Welcome to the Twilight Zone and "Russian experiments in life after death."

Photos: Lenin's Mausoleum, 1989, from my collection. Indoor photography was not allowed, to put it mildly.

If it's really strange reading you're looking for, may I suggest this review in The Nation of a book by Anya Bernstein called The Future of Immortality: Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. The review begins with cryogenics and then really leaves the tracks.

The Collective Body: Russian experiments in life after death, by Sophie Pinkham

... This practice (of life-extending blood transfusions) has its origins in a truly utopian and egalitarian, if even more biologically suspect, experiment. Aleksandr Bogdanov, a prominent early Bolshevik and science fiction writer, investigated the rejuvenating properties of blood transfusions in the 1920s, though he soon died after exchanging blood with a tubercular student. As anthropologist Anya Bernstein discusses in The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia, Bogdanov’s hope was not merely to prolong the lives of individuals; he envisioned a sanguine communism in which all were granted an equal share of society’s collective health through blood exchanges.

You only thought you knew why the USSR failed.

“All social doctrines … all the social utopias humanity has tried to achieve have stumbled up against the short-breathedness of man,” (Anastasia) Gacheva tells the crowd. “The utopias stumbled on man’s deepest misfortune, which is his mortality. Mortal man cannot be made happy. This is why communism did not succeed.” Needless to say, this is a novel diagnosis of communism’s failure. It wasn’t the command economy, the Cold War, or growing popular resistance that brought the Soviet Union down but rather the failure to achieve eternal life. Until all people unite in the common cause—the struggle against death—the world will be rife with conflict, whether or not the state professes itself a utopia.

I'm headed back to reread this essay, this time with a couple belts of vodka.

THE BEER BEAT: The Moon Under Water -- so, how does Orwell's perfect pub look today?

In my view, George Orwell's description of his favorite pub is an English-language classic. It is a compelling, dreamy vision.

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of ‘regulars’ who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.

Of course, we're adults, and we understand that perfection is unattainable, even if misguided restaurateurs continue to insist that their meat is grilled "to perfection."

No, it isn't, because perfection does not exist. Rather, success accrues from the pursuit of perfection. As Ian Gillan once observed, "It's not the kill -- it's the thrill of the chase."

A survey in the United Kingdom has undertaken to compare Orwell's angle with the rigors of modernity, and to update it. I think the 1940s ideal remains valid in a number of core objectives, which might be summarized by ambiguity: a "perfect" pub has to be a special one.

The process of identifying and delivering "special" is extremely difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

And they're not, are they?

Forget live music and real ale – pubs need lipstick-proof glasses and non-sticky carpets, by Rebecca Nicholson (The Guardian)

George Orwell’s vision of the perfect boozer would be recognisable to many drinkers today, a survey has revealed. But what else might we find in a modern Moon Under Water?

What does Britain’s ideal pub look like? A YouGov Omnibus survey aims to assess which of George Orwell’s perfect-pub attributes, as immortalised in his 1946 essay The Moon Under Water, have stood the test of time. While some of Orwell’s stipulations have aged less well, such as the notions that stamps and aspirin should be available behind the bar, beer tastes better out of pink china cups, and liver sausage sandwiches and mussels make the best bar snacks, the picture of his fantasy drinking den would, on the whole, be familiar to us today.

Sheet rock is easy. Utopianism is hard.

What makes this such an effective piece of writing is the author's ability to peel back the layers of a story far more nuanced than it appears at first glance.

They Built It. No One Came.

By Penelope Greenmay (New York Times)

... Their ideals were lofty but simple: They would live off the land, farming with Colonial-era tools, along with a band of like-minded men dressed in homespun robes wielding scythes and pickaxes. They would sleep in atmospheric log cabins and other 18th-century structures that they had rescued from the area and that they began to reconstruct, painstakingly, brick by crumbling brick and log by log.

But what if you built a commune, and no one came?

It turns out it’s not so easy to cook up a utopia from scratch.