Two Visionaries Walk Into a Bar: Huysmans and Huxley

(Both titles: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“This was the attraction of the abyss over which one is leaning, that of a life lived at white heat. It was a deliberate abdication of day to day struggles, the removal of the difficulties of existence.”

--J .K. Huysmans

“We live together, we act on and react to one another but always we are by ourselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

--Aldous Huxley

As T.A. Brown pointed out in the article “The Technology That Actually Runs The World” last December in The Atlantic Monthly, the most dominant algorithms aren’t necessarily the ones choosing what songs Spotify serves up to you supposedly based on your personal tastes, but rather the ones that control everything you see, hear or read by controlling
all the art the even gets made before it’s made, as a result of prevailing consumer taste mechanisms that it can interpret more efficiently than the most canny culture critics ever could. The article suggested that these algorithms dictate everything, from which books are published and what art gets seen, in a revolutionary paradigm shift that has become entrenched in the arts and media. The essential premise was that in 2024 culture became boring and stale due to these thuggish algorithms’ calling the shots on what gets first produced, and then gets praised. The idea is that Big Tech has flattened culture into a facsimile of its former self, and that algorithmic recommendation engines have created what amounts to a lack of all forward momentum. But long before computers ever existed, except in the minds of visionary science fiction authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin (author of the mindblowing 1922 novel WE) and Aldous Huxley (author of the book Zamyatin inspired, Brave New World in 1931), concerns were already beginning to float to the surface of our consciousness. Or at least to the consciousness of a few heroic prescients.

Potpourri: Love Life, Don’t Eat the Mangos and Beckett Briefs

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in Love Life. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The review of Don’t Eat the Mangos contains spoilers.

The great Jewish Weimar composer Kurt Weill fled Berlin for New York in the early thirties. Nothing he wrote for Broadway earned him the fame he’d garnered as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Germany, but he produced the music for eight shows between 1936 and 1949 (he died in 1950 at the age of fifty while he was working on a musical based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with a fascinating range of librettists including Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Maxwell Anderson. And though the shows were a mixed bag, his music was usually glorious. The 1947 opera he and the poet Langston Hughes fashioned from Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, set in a Manhattan tenement, may be the most exquisite score anyone has written for Broadway besides Porgy and Bess.