punk rock housewife

Everyone should wait until they’re 26 to read Brave New World.

I did. Most persons in the English-reading universe read it at the behest of some cagey high school teacher (or, I shudder to think, after Googling their latest favoritest Top 40 hits and finding their derivation; to be fair I once did this with R.E.M. lyrics and hope I’m a little better read for it)

In School, it’s sexy and stimulating to think you understand the idea of a politically and philosophically circumscribed life and see everyone around you “living” it. Only you know the lie! Special you. Punk rock music and the Green Party are very popular at this age.

After School (i.e. 25 forward, you fuck, and why are you not in a Master’s program yet? Here’s why) the divisions between Greek-lettered castes of what you’d assumed were civilization become clear. Either you succeed at your presumed goal and your friends are a bunch of materialistic fuckheads who blather on about their diets and their philosophies and other luxuries of the Ubermensch; you somewhat level out and experience dizzying sensual (drugs) and intellectual (books) highs and (work) lows; or you utterly fail and wait tables, like me.

Anyway, you get it! People’s expectations of life are conditioned. But this is an un- and anti-American concept. We like to think of ourselves as economically, socially and spiritually malleable. We might be Oliver Twist in the morning and Donald Trump by night. (Sorry, fellow feminists, there’s still no good female analogue for you. Working on Potsy and Oprah.)

And if I ever thought Literature mattered, it’s right here. There courses through British literature a certain satirical sense of place, a winking collusion with bullshit and a spirit of imaginative flight that in American literature sound pretentious at best. Wilde, Wodehouse and yes, fucking Huxley! flung it all over the place; Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams and sure, even Nick Hornby borrow heavily from the technique. Every decent American writer has dutifully tried and inevitably - necessarily? - failed to employ the same voice. Here is a perfect example from Brave New World.

Like the vague torsos of fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lolled on the blue air above their heads.

How has the writer managed to make as hackneyed and overdone an image as The Sky Above the Lovers’ Heads at once frighteningly erotic, weirdly political, sensually luscious and adorably dear?

I have no thesis, save for this: He’s fucking British.