk in an export business: "Excuse me for writing so badly, I have three bottles of beer under my belt, hurrah, and I cannot write much more because this must go to the post at once. It is already striking half-past three and letters must be posted by four o'clock. Good gracious, thunder and lightning, you can see that I've got some beer inside me. What a lamentable state! The old man, i.e. the Principal, is just going out and I am all mixed up, I don't know what I'm writing. There are all sorts of noises going on in my head." YA THAT'S RIGHT, COMMUNIST NOISES. pg 77
This requires no lj-cut: "They had no secrets from each other, no taboos; if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn't hesitate to supply a full description."
AND how about the part where Engels taught paleography to the German Social Democrats that wanted to organize Marx's unpublished papers because Engels and Marx's wife were the only two people who could understand his writing. Not only was it messy, but they would correspond in "Anglo Franco Latino German mumbo jumbo." THEY HAD THEIR OWN SECRET LANGUAGE, GUYS sort of.
And if you haven't signed up for the Narnia Fic Exchange, do so here!
...There is so much about this post that would have had me blacklisted, once upon a time.