"You might find me, if you like, around Fleet Street, I wouldn't wonder."

"The various Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street." - p. 65

So as it turns out, the structure of this book is even more convoluted than I thought, and from this point forth, Huxley's got his chapters divided into parts, so that's weird.

Furthermore, this relationship between Helmholtz Watson and Bernard Marx seems sort of unexpected. Helmholtz is the cool kid on the block with the rumored six hundred forty girls in four years-- which is about a hundred sixty per year, which ends up being about one every other day, which is pretty crazy. Bernard is the scrawny one of whom people are allegedly suspicious, although I don't understand why yet, and I hope I haven't missed something there. Anyway, I don't trust it. It calls to mind the Marauders and Peter Pettigrew, which is a Harry Potter reference for anybody who doesn't get it, and in that case, read this.

"A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism." - p. 69

That sort of paragraph makes me feel inadequate on dual levels, the first being that I can't in all honesty say I know what the latter half of it really means, and the second being that it just sounds so nice, and I wish I could do that. Both of these reasons make me want to... well... harbor resentment toward this Huxley guy. That's not very exciting at all, but I don't think it would be terribly productive to exaggerate, in this situation. On a side note, "asceticism" makes me think of Siddhartha, and because of Siddhartha, I did remember vaguely that ascetics seem to try to rid their lives of the ability to feel, although my dictionary widget says it's mostly about self-discipline. I thought "impotence" was the same as infertility. Anyway, the general idea (*salute* "General Idea.") seems to be that they're both isolated because they're different, so... I guess they can relate to each other, but I'm still not really sure they're friends.

Aaaaand I almost forgot, a simile:

"Besides, can you make words really piercing--you know, like the very hardest X-rays--when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?" - p. 70

"Widget" is fun to say.

"On the fringe of the little group stood a stranger--a man of middle height, black-haired, with a hooked nose, full red lips, eyes very piercing and dark." - p. 33, Brave New World

"Professor Quirrel, in his absurd turban, was talking to a teacher with greasy black hair, a hooked nose, and sallow skin." - p. 126, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

I'm just saying.

Also, I would like to point out, with no small amount of frustration on my part, that ninety-nine percent of the words I have to find in the dictionary end up making me feel uncomfortable. I'm not saying it isn't better to say "copulate" and "pneumatic" than the other words that could be used, and I'm not saying Huxley should be censoring those parts, and I'm not saying we shouldn't read it. I'm just saying that I hope no one ever looks through the history on my computer dashboard's dictionary widget.

The structure gets pretty crazy in this chapter. The perspective/scene changes with every paragraph, most of the time, and there are these little encircled lightning bolts randomly placed within the text, and I can't decipher their purpose. Maybe there isn't one. Also, at the end of chapter three, we see the start of chapter four, which is headed with a nice bold "Part One." What have I been reading, then? Part Zero? Some three-chapter preface?

Furthermore, a metaphor: (rhymes are exciting)

"Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier." - p. 43, BNW

flood=feeling=passion=madness

This reminds me of some sort of mathematical property. Stupid equals sign shortcuts. Is it the commutative one? I don't actually care; math hates me.

This chapter also introduced the idea of the instability of feeling strongly; it was on page 41 or so. I sense that that will show up a lot in this novel because dystopia novels seem to, in my experience, stress--in their dearth of feelings we societally consider to be "normal"-- the importance of those feelings. On a side note, I really dislike the word "feelings." Anyway, I do understand their point. We can get awfully sidetracked if we let "feelings" grip our minds too firmly, but they're pretty important to meaningful existence. That's a vague explanation, but in our society, at least, I think it's relatively axiomatic.

A few last side notes:

1) "History is bunk." That's weird. I don't know what it means yet.

2) I think Bernard Marx is going to be our trusty nonconformist.

3) I think freemartins might be the ones in charge of keeping the world populated, since they apparently are unlikely to be seen with contraceptives.

4) A.F. started with the release of Ford's first T-Model.

The Shurley Method

"Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks-- already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly." - p. 21/22

That's called Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning, apparently. It's alluding to the Pavlov's Dogs experiment, which Ms. Schembra pounded into our brains day after day in health class; it also comes up when I'm at the library, and the sound of books thundering (and sometimes tumbling unpredictably in crazy-making individual doses) onto the conveyor belt calls me immediately to retrieve the asparagus key to unlock the door so I don't have to WAIT for the conveyor, because that would be ridiculous. Usually. Tangents are great. *broad hand gesture*

Huxley also alludes to Henry Ford, who is apparently a Godlike figure in the lives of these Greek letters in A.F.214. They make the sign of the T, which made a lot more sense when my half-sleeping car-ride-addled brain concluded that it stood for Ford. Now I am confused again. And generally they just say Ford where people nowadays might say God. Maybe in 1932 they said "Lord" instead. That would be a more satisfying substitute, in that case.

I would also like to address this concept of hypnopœdia. I'm terribly sorry to say that it just dooooesn't work like that. I know this because I recorded myself reading my AP US History outlines and played them while I slept in the day(s) leading up to my first semester final, and I still got... I don't remember... but it didn't work, is my point. The only part that worked was the part where I read it the first time. Now it's saved in a random playlist on iTunes, and occasionally when it's on shuffle, I have to lunge for the space bar in an effort to avoid being conscious while listening to my own voice. Also, they're teaching the children mean things. Azi says "stupid" is a bad word.

Also, this:

"Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob."

There are so many things about that paragraph that bother me. Not in the sense that I am actually at this point harboring ill will toward Aldous Huxley, but in the sense that... actually, I am. Not only is that sentence excessive-sarcastic-air-quoting lacking both a subject noun and verb, if I'm not mistaken, which assumes bravely (pun?) that we will connect the description to his previous paragraph about the overall process of hypnopœdia, but also it ends a thing in a preposition, which I really try to avoid even though nobody cares except for me, and also he used the form of "till" that means "to prepare land for the raising of crops." And "sibilant with categorical imperative"? Come on. Preposition. You know he's just showing off. Preposition.

It is actually pretty sick that I still remember that, so... take from that what you will.

Ghosts

"The light was frozen, dead, a ghost." - p. 3

I understand that frozen and dead could call to mind ghostliness, and I suppose I understand that light could be ghostly, but it still seems like a weird metaphor to me.

A lot about this book is weird to me so far. For instance, the sentence "Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs" makes little sense to me, but maybe I should actually research this "theremogene" stuff if I am actually that curious. I just hate that moment when I realize I'm researching something that doesn't actually exist; it could very well be fictional, for all I know.

Also, this business of the "whole world problem" being solved by this crazy bokanovskification thing makes no sense to me. The goal seems to be population stability, but that's definitely going to get out of control either because of simple exponents (oxymoron?) or because, if it's a case of only a few randomly selected individuals being given the job of reproducing, like in The Giver (I think?), people will just get mad, eventually. That is all conjecture, of course.

I'm also perplexed by the point of view. The narrator seems to be a big fan of this utopian society, which is not usually the case. Typically, the narrator is the one that's not content with the way things are going -- Winston in 1984, for instance.

And I have no idea what a "freemartin" is; it sounds like some sort of androgynous creation. The whole business of creating people to be happy with their predestined roles in society is questionable. It's like house elves being happiest as slaves. I dunno how they came to be like that, and it doesn't seem quite right, but it's better they be happy as slaves than unhappy and free . . . right? I don't know. That sounds really messed up.

Also, there's a random mention of "three ghosts" and of weirdly colored people like Lenina, and somebody shouts "Ass!" and I have no idea what that's all about, and why was making "them taste the rich blood-surrogate" ever considered a good idea? And the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons--are those their names? Is everybody just given a Greek letter for a name, or is that the way their role is determined . . . ?

And what does A.F. mean? Anno Flamingo? Sorry. That was flippant.

I think that concludes my halfway comprehensible ramblings.

Frenchy McVowels

. . . wrote a lovely little foreword thing in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I began reading at 3:49 AM on Tuesday, June 14, 2011 after waking completely, abruptly and inexplicably. It's in french, though, which I don't speak, so I'm going to use Google Translate because Google is alive, so he'll probably do a good job, right?

So Mr. Nicolas Berdiaeff said this:

"Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu'on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur realisation définitive? . . . Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-étre un siécle nouveau commence-t-il, un siécle oú les intellectuels et la classe cultivée réveront aux moyens d'éviter les utopies et de retourner á une société non utopique, moins "parfaite" et plus libre."

I can't unquote. Why can I not unquote? Blast.

Anyway:

"Utopias appear to be much more feasible than was previously thought. And we are now at a far more frightening question: How to avoid their final completion?... Utopiasare realizable. Life march towards utopias. And perhaps a new century begins there,a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream how to avoid utopias and return to a non-utopian, less "perfect" and more free. "

I guess his point is that anytime there is a "utopia," it is actually a dystopia, and that's never good, so we should avoid them, even though they seem tempting in theory.