The Reader Travels

The same year he published A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess published another dystopic novel called The Wanting Seed. I loved the language of the more popular novel, but I read this other one over ten years ago, and I’m still talking about it because it was supremely awesome.

So here’s the premise. It’s London in the not-too-distant future, and over-population has reached a point where it’s no longer cool to be heterosexual. Breeders get passed up for promotion, and some of them pretend to be gay to climb the corporate ladder.

And that’s just the beginning. The society falls completely apart when the crops fail and there’s no food for anyone. There’s war and cannibalism, and man, this is a movie I would stand in line to see.

To all you aspiring film makers out there, I dare you…

I remember how my junialeeg grandmother was so disgusted by any “misuse” of the English language. She had perfect penmanship and wrote grammar lessons into her correspondence whenever we misused a word in our letters to her. She thought there was a correct way of saying every word and that we should never stray.

Meanwhile, I view slang as a wonderfully creative expression, opening up all sorts of possibilities in language and communication. I love how words keep evolving and we gain new ways of expressing ourselves. And I love the English language for its flexibility to embrace new words and introduce new thought.

My grandmama’ would have been disgusted to hear the word “disrespect” used as a verb, but for me, the word has been granted the power of action in one simple twist. My daddy used to always tell us not to be disrespectful to our mother. We had a strong sense of guilt, so we would usually hang our heads in shame when he said this, but we weren’t always sure why.

If he were to say, “Don’t disrespect your mother,” his words would have gained momentum and power, from an economy of words and a truly active verb. It breaks the rules, and it is brilliant.

To shorten it even further, it becomes simply, “dis,” a small and powerful word where the concept of “respect” is so crucial to our lives, it need not even be said.

Stanley Kubrick helped to immortalize A Clockwork Orange by turning it into a movie. His image of Alex and his droogs in white suits with top hats and canes, bizarre, bulging codpieces and menacing eye makeup is burned into the minds of cult fans everywhere.

The story is disturbing and thought-provoking, a commentary on human nature, mind control and free will. But having read the book, it is the words, the dialog, those minute building blocks, that give the story power on an almost molecular level.

You see, Burgess was quite the cunning linguist, and the words he creates for the book happily find their way into the screenplay. As a linguist he wrote about slang as a form of rebellion, a sullying of the language rules defined by the rulers.

In the hoodlums’ strange and foreign words we hear their rebellion and their isolation from those who would rule them. How far, how deep, would we go to force them to conform? To the atoms of their thoughts, to their very language?

Before I got all sidetracked, we were in London, and it’s calling me back now. I’m planning an actual, real life trip to England in the spring, just bought my plane ticket and everything.

So, since I’ll actually be there in the not too distant future, I thought it was time to let Anthony Burgess take us to one of his versions of London in the not too distant future. I’m speaking, of course, of A Clockwork Orange, a master work of linguistics and storytelling.

Apparently, in Burgess’s future horror, the Soviets have won the Cold War, and all the hoodlums in the streets speak a particularly Russian flavor of slang. Alex and his droogs are particularly fascinated with groodies, of which I have quite a horrorshow if not overly bolshy pair, a bust of which is hanging (nay, sagging) over my fireplace, but that’s another story altogether.

Ta ta, for now.

He held out through Thanksgiving and Christmas and breathed his last on New Year’s Eve, never to see 2008. And all I could do through all of it was to sing. I’m like that little kid on About a Boy, who starts singing for no apparent reason. It’s a bizarre tic that often gets on people’s nerves, but I couldn’t stop.

At some point, though, it turned into something that soothed people’s nerves, that brought joy into gloomy hospital rooms. So I kept on singing. I started taking requests for things like, “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and other happy holiday songs. I sang a duet of “The Christmas Song” with a hospital tech who’d come to check Gene’s blood pressure.

And when he had to go back to ICU and his lungs collapsed and we knew it was the end, I sang at my mother-in-law’s request. Despite the sedation, we knew he could hear us. Christmas was over, and it was New Year’s Eve, and I remembered how Gene liked bawdy songs, so I sang the ones my folks had taught me, “Roll me over, in the clover, roll me over, lay me down and do it again,” and “The Princess Pupule has plenty papaya, she loves to give it away.”

He took his last breath while everyone around his bed sang, “You Are My Sunshine,” the same song his granddaughter Caroline had sung to him the day after Christmas, bringing a smile to his lips.

The songs go through my head as I lay down to sleep and they’re still there when I wake in the morning, the Irish songs he loved so much, “Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling… and I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.”

Farewell, Gene. I sing for you still, though my voice is cracked with sickness and sorrow.