BNW ... final thoughts

As we wrap up our class discussion of this novel, a few ideas have been floating around which are indeed signs of the shifts in society since Huxley's day. When he wrote about Soma, the wonder drug which controlled the masses, he likely did not foresee all the interpretations such a force would render. In class discussions, we have wondered if this soma, not altogether unlike a prescription muscle relaxer on the market today, would be more recreational in use, like marijuana or Ecstasy or cocaine or if anti-depressants would have that spot. Some students even ventured to assert that Ritalin or Adderall is more likely akin to Huxley's drug of choice. Even alcohol and binge drinking seem to fit his purpose of the soma holiday. Regardless of the way we view this attachment to drug use, whether prescription or recreational, Huxley foreshadows the attachment society would have to this escape hatch of sorts. Papers that my students are working on now, selecting something from Huxley's fictional world and juxtaposing it with our day promise to be an interesting bit of reading. They are exploring cloning and birth control and virtual reality and even retirement home living. A few are looking closely at the propaganda Hitler used some 8-10 years after this novel was published. It is frightenly similar. Well, I am looking forward to their analysis. We head off in two directions after that, one class will be discussing Pride and Prejudice and the other will be delving into the Greek tragedies. I will see what connections await.

Brave New World: the conversation

In the final chapters of the novel, John the Savage has a powerful and revealing conversation with Mustapha Mond (aka Must Staff a World) about the choice between freedom and happiness in life. John says, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." Mustapha Mond believes man's happiness is more powerful than the freedom of choice. One of the either-or dilemmas that Huxley invites us to consider is how much are we willing to surrender of our lives in order to receive protection, security, and stability? What drove Huxley to this choice seems to be the very air of 1932, ripe with Pavlovian conditioning and sullied with a grave economic depression. I wonder if the book resonates with our world; how much control do we surrender for comfort? Is happiness the goal?

Brave New World

I began teaching this novel in 1983; 27 years have come and gone, most of them with me still reading and thinking about Huxley's nightmare. What I did not know in 1983 ( nor did any of my students) was that the weapon of mass destruction he chose, Anthrax, would, in fact, be one that soldiers, postal carriers, and the general public today also fears. Huxley writes that the ingenious method of destruction was the Russians' infecting the water supply. Eco-terrorism does not seem so fanciful in 2010.
In 1932, when he wrote this work, we were in that not so calm lull between the World Wars. Huxley, like many other authors, was horrified by the brutality of the world at hand, and in his fiction gave this worst-case scenario shape. Other parts of the novel, the cloning, which was rather a ludicrous notion for the readers of the 1930s now exists in many places, and we seem just a few steps from the engineered babies he describes. The feelies, his version of virtual reality, seems like Sims or Second Life on steroids. The Malthusian Drill eerily resembles birth control methods available today. In fact, the more I teach this novel, the more prophetic Huxley seems. As I spend the next week or so discussing this book with the seniors of 2010, I am anxious to know how they will feel about the world Huxley creates. With what lens will this group, who were born in 1992, 60 years after this novel's publication, read Huxley? I will let you know.

Happiness Completed & Quest Begun

I just finished Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project which explores her year- long journey looking for the path to a happier life. As I wrote last week, I found many of her ideas to be so uplifting. A gratitude journal, making new friends, starting a children's literature reading group, be a treasure house of happy memories -- all these and many more comprise strategies Gretchen devised in her year of the project. Her first rule, "Be Gretchen," seems to be the most basic but perhaps most challenging. Just as Polonius says to Laertes, "To thine own self be true." Achieving authenticity is a feat.
When I finished the The Happiness Project, I was delighted to find that I could order a Happiness Project Toolbox, could follow Gretchen Rubin on Twitter, and form my own Happiness Group with the help of a starter kit that she would send me. So, much like Gretchen, I am launching another project. First a blog, then twitter, now the Happiness Project.... when will I find time to teach?
Speaking of teaching, next week, I am writing a bit about Brave New World. I am wondering if Huxley resonates for the seniors of 2010 as powerfully as it always has for me. Community, Identity, Stability.... hmmmm

The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a moving novel about the early 1960s racial tension in Jackson, Mississippi. Having been born about that time and living in North Louisiana, I recall vividly the struggle between blacks and whites as desegregation swept the South. The Help though does not focus on the marches, the riots, the brutal clash in its most overt form, although all these are all present as a background to the scenes Stockett writes. What Stockett does achieve in near perfection is establishing the powerful, interpersonal relationships between the black women who work in homes and the white ladies of the house, their employers. Stockett depicts varying strands of these relationships, from ones of trust and love, albeit a rarer case, to the demeaning ones commonplace with the fictionalized Junior League contingency who raise funds for starving children in Africa but ignore the poverty just outside their neighborhood. The premise for the novel becomes one young, would-be journalist, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan's expose of the trials and tribulations of being the help. She enlists at first just one woman whose own story is sad, however typical. Later Abileen and her friend Minny convince others to join in telling their experiences of working in a white household. With a New York book publisher interested in the idea, Skeeter and the maids write their own revolution, ignited with the publication of their stories. The Southern employers are exposed for all their racist behaviors, and another powder keg is lit in the Deep South of 1962. I felt a powerful connection to this novel; I was, in fact, raised by a black woman, Pansy, who worked for my family for over 40 years. She was the kindest, most generous woman I have known. She had a deep, abiding faith in God, a contagious laugh and simply loved us all without limit. When she passed away, just a few months before my mother's own death, we were all bereft. Having lived 82 years in the South, picking cotton as a child, Pansy, I am sure, had stories of her own to tell. This novel has made me wish someone could tell them for her.

School is coming

Next week, I will begin blogging about not only the new books I read, but also will revisit the classics I teach. So if you are one of my former students, and I write about a work that you enjoyed (or not) please feel free to engage. I will also invite the Class of 2011 to read and respond to the works we read throughout the year. These works will include
Brave New World
Pride and Prejudice
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Dante's Inferno
Siddhartha
Heart of Darkness
The Metamorphosis
Oedipus Rex
Antigone
Hamlet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire

I hope this blog can provide a great forum for exchange of ideas. I can't wait!

The Happiness Project

I am only part way through a terrific bit of nonfiction, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. She has written biographies of both Churchill and Kennedy and has a researcher's passion for any subject she undertakes. She actually stumbled upon this idea about decoding happiness one day as she says while riding the subway. What makes us happy? How can we maximize happiness? Happiness is a trendy topic these days with a class at Harvard dedicated to the very subject. Rubin's not a depressed type; in fact, she says on a scale of 1-5, she was close to a 4 in her own happiness when she began the study. However, she wanted to investigate the substructure of that ephemeral term and devised a year- long project, which incidentally she blogged about. Each month she sets specific goals to increase her happiness quotient. These may be as physical as a thorough de-cluttering of office and closet or as luxurious as a moderate splurge. Rubin works to not only increase her own level and understanding of happiness but also includes excerpts from her blogs when readers offered their own responses to the questions she posed. Since I have only arrived at July ( her book follows a calendar year) I am not sure if her final analysis will be earth shattering, but I must say I have enjoyed her journey. And by the way, I am a 4 on the 1-5 scale myself!

That Old Cape Magic

Let me begin by stating I have never been to the Cape. I have read lots of stories which evoke the Cape, and so it feels like a place I know, if only in text. So when I saw Richard Russo had written That Old Cape Magic, published in 2009, it seemed like a good choice. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Empire Falls, a spectacular work. His 2007 Bridge of Sighs was also excellent, but this latest book is much lighter and warmer than I expected. Cape follows a year in the life of a Hollywood screenwriter/ college professor, Jack Griffin, as he struggles with his marriage, his career and his dead mother and father. He, in fact, carries their urns around in the trunk of his car for quite a while, trying to release them at a perfect spot on the Cape, their annual summer vacation spot during Jack's turbulent childhood. Both his parents -- Ivy League educated English professors -- were doomed to spend their careers in the wretched Midwest. Jack's own marriage comes into play as he tries to see the influence his parent's marriage model established for him. It is a wickedly funny novel in parts, one scene with a rehearsal dinner disaster was laugh-out loud hilarious. Russo's brilliance as a novelist is in his ability to evoke truth in his characters, and I must say he has frankly nailed the Sandwich Generation. If you haven't read any Russo, Empire Falls is more sweeping, but there is clearly magic at The Cape.

Home again, Home again

After a week of no Internet -- between the storm which actually sent a lightning bolt through my neighbor's attic, burning down his entire home, and a sojourn to Louisiana -- I am ready to blog again. Jennifer Weiner's latest novel, Fly Away Home, seems to be a combination of the many political scandals that have popped up in recent years. A long time senator and "happily" married man indulges in an affair which breaks apart his family -- while Weiner could have gotten on the bandwagon here and made the novel's focus the rage of the betrayed wife and daughters, she, in fact, turns the book into an examination of the way we live our lives and the choices we make. Neither daughter, both adults, one a physician engaged in her own extramarital romp, the other, just out of rehab and looking for direction, is quite able to judge and condemn the brief exploits of her father. The wife, however, whom the novel follows most thoughtfully, spends her time coming to terms with herself as an individual and not as an accessory of a famous husband. She must begin to live her life on her terms and happily has a coastal summer house in which to seek respite. This novel much like all of Weiner's books has believable characters and a slim plot; her talent as a writer it seems to me is in the creation of people so full of truth that we may forget we are in a world of fiction. Now having read all of Weiner's books, I must admit that Good in Bed was for me the most hilarious and well done. These last few seem to be more rushed and less quirky. Nonetheless, if you want a quick and enjoyable read for these dog days of summer, Fly Away Home will do.