Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
JEAN COCTEAU (1889-1963)
JEAN COCTEAU (1889-1963)
The French poet, writer, artist, and film maker Jean Maurice Eugene Clement Cocteau was born to a wealthy family on July 5, 1889 in a small town near Paris, France. Cocteau's father committed suicide when he was about 10 years old.
In 1900, he entered a private school and was expelled in 1904. After his expulsion from school, Cocteau ran away to Marseilles where he lived in the "red light district" under a false name. Police discovered him in Marseilles and returned him to his uncle's care.
At the age of 17 or 18, Cocteau fell in love with an actress named Madeleine Carlier. She was 30 years old at the time. She later ended the relationship.
In 1908, Cocteau associated himself with Edouard de Max. De Max was a reigning tragedian of Paris stage at this time. De Max encouraged Cocteau to write and on April 4 of that year rented the Theatre Femina for the premiere of the young writer's poetry.
In 1909, Cocteau met the Russian impresario Sergey Daighilev who ran the Ballets Russes. Daighilev encouraged Cocteau to venture into the genre of ballet. The Russian challenged Cocteau to "Ettonne-moi" (Surprise me). The remark pushed Cocteau to write the libretto for an exotic ballet called Le Dieu Bleu. During this time, Cocteau also met composer Igor Stravinsky who was working on his composition The Rite of Spring. In the spring of 1914, Cocteau visited Stravinsky in Switzerland. It was during this visit that Cocteau finished his first book, Le Potomak.
The First World War broke out in the summer of 1914 and though Cocteau never served in the military, he did help run an ambulance service. He acquainted himself with a group of marines. Cocteau was arrested and returned to civilian life in 1915.
In 1917, he met Pablo Picasso. Cocteau and Picasso went to Rome where they met up with Diaghilev. At this point, Cocteau helped prepare the ballet Parade. Picasso designed the sets, Erik Satie wrote the music, and the ballet was choreographed by Leonide Massine. The Paris opening in May of that year was a disaster. A few years later the ballet was successful.
After the war Cocteau continued his association with several well known artists. He founded a publishing house called Editions de la Sirene. The company published Cocteau's writings and many musical scores of Stravinsky, Satie and a group of composers known as Les Six.
In 1918, Cocteau formed an intimate friendship with a 15 year old novelist, Raymond Radiguet. Radiguet strongly influenced Cocteau's art and life. The young writer would die from typhoid fever in 1923. His death was a severe blow to Cocteau and drove him to use opium. During Cocteau's recovery from his opium addiction, the artist created some of his most important works including the stage play Orphee, the novel, Les Enfants terribles, and many long poems.
In 1930 Cocteau's first film, Blood of a Poet was released. The film was a commentary on his own private mythology. Cocteau designed the work concerning the adventures of a young poet condemned to walk the halls of the Hotel of Dramatic Follies for his crime of having brought a statue to life. In the early 1930's, Cocteau wrote what some believe is his greatest play, La Machine Infernal. The play was a treatment of the Oedipus theme. Cocteau also wrote La voix humaine(1930, The Human Voice), Les chevaliers de la table rounde (1937, The Knights of the Round Table), Les parents terribles (1938, Intimate Relations), and La machine a ecrire (1941, The Typewriter).
During the next 15 years the artist's work lapsed. One reason for this is his recurring addiction to opium. His return to work in the early 1940's was primarily due to the influence of his close friend, actor Jean Marais.
In 1945, Cocteau directed his adaptation of La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast). The film marked a triumphant return of Cocteau to the screen. Marais starred in the film as the Beast, Beauty's suitor, and the Prince.
In the late 1940's, Cocteau adapted two of his plays to film; The Eagle with Two Heads and The Storm Within.
In 1950, Cocteau directed the film Orpheus which again starred Marais. This time the theme revolves around a poet beset by artistic and romantic rivals. When his wife dies, Orpheus descends to Hell to rescue her. In Hell, Orpheus' fate is determined before a tribunal. Also in 1950, Cocteau used his artists' eye to decorate the Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and begin a series of graphic works.
In 1954, on the death of his friend Collette, the novelist, Cocteau took her place in the Belgian Academy. In 1955, he was elected to the French Academy.
In 1959, Cocteau made his last film as a director, The Testament of Orpheus. The elaborate home movie stars Cocteau and also features cameos from many celebrities including Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner and Jean-Pierre Leaud.
The artist died of a heart attack at age 74 at his chateau in Milly-la-Foret, France on October 11, 1963 after hearing the news of the death of another friend, the singer Edith Piaf.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Coast To Coast (3.23.2011)
Global Conspiracy:
In the first half of Wednesday's show, controversial author David Icke discussed what's behind the curtain of world events, how a global cartel pulls the strings, and changes that humanity is facing. The planet is undergoing a vibrational or energetic shift and during this time hidden aspects of life will be revealed to people, along with big geophysical upheavals, and increased solar activity, he said. One such revelation that people are becoming aware of is that a secret cabal runs the world, and pushes events in a direction that gives them more and more power, he stated.
In addition to another deliberate crashing of the economy, conflicts in the Middle East, including the recent attacks on Libya, are part of a plan by the cabal to instigate WWIII, drawing in not only the US, but China and Russia, Icke continued. The idea of the Third World War is to create so much violence and economic mayhem, that "they can say the only way to stop it is to have one global army under one command," which will impose the will of a world government on any country, region, or people, he warned.
Alternative Energy:
In the second half, researcher Sterling D. Allan introduced some amazing free & alternative energy technologies which could have the potential to eliminate the need for oil, nuclear, and other polluting energy sources. The days of the old energy monopolies are numbered, he said, adding that "it's time for free energy to emerge," empowering the people in a new revolution.
A variety of promising solutions are making their way to market. Andrea Rossi, joined the program for a segment , to talk about his 10 kilowatt cold fusion device, which is clean, inexpensive, and though it involves a nuclear reaction, creates no radioactive waste. In the short term, his device will be offered in industrial use, for heat and power, he reported. Allan also mentioned other exciting developments including PlasmERG's Noble Gas Engine, which runs on fuel that would only cost a few dollars a month, and Aviso Technologies out of the Philippines, which uses Tesla-like circuitry.
Watch Here
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Record companies rethink strategies as music sales fall
The beginning of 2011 has signaled almost no signs of positive things to come for the future of the music business. The hope generated from bloated 2010 sales has all but vanished, as Warner Music Group hired investment bank Goldman Sachs to search out potential buyers for the company.
The news came on Jan. 20, one of the more prominent announcements in a couple of months filled with similar negative proclamations for the future of the music industry.
Warner Music, one of the four major record companies, hired Goldman Sachs to investigate interested buyers after several offers to buy out the company flooded Warner's management, according to news reports.
The hope that came about from 2010 was, as expected, a fluke. Overall, music sales fell from 2009, but weren't as low as some experts feared.
However, a chunk of sales came about from the rejuvenated purchase of previously released records, as well as with the death of Michael Jackson and the re-release of The Beatles' catalog.
Warner isn't the only record company changing tactics in this gloomy era. In early January, Sony Corporation of America announced its intention to close a 50-year-old CD manufacturing plant in Pitman, N.J. The plant's closing hints toward the dim future of physical media.
While Sony will continue CD production at other U.S. locations, the decision comes along with several other negative reports concerning physical music.
The most consistent are those of ever-falling weekly record purchases. Although 2011 is still young, the record for lowest album sales for a No. 1 album has already been broken twice, according to Billboard.com.
The Billboard 200 Chart uses Nielsen SoundScan to track the top-selling albums every week, and SoundScan has been keeping track of the data since 1991.
On Jan. 11, Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" broke the record for lowest-selling No. 1 album of all time, selling about 53,000 copies. Swift's debut week, on the other hand, saw "Speak Now" sell more than 1 million copies.
Just one week later, the dubious record was broken again. Cake took the No. 1 spot on Jan. 18, selling about 44,000 copies of its latest album, "Showroom of Compassion," in its debut week.
To compare these tough times to the industry's past, consider pop group 'N Sync, a band that sold 2.42 million copies of "No Strings Attached" in its debut week in 2000.
In 2010, only 326.2 million albums were sold worldwide, the lowest yearly total in recorded history, according to SoundScan. Only 13 albums sold more than 1 million copies, and only one album, Eminem's "Recovery," sold more than 3 million.
Similarly, Eminem's "The Marshall Mathers LP" sold 7.9 million copies in 2000, and every top-10 sales record that year sold more than 3.8 million copies.
The bold theme that resounds in these data is that less people are buying music than ever before - something that could be accredited to the economy and the Internet. With the continued rise of digital music and peer-to-peer file sharing, more people can hear what they want for free.
Jamie Fink, a UF public relations freshman, said she only pays for the music she wants to hear most. An avid music listener, Fink said she couldn't imagine having to pay for all the music that interests her.
"When I'm really looking forward to a new album, I'll download it on iTunes," she said. "I only buy physical CDs from my favorite artists."
Fink said she usually downloads other music online to gauge how interested she is in a new album. She added that even when she likes a new release, she won't always buy it.
"Unfortunately, I can't always afford to buy all of the new music that I like," Fink said.
This mindset is common among several UF students.
UF political science senior Danny Ramos said he tends to listen to more underground, less well-known music.
"I usually will download music first to see if I like it," he said. "If I like it enough, then I'll buy it, but I don't feel like I'm taking anything away from an artist by trying it out first."
However, Ramos said he supports the struggling underground artists whose music he enjoys.
"If buying an album at a show from a band that I like helps them get through their tour a little
easier and provides me with endless hours of entertainment, that's how I legitimize buying music."
SoundScan has carefully documented the falling record sales seen in recent years. Last year, it reported that overall music sales fell by 2.4 percent. Digital purchases rose only by 1 percent.
But physical media fared far worse, as both new and older titles saw significant drops in purchases. New CD sales were down 16 percent in 2010 and purchases of previously released titles fell 23 percent.
Both of those categories saw double-digit drops in 2009, too.
Away from the mainstream radar, independent record labels have found new ways to stay afloat while music fans have become less likely to pay for music. Some of the results that indie labels have arrived at may be surprising.
Vincent Fiorello, owner of Gainesville-based independent record label Paper + Plastick, focuses on putting out quality music but the art that accompanies the music, as well.
"We already know people are going to get the music for free," Fiorello said, "but what we try to do is provide a special physical product for people who like the music."
The result? Limited production of exclusive 12-inch vinyl records.
Paper + Plastick commonly releases intricately designed, multi-colored 12-inch records. The records' artwork is oftentimes quite a sight to behold as well, with die-cut jackets and handmade packaging.
Fiorello said he uses the Internet to his advantage when releasing records, keeping in mind that people have probably already heard it for free.
"We put out good enough music that, when people hear it, they'll like it and want something more from that band," he said. "I want a casual listener to become a fan of the band and want ownership of something more than just the digital music, and that's where the vinyl comes in."
Fiorello added that major labels have been hurt much more by the Internet than by indie labels. While major labels use "machine-gun marketing," according to Fiorello, indie labels exemplify "sniper rifle marketing."
"A major label will just try to get its music out to every outlet and hope that people like it, which costs a lot of money. The indie labels target specific groups and are able to use the Internet to their advantage in that sense," Fiorello said.
Turning things around and using the Internet to his advantage has helped Fiorello and several other indie label owners stay afloat in a struggling economy. The unique and limited physical products have been the key to turning profits in the industry.
Fans, like Ramos, have responded well to that strategy.
"Having a vinyl record is something unique that brings a whole new experience to the music," Ramos said.
Plus, because of the limited and exclusive format, he said he feels like "part of an almost elite fan base who owns that band's music in that format."
The situation's underlying irony is that major labels, once dominant in the physical CD market, are now relying on digital purchases to stay afloat. Meanwhile, smaller labels that don't have the same manpower or resources as music giants have used a business technique that keeps physical media relevant.
At the end of the day, Fiorello said the key to success is adapting and moving forward.
"Maybe it's not what you thought you were going to be doing at first," he said, "but you do what you can to keep going."
The news came on Jan. 20, one of the more prominent announcements in a couple of months filled with similar negative proclamations for the future of the music industry.
The hope that came about from 2010 was, as expected, a fluke. Overall, music sales fell from 2009, but weren't as low as some experts feared.
However, a chunk of sales came about from the rejuvenated purchase of previously released records, as well as with the death of Michael Jackson and the re-release of The Beatles' catalog.
Warner isn't the only record company changing tactics in this gloomy era. In early January, Sony Corporation of America announced its intention to close a 50-year-old CD manufacturing plant in Pitman, N.J. The plant's closing hints toward the dim future of physical media.
While Sony will continue CD production at other U.S. locations, the decision comes along with several other negative reports concerning physical music.
The most consistent are those of ever-falling weekly record purchases. Although 2011 is still young, the record for lowest album sales for a No. 1 album has already been broken twice, according to Billboard.com.
The Billboard 200 Chart uses Nielsen SoundScan to track the top-selling albums every week, and SoundScan has been keeping track of the data since 1991.
On Jan. 11, Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" broke the record for lowest-selling No. 1 album of all time, selling about 53,000 copies. Swift's debut week, on the other hand, saw "Speak Now" sell more than 1 million copies.
Just one week later, the dubious record was broken again. Cake took the No. 1 spot on Jan. 18, selling about 44,000 copies of its latest album, "Showroom of Compassion," in its debut week.
To compare these tough times to the industry's past, consider pop group 'N Sync, a band that sold 2.42 million copies of "No Strings Attached" in its debut week in 2000.
In 2010, only 326.2 million albums were sold worldwide, the lowest yearly total in recorded history, according to SoundScan. Only 13 albums sold more than 1 million copies, and only one album, Eminem's "Recovery," sold more than 3 million.
Similarly, Eminem's "The Marshall Mathers LP" sold 7.9 million copies in 2000, and every top-10 sales record that year sold more than 3.8 million copies.
The bold theme that resounds in these data is that less people are buying music than ever before - something that could be accredited to the economy and the Internet. With the continued rise of digital music and peer-to-peer file sharing, more people can hear what they want for free.
Jamie Fink, a UF public relations freshman, said she only pays for the music she wants to hear most. An avid music listener, Fink said she couldn't imagine having to pay for all the music that interests her.
"When I'm really looking forward to a new album, I'll download it on iTunes," she said. "I only buy physical CDs from my favorite artists."
Fink said she usually downloads other music online to gauge how interested she is in a new album. She added that even when she likes a new release, she won't always buy it.
"Unfortunately, I can't always afford to buy all of the new music that I like," Fink said.
This mindset is common among several UF students.
UF political science senior Danny Ramos said he tends to listen to more underground, less well-known music.
"I usually will download music first to see if I like it," he said. "If I like it enough, then I'll buy it, but I don't feel like I'm taking anything away from an artist by trying it out first."
However, Ramos said he supports the struggling underground artists whose music he enjoys.
"If buying an album at a show from a band that I like helps them get through their tour a little
easier and provides me with endless hours of entertainment, that's how I legitimize buying music."
SoundScan has carefully documented the falling record sales seen in recent years. Last year, it reported that overall music sales fell by 2.4 percent. Digital purchases rose only by 1 percent.
But physical media fared far worse, as both new and older titles saw significant drops in purchases. New CD sales were down 16 percent in 2010 and purchases of previously released titles fell 23 percent.
Both of those categories saw double-digit drops in 2009, too.
Away from the mainstream radar, independent record labels have found new ways to stay afloat while music fans have become less likely to pay for music. Some of the results that indie labels have arrived at may be surprising.
Vincent Fiorello, owner of Gainesville-based independent record label Paper + Plastick, focuses on putting out quality music but the art that accompanies the music, as well.
"We already know people are going to get the music for free," Fiorello said, "but what we try to do is provide a special physical product for people who like the music."
The result? Limited production of exclusive 12-inch vinyl records.
Paper + Plastick commonly releases intricately designed, multi-colored 12-inch records. The records' artwork is oftentimes quite a sight to behold as well, with die-cut jackets and handmade packaging.
Fiorello said he uses the Internet to his advantage when releasing records, keeping in mind that people have probably already heard it for free.
"We put out good enough music that, when people hear it, they'll like it and want something more from that band," he said. "I want a casual listener to become a fan of the band and want ownership of something more than just the digital music, and that's where the vinyl comes in."
Fiorello added that major labels have been hurt much more by the Internet than by indie labels. While major labels use "machine-gun marketing," according to Fiorello, indie labels exemplify "sniper rifle marketing."
"A major label will just try to get its music out to every outlet and hope that people like it, which costs a lot of money. The indie labels target specific groups and are able to use the Internet to their advantage in that sense," Fiorello said.
Turning things around and using the Internet to his advantage has helped Fiorello and several other indie label owners stay afloat in a struggling economy. The unique and limited physical products have been the key to turning profits in the industry.
Fans, like Ramos, have responded well to that strategy.
"Having a vinyl record is something unique that brings a whole new experience to the music," Ramos said.
Plus, because of the limited and exclusive format, he said he feels like "part of an almost elite fan base who owns that band's music in that format."
The situation's underlying irony is that major labels, once dominant in the physical CD market, are now relying on digital purchases to stay afloat. Meanwhile, smaller labels that don't have the same manpower or resources as music giants have used a business technique that keeps physical media relevant.
At the end of the day, Fiorello said the key to success is adapting and moving forward.
"Maybe it's not what you thought you were going to be doing at first," he said, "but you do what you can to keep going."
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
William Blake
“The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: The bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.”
“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
“I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love.”
Aldous Huxley
I love this man's way of thinking, fucking brilliant. Aldous Huxley was basically blind. He thought a lot and wrote a lot. His words inspire my writings, and did they to Jim Morrisons. His idea's are coming back FAST! Read and Listen!
DANNY DELEGATO
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, into a family that included some of the most distinguished members of that part of the English ruling class made up of the intellectual elite. Aldous' father was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a great biologist who helped develop the theory of evolution. His mother was the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist; the niece of Matthew Arnold, the poet; and the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, a famous educator and the real-life headmaster of Rugby School who became a character in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Undoubtedly, Huxley's heritage and upbringing had an effect on his work. Gerald Heard, a longtime friend, said that Huxley's ancestry "brought down on him a weight of intellectual authority and a momentum of moral obligations." Throughout Brave New World you can see evidence of an ambivalent attitude toward such authority assumed by a ruling class.
Like the England of his day, Huxley's Utopia possesses a rigid class structure, one even stronger than England's because it is biologically and chemically engineered and psychologically conditioned. And the members of Brave New World's ruling class certainly believe they possess the right to make everyone happy by denying them love and freedom.
Huxley's own experiences made him stand apart from the class into which he was born. Even as a small child he was considered different, showing an alertness, an intelligence, what his brother called a superiority. He was respected and loved--not hated--for these abilities, but he drew on that feeling of separateness in writing Brave New World. Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, both members of the elite class, have problems because they're different from their peers. Huxley felt that heredity made each individual unique, and the uniqueness of the individual was essential to freedom. Like his family, and like the Alphas of Brave New World, Huxley felt a moral obligation--but it was the obligation to fight the idea that happiness could be achieved through class-instituted slavery of even the most benevolent kind.
Another event that marked Huxley was his mother's death from cancer when he was 14. This, he said later, gave him a sense of the transience of human happiness. Perhaps you can also see the influence of his loss in Brave New World. The Utopians go to great lengths to deny the unpleasantness of death, and to find perpetual happiness. But the cost is very great. By denying themselves unpleasant emotions they deny themselves deeply joyous ones as well. Their happiness can be continued endlessly by taking the drug soma by making love, or by playing Obstacle Golf, but this happiness is essentially shallow. Standing in contrast to the Utopians are the Savages on the Reservation in New Mexico: poor, dirty, subject to the ills of old age and painful death, but, Huxley seems to believe, blessed with a happiness that while still transient is deeper and more real than that enjoyed by the inhabitants of London and the rest of the World State.
When Huxley was 16 and a student at the prestigious school Eton, an eye illness made him nearly blind. He recovered enough vision to go on to Oxford University and graduate with honors, but not enough to fight in World War I, an important experience for many of his friends, or to do the scientific work he had dreamed of. Scientific ideas remained with him, however, and he used them in many of his books, particularly Brave New World. The idea of vision also remained important to him; his early novels contain scenes that seem ideal for motion pictures, and he later became a screenwriter.
He entered the literary world while he was at Oxford, meeting writers like Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell and becoming close friends with D. H. Lawrence, with whom you might think he had almost nothing in common.
Huxley published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1916. He married Maria Nys, a Belgian, in 1919. Their only child, Matthew Huxley, was born in 1920. The family divided their time between London and Europe, mostly Italy, in the 1920s, and traveled around the world in 1925 and 1926, seeing India and making a first visit to the United States.
Huxley liked the confidence, vitality, and "generous extravagance" he found in American life. But he wasn't so sure he liked the way vitality was expressed "in places of public amusement, in dancing and motoring... Nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation... It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath--down the waste. Yes, down the waste." Those thoughts of the actual world, from the book Jesting Pilate, were to color his picture of the perpetual happiness attempted in Brave New World.
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His experiences in fascist Italy, where Benito Mussolini led an authoritarian government that fought against birth control in order to produce enough manpower for the next war, also provided materials for Huxley's dystopia, as did his reading of books critical of the Soviet Union.
Huxley wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931. It appeared three years after the publication of his best-seller, the novel Point Counter Point. During those three years, he had produced six books of stories, essays, poems, and plays, but nothing major. His biographer, Sybille Bedford, says, "It was time to produce some full-length fiction--he still felt like holding back from another straight novel--juggling in fiction form with the scientific possibilities of the future might be a new line."
Because Brave New World describes a dystopia, it is often compared with George Orwell's 1984, another novel you may want to read, which also describes a possible horrible world of the future. The world of 1984 is one of tyranny, terror, and perpetual warfare. Orwell wrote it in 1948, shortly after the Allies had defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and just as the West was discovering the full dimensions of the evils of Soviet totalitarianism.
It's important to remember that Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and before Joseph Stalin started the purges that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union. He therefore had no immediate real-life reason to make tyranny and terror major elements of his story. In 1958 Huxley himself said, "The future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell."
In 1937, the Huxleys came to the United States; in 1938 they went to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter (among his films was an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which starred the young Laurence Olivier). He remained for most of his life in California, and one of his novels caricatures what he saw as the strange life there: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In it the tycoon Jo Stoyte tries to achieve immortality through scientific experimentation, even if it means giving up humanity and returning to the completely animal state--an echo of Brave New World.
In 1946 Huxley wrote a Foreword to Brave New World in which he said he no longer wanted to make social sanity an impossibility, as he had in the novel. Though World War II had caused the deaths of some 20 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union, six million Jews, and millions of others, and the newly developed atomic bomb held the threat of even more extensive destruction, Huxley had become convinced that while still "rather rare," sanity could be achieved and said that he would like to see more of it. In the same year, he published The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology of texts with his own commentaries on mystical and religious approaches to a sane life in a sane society.
He also worried about the dangers that threatened sanity. In 1958, he published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life problems and ideas you'll find in the novel--overpopulation, overorganization, and psychological techniques from salesmanship to hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching. They're all tools that a government can abuse to deprive people of freedom, an abuse that Huxley wanted people to fight. If you want to further relate his bad new world to the real world, read Brave New World Revisited.
In the 1950s Huxley became famous for his interest in psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he apparently took a dozen times over ten years. Sybille Bedford says he was looking for a drug that would allow an escape from the self and that if taken with caution would be physically and socially harmless.
He put his beliefs in such a drug and in sanity into several books. Two, based on his experiences taking mescaline under supervision, were nonfiction: Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). Some readers have read those books as encouragements to experiment freely with drugs, but Huxley warned of the dangers of such experiments in an appendix he wrote to The Devils of Loudun (1952), a psychological study of an episode in French history.
Another work centering on drugs and sanity was Island (1962), a novel that required 20 years of thought and five years of writing. Among other things, Island was an antidote to Brave New World, a good Utopia. Huxley deplored the drug he called soma in Brave New World--half tranquilizer, half intoxicant--which produces an artificial happiness that makes people content with their lack of freedom. He approved of the perfected version of LSD that the people of Island use in a religious way.
Huxley produced 47 books in his long career as a writer. The English critic Anthony Burgess has said that he equipped the novel with a brain. Other critics objected that he was a better essayist than novelist precisely because he cared more about his ideas than about plot or characters, and his novels' ideas often get in the way of the story.
But Huxley's emphasis on ideas and his skin as an essayist cannot hide one important fact: The books he wrote that are most read and best remembered today are all novels--Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point from the 1920s, Brave New World and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan from the 1930s. In 1959 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize given every five years; earlier recipients had been Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Theodore Dreiser.
The range of Huxley's interests can be seen from his note that his "preliminary research" for Island included "Greek history, Polynesian anthropology, translations from Sanskrit and Chinese of Buddhist texts, scientific papers on pharmacology, neurophysiology, psychology and education, together with novels, poems, critical essays, travel books, political commentaries and conversations with all kinds of people, from philosophers to actresses, from patients in mental hospitals to tycoons in Rolls-Royces...." He used similar, though probably fewer, sources for Brave New World.
This list gives you some perspective on the wide range of ideas that Huxley studied. He also wrote an early essay on ecology that helped inspire today's environmental movement. And he was a pacifist. This belief prevented him from becoming an American citizen because he would not say his pacifism was a matter of his religion, which might have made him an acceptable conscientious objector.
Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. Maria Huxley died in 1955, and Huxley married Laura Archera a year later. He died November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his parents' grave in England.
Undoubtedly, Huxley's heritage and upbringing had an effect on his work. Gerald Heard, a longtime friend, said that Huxley's ancestry "brought down on him a weight of intellectual authority and a momentum of moral obligations." Throughout Brave New World you can see evidence of an ambivalent attitude toward such authority assumed by a ruling class.
Like the England of his day, Huxley's Utopia possesses a rigid class structure, one even stronger than England's because it is biologically and chemically engineered and psychologically conditioned. And the members of Brave New World's ruling class certainly believe they possess the right to make everyone happy by denying them love and freedom.
Huxley's own experiences made him stand apart from the class into which he was born. Even as a small child he was considered different, showing an alertness, an intelligence, what his brother called a superiority. He was respected and loved--not hated--for these abilities, but he drew on that feeling of separateness in writing Brave New World. Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, both members of the elite class, have problems because they're different from their peers. Huxley felt that heredity made each individual unique, and the uniqueness of the individual was essential to freedom. Like his family, and like the Alphas of Brave New World, Huxley felt a moral obligation--but it was the obligation to fight the idea that happiness could be achieved through class-instituted slavery of even the most benevolent kind.
Another event that marked Huxley was his mother's death from cancer when he was 14. This, he said later, gave him a sense of the transience of human happiness. Perhaps you can also see the influence of his loss in Brave New World. The Utopians go to great lengths to deny the unpleasantness of death, and to find perpetual happiness. But the cost is very great. By denying themselves unpleasant emotions they deny themselves deeply joyous ones as well. Their happiness can be continued endlessly by taking the drug soma by making love, or by playing Obstacle Golf, but this happiness is essentially shallow. Standing in contrast to the Utopians are the Savages on the Reservation in New Mexico: poor, dirty, subject to the ills of old age and painful death, but, Huxley seems to believe, blessed with a happiness that while still transient is deeper and more real than that enjoyed by the inhabitants of London and the rest of the World State.
When Huxley was 16 and a student at the prestigious school Eton, an eye illness made him nearly blind. He recovered enough vision to go on to Oxford University and graduate with honors, but not enough to fight in World War I, an important experience for many of his friends, or to do the scientific work he had dreamed of. Scientific ideas remained with him, however, and he used them in many of his books, particularly Brave New World. The idea of vision also remained important to him; his early novels contain scenes that seem ideal for motion pictures, and he later became a screenwriter.
He entered the literary world while he was at Oxford, meeting writers like Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell and becoming close friends with D. H. Lawrence, with whom you might think he had almost nothing in common.
Huxley published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1916. He married Maria Nys, a Belgian, in 1919. Their only child, Matthew Huxley, was born in 1920. The family divided their time between London and Europe, mostly Italy, in the 1920s, and traveled around the world in 1925 and 1926, seeing India and making a first visit to the United States.
Huxley liked the confidence, vitality, and "generous extravagance" he found in American life. But he wasn't so sure he liked the way vitality was expressed "in places of public amusement, in dancing and motoring... Nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation... It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath--down the waste. Yes, down the waste." Those thoughts of the actual world, from the book Jesting Pilate, were to color his picture of the perpetual happiness attempted in Brave New World.
His experiences in fascist Italy, where Benito Mussolini led an authoritarian government that fought against birth control in order to produce enough manpower for the next war, also provided materials for Huxley's dystopia, as did his reading of books critical of the Soviet Union.
Huxley wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931. It appeared three years after the publication of his best-seller, the novel Point Counter Point. During those three years, he had produced six books of stories, essays, poems, and plays, but nothing major. His biographer, Sybille Bedford, says, "It was time to produce some full-length fiction--he still felt like holding back from another straight novel--juggling in fiction form with the scientific possibilities of the future might be a new line."
Because Brave New World describes a dystopia, it is often compared with George Orwell's 1984, another novel you may want to read, which also describes a possible horrible world of the future. The world of 1984 is one of tyranny, terror, and perpetual warfare. Orwell wrote it in 1948, shortly after the Allies had defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and just as the West was discovering the full dimensions of the evils of Soviet totalitarianism.
It's important to remember that Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and before Joseph Stalin started the purges that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union. He therefore had no immediate real-life reason to make tyranny and terror major elements of his story. In 1958 Huxley himself said, "The future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell."
In 1937, the Huxleys came to the United States; in 1938 they went to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter (among his films was an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which starred the young Laurence Olivier). He remained for most of his life in California, and one of his novels caricatures what he saw as the strange life there: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In it the tycoon Jo Stoyte tries to achieve immortality through scientific experimentation, even if it means giving up humanity and returning to the completely animal state--an echo of Brave New World.
In 1946 Huxley wrote a Foreword to Brave New World in which he said he no longer wanted to make social sanity an impossibility, as he had in the novel. Though World War II had caused the deaths of some 20 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union, six million Jews, and millions of others, and the newly developed atomic bomb held the threat of even more extensive destruction, Huxley had become convinced that while still "rather rare," sanity could be achieved and said that he would like to see more of it. In the same year, he published The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology of texts with his own commentaries on mystical and religious approaches to a sane life in a sane society.
He also worried about the dangers that threatened sanity. In 1958, he published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life problems and ideas you'll find in the novel--overpopulation, overorganization, and psychological techniques from salesmanship to hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching. They're all tools that a government can abuse to deprive people of freedom, an abuse that Huxley wanted people to fight. If you want to further relate his bad new world to the real world, read Brave New World Revisited.
In the 1950s Huxley became famous for his interest in psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he apparently took a dozen times over ten years. Sybille Bedford says he was looking for a drug that would allow an escape from the self and that if taken with caution would be physically and socially harmless.
He put his beliefs in such a drug and in sanity into several books. Two, based on his experiences taking mescaline under supervision, were nonfiction: Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). Some readers have read those books as encouragements to experiment freely with drugs, but Huxley warned of the dangers of such experiments in an appendix he wrote to The Devils of Loudun (1952), a psychological study of an episode in French history.
Another work centering on drugs and sanity was Island (1962), a novel that required 20 years of thought and five years of writing. Among other things, Island was an antidote to Brave New World, a good Utopia. Huxley deplored the drug he called soma in Brave New World--half tranquilizer, half intoxicant--which produces an artificial happiness that makes people content with their lack of freedom. He approved of the perfected version of LSD that the people of Island use in a religious way.
Huxley produced 47 books in his long career as a writer. The English critic Anthony Burgess has said that he equipped the novel with a brain. Other critics objected that he was a better essayist than novelist precisely because he cared more about his ideas than about plot or characters, and his novels' ideas often get in the way of the story.
But Huxley's emphasis on ideas and his skin as an essayist cannot hide one important fact: The books he wrote that are most read and best remembered today are all novels--Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point from the 1920s, Brave New World and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan from the 1930s. In 1959 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize given every five years; earlier recipients had been Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Theodore Dreiser.
The range of Huxley's interests can be seen from his note that his "preliminary research" for Island included "Greek history, Polynesian anthropology, translations from Sanskrit and Chinese of Buddhist texts, scientific papers on pharmacology, neurophysiology, psychology and education, together with novels, poems, critical essays, travel books, political commentaries and conversations with all kinds of people, from philosophers to actresses, from patients in mental hospitals to tycoons in Rolls-Royces...." He used similar, though probably fewer, sources for Brave New World.
This list gives you some perspective on the wide range of ideas that Huxley studied. He also wrote an early essay on ecology that helped inspire today's environmental movement. And he was a pacifist. This belief prevented him from becoming an American citizen because he would not say his pacifism was a matter of his religion, which might have made him an acceptable conscientious objector.
Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. Maria Huxley died in 1955, and Huxley married Laura Archera a year later. He died November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his parents' grave in England.
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