recent Huxley misc and perpetual Orwell book

[Monte Davis]

Excellent point and well-chosen examples on the (discontinuous, meandering,
but real) Huxley > Orwell > Pynchon trajectory of the sex/power/control
cluster. We touch on it here more or less explicitly every time we touch on
the prominence in P of sex with too-young girls, "what does Frenesi fsee in
Vond?", the vicious slave-baby-making game that the Vroom women play with
Mason and Dixon, Blicero & Enzian, Blicero and Katje and Gottfried (and the
many lesser Hansel & Gretel variations threaded through GR), the
nun-Jesuit-Chinese-Native American captivity narrative, etc.

You don't have to walk all the way with Freud to agree that parent-child
and adult-child asymmetries of power and knowledge -- and the kinks those
inevitably weave into *non*-sexual love/trust/dependency -- are so
universal that it would be amazing if they *didn't* recur widely in sexual
love/trust/dependency... AND in the social/political power asymmetries of
slurpin' up that soma, lovin' Big Brother, and putting your erection in the
hands of multinationals.

"the boots are not exactly on US faces"... yeah but think beyond the
explicitly political/economic arena. E.g., when I read Tore's precis of the
Engdahl "insular American fiction" brouhaha, I flashed on the 250+ years of
painful US awareness (blending into pugnacious denial) that we were
"cultural colonials" vis-a-vis the UK, which of course we were... and the
never-ending critical/historical gnawing over whether it was Hawthorne or
Melville or Twain or Howells or that turncoat tea-drinker Slammin' Hank
James who set us on our own two feet. Aren't there parent-child, "you're
not the boss of me any more" echoes in some of the responses to that snotty
Nobel guy from that pissant little Nordic country that hasn't invaded
anybody for centuries?

And so by a commodius vicus we return to polymorphous perversity. When I
was much younger, "Swedish movies" signified two and only two things in the
US: Bergman to cineastes, and [what was then deemed] porn to everyone else.
I didn't see much of the latter, but as I remember it was in the air that
you got to see more skin and Action than in Hollywood movies...

BUT that was understood to be 99% blonde vanilla heterosexual action, *not*
S&M or Slothrop/Bianca or any of that. Dirty, sexy "old Europe" as a
*continent* had all that tucked away, sure, but Scandinavia... well, unlike
France or Italy it was very very modern, Protestant, and
gender-egalitarian, so in our minds its sexiness had to be closer to
healthy sunlit uninhibited nudism than to the glorious daisy chain on the
Anubis.


On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Perry Noid <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:

> This often comes up when I come across someone who has either read BNW or
> 1984, or both, and the first point often made is "well Huxley's prediction
> is the more accurate one." Might be true on the surface but Orwell, imo,
> offers a lot more in terms of control other than "boot-on-the-face"
> methods, as Huxley puts it. And the boots are not exactly on US faces,
> true, but they are and have been on many faces around the globe. Seems to
> me Pynchon synthesizes both in GR
>
> "The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism
> which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and
> denying it." - AH letter
>
> "But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes
> up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but
> that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its
> very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It
> needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts
> after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is
> no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established
> universally, at the family level, the State would wither away." - GR
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> *Open Culture* ‏@openculture  <https://twitter.com/openculture> 2m2
>> minutes ago <https://twitter.com/openculture/status/690974006841769984>
>>
>> Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours
>> (1949) http://goo.gl/XYH0mk  <https://t.co/XdGmuKSc2T>
>>
>
>
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