The Reader Travels

It’s time to move on.  My tour of dystopic future Londons started back on Halloween. I’ll apologize now. I said it was going to be a “short tour,” but as you can see it lasted over four months. That’s an average of one book per month.  I think I may have gone a little obsesso.

Anyway, I’m not quite ready to leave London, and I’m still lurking around in alternate realities, but this time it’s the alternate reality world of London Below, which merges London’s past and present in the bizarre underground world of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

I’ll be honest, I had never even heard of Neil Gaiman until I started reading A Great Big Nerd, who talks about Gaiman a lot. Last March the Nerd got me excited about the upcoming movie version of Gaiman’s Stardustwith this plug, even though I had never read the book. He would have been jealous to know that I actually saw the movie at a screening two months before its actual release. They hadn’t even filmed the opening or closing credits yet.

So, speaking of nerds, my two sisters and I all married computer guys, but my youngest sister’s husband will forever hold the title of biggest nerd, even though my man still has a collection like this.  I don’t think he’ll ever live down the time we went to the beach and he wrote his e-mail address in the sand.  Anyway, he’s a nice guy, and he’s good to my sister, so…  They were the ones who loaned me Neverwhere and Good Omens (which I didn’t actually read).

Anyway, London Below is quite the imaginative invention, though I really wouldn’t want to live there.

All this gay talk started with a discussion of The Wanting Seed, but there’s much more to this book than a discussion of sexual orientation. What about war and political philosophy?

Having majored in philosophy in college, this book appeals to me because Anthony Burgess doesn’t seem to make any judgment about the things that are happening to his main character, he just reports on them matter-of-factly. The society is what it is, they eat what they eat and call it meat, and wars are started in the interest of public safety and morale. I don’t know, if I read it again, I might not feel that way. Maybe I’m just projecting my own ethical ambiguities.

In my youth, I wanted to be appalled by Plato’s philosopher kings, the only people with all the facts, lying to the masses to “protect them.” But after studying ethics, I know all about hard decisions and hidden truths. I’m fine with governors making hard decisions about wars; I can’t judge them because I don’t have all the facts; and honestly I have other interests, so I don’t want to spend my time looking under rocks for truths I may never find.

You can call it apathy if you want. You could even call it irresponsible, but then I don’t really care, which brings us back to apathy. So there.

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.

I love to look up phrases we use in our everyday language to figure out where they started. A lot of our idioms come from literature and story-telling traditions. There’s the popular phrase, “Catch 22,” that came from the book of the same name. And I always thought, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” came from The Iliad, where the Trojans send in the big horse filled with soldiers, but Dictionary.com says otherwise. Oh well.

Anyway, the term, “Big Brother,” came from George Orwell’s 1984, and in today’s time of conspiracy theories, the US Patriot Act and whatnot, it’s a very popular sentiment to think that Big Brother is indeed watching. In Orwell’s future London, the government is all seeing and all knowing. There’s nowhere to hide from Big Brother.

There’s this scene in the book where an auditorium full of people are chanting, “BB, BB, BB.” And this is the image that floated through my brain as I watched B.B. King in concert, circa 1992. Near the end of the concert, B.B. jammed on his guitar for twenty minutes, while his friend on stage punctuated the guitar solo with chants of the master’s name, ” B-b-b-Bee – BB. B-b-b-Bee – BB.”

Totally surreal, man.

I watched a family of tiny cockroaches come out of the woodwork in my bathroom last night. They were thankful for the moisture in the baseboard next to the shower as they danced and delighted in the feast.

I used those same words, “out of the woodwork,” as the phone kept ringing this week, with friends and family calling to find out how my father-in-law was doing in the hospital. And on my own side, we had the largest Thanksgiving gathering ever, welcoming my grandfather and his new fiance, a beloved uncle, an extra nephew and a family friend.

In the year 2540, only cockroaches and savages care about family. In his disillusionment about living in The World State, the main character Barnard takes a trip to a small reservation in what once was New Mexico, where people still celebrate their culture and mourn their dead. They quote Shakespeare because art and literature are not forbidden.

Savages, all.

A few years ago I was looking for a new doctor so I could get a prescription of Nasonex, you know, for my nasal allergy symptoms? I picked a doctor based on the fact that she was in my neighborhood and worked with my insurance company, which is probably not the best way to pick a physician.

Anyway, since I was a new patient, she asked me to fill out a survey to mark all of the symptoms I might have experienced in the past year. I marked “headaches,” not that I get bad headaches or a lot of headaches, just the occasional headache. That’s normal, right?

So, when she asked me about it, I said, sometimes I clench my teeth when I’m sleeping, and I wake up with a headache. So, with a few psychological questions uncovering a family history of self medication, she decided that I too must be medicated.

I discovered that mouth guards are not the only solution for teeth clenching. There are pharmaceuticals specifically designed for this purpose. And I had the pleasure of taking them. Well, I wouldn’t actually say it was a pleasure.

I was dizzy all the time, and I really felt like I was off my game, like I wasn’t as smart or confident or in control as I was when I wasn’t on mind altering medication. I went to the doctor and told her I didn’t like taking the drugs. Intelligent woman that she was, she argued, “They don’t alter your mind, they just make it more normal.” I just looked at her like she was stupid, because, well, she was.

Anyway, I thought of this story because it just goes to show that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is not as far off as the year 2540. In this hopeful future society, everyone is on drugs to help mellow them out and make the world a better place. If anyone complains about their life, their friends will tell them, “Just shut up and take your Soma.”

We all just want to be “normal,” right?

What would you hope for? A universally content society? Total equality? The perfect drug? That’s what Aldous Huxley gives us in the future London of Brave New World.

Of course, the author was famous for experimental drug use. On the other hand, I’m sure he wasn’t thinking, wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone took LSD? Because that’s just silly.

Huxley’s Soma is a beautiful invention of future pharmacology. It’s Brain Candy without the crazy, comatose side effects. And Huxley also understands that a happy person is one who is getting laid on a regular basis. So everyone does. Yippee.

As long as you don’t mind being average, your life would be grand in this future society. We can only hope.