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In the 1950s and 60s a cross-section of psychologists, writers and artists in America, partly inspired by Aldous Huxley’s essay The Doors of Perception published in 1954, experimented with hallucinogenics like LSD, mescaline, mushrooms, and hashish to venture into new realms of experience, seeking the “hidden” reality of the self and the world and probing into the meaning of art to locate their inner vision.

The post How A. K. Ramanujan mirrored Aldous Huxley appeared first on OUPblog.

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In the 1950s and 60s a cross-section of psychologists, writers and artists in America, partly inspired by Aldous Huxley’s essay The Doors of Perception published in 1954, experimented with hallucinogenics like LSD, mescaline, mushrooms, and hashish to venture into new realms of experience, seeking the “hidden” reality of the self and the world and probing into the meaning of art to locate their inner vision.

The post How A. K. Ramanujan mirrored Aldous Huxley appeared first on OUPblog.

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I've had author crush on Aldous Huxley since my teens. He wrote books like Brave New World. I read it, and we became best friends. He wrote screenplays: Pride and Prejudice (1940)and Jane Eyre (1944). He wrote essays, poems, travel journals, and even (gasp) a children's book. (You are making me look lame, bestie.)

This week I'm musing about his essay "Sermons in Cats." A young author once asked Huxley how to become a novelist. Huxley encouraged the young author to buy lots of paper, a pen, ink, and write. The young author was not satisfied with this answer and begged Huxley for his writing formula. Huxley then urged the young writer to go to a fancy university and study writing. The young author was still unsatisfied and asked Huxley "did he keep a notebook or a journal," did he jot things on napkins or did use cross indexed cards, did he read novels exclusively or be well read across all subjects, and more questions.

Finally Huxley had enough and he offered this: "My young friend," I said, "if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats."


I have two cats and they are true characters. They are friends one minute and sinking in fangs in the next. Those twitching tails indicate perverse plans in the future. They are also affectionate, nuzzling and rubbing, and then out of nowhere, biting. My cats will moan like the world is coming to an end at night outside my door, and then purr like motorboats when I let them in, and then scratch me a few seconds later. Yes, Huxley has something here. Some big sermons for writers are hidden in the lives of cats.

Here is a doodle for you:






A quote for your pocket: 

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm. Aldous Huxley

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The American Library Association (ALA) has released its annual list of the most frequently challenged library books of the year. We’ve linked to free samples of all the books on the list–follow the links below to read these controversial books yourself.

During the past year, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received 326 reports of “attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves.” The list was part of the ALA’s 2012 State of America’s Libraries Report.

Here’s more eBook news from the report: “The rapid growth of ebooks has stimulated increasing demand for them in libraries, but libraries only have limited access to ebooks because of restrictions placed on their use by publishers. Macmillan Publishing, Simon and Schuster and Hachette Book Group refused to sell ebooks to libraries. HarperCollins imposed an arbitrary 26 loans per ebook license, and Penguin refused to let libraries lend its new titles altogether. When Random House raised ebook prices, the ALA urged it to reconsider.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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The American Library Association (ALA) has released its annual list of the most frequently challenged library books of the year. We’ve linked to free samples of all the books on the list–follow the links below to read these controversial books yourself.

During the past year, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received 326 reports of “attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves.” The list was part of the ALA’s 2012 State of America’s Libraries Report.

Here’s more eBook news from the report: “The rapid growth of ebooks has stimulated increasing demand for them in libraries, but libraries only have limited access to ebooks because of restrictions placed on their use by publishers. Macmillan Publishing, Simon and Schuster and Hachette Book Group refused to sell ebooks to libraries. HarperCollins imposed an arbitrary 26 loans per ebook license, and Penguin refused to let libraries lend its new titles altogether. When Random House raised ebook prices, the ALA urged it to reconsider.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

The American Library Association (ALA) has released its annual list of the most frequently challenged library books of the year. We’ve linked to free samples of all the books on the list–follow the links below to read these controversial books yourself.

During the past year, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received 326 reports of “attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves.” The list was part of the ALA’s 2012 State of America’s Libraries Report.

Here’s more eBook news from the report: “The rapid growth of ebooks has stimulated increasing demand for them in libraries, but libraries only have limited access to ebooks because of restrictions placed on their use by publishers. Macmillan Publishing, Simon and Schuster and Hachette Book Group refused to sell ebooks to libraries. HarperCollins imposed an arbitrary 26 loans per ebook license, and Penguin refused to let libraries lend its new titles altogether. When Random House raised ebook prices, the ALA urged it to reconsider.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Who, we sometimes ask, at the dinners and debates of the intelligentsia, was the 20th century’s more insightful prophet — Aldous Huxley or George Orwell? Each is best known for his dystopian fantasy — Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 — and both feared where modern technology might lead, for authorities and individuals alike. But while Huxley anticipated a world of empty pleasures and excessive convenience, Orwell predicted ubiquitous surveillance and the eradication of freedom. Who was right?     —William Davies, New Statesman, August 1, 2005

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The long-standing Huxley vs. Orwell debate got a 21st century New Media makeover in 2009, courtesy of cartoonist Stuart McMillen. In May of that year, he published an online comic entitled “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that quickly went viral. At the top of this strip, which has been tweeted and re-tweeted many times and can now be found posted on scores of websites, we see caricatures of the two authors above their names and the respective titles of their best-known novels. Below that comes a series of couplet-like contrastive statements, accompanied by illustrations. The top couplet reads: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books; What Huxley feared was that there would be no need to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one.” The first statement is paired with a picture of a censorship committee behind a desk, with a one-man “Internet Filter Department” off to one side, a wastebasket for banned books off to the other. The illustration for the second statement shows a family of couch potatoes waiting for The Biggest Loser to return after a word from its sponsors.

McMillen’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” might best be called an homage, or perhaps a reboot, for the lines in it all come straight from media theorist Neil Postman’s influential 1985 book of the same title, which made the case for Huxley’s famous 1932 novel being a superior guide to the era of television than Orwell’s from 1949. But Postman himself was far from the first to play the Huxley vs. Orwell game. The tradition of comparing and contrasting Huxley and Orwell goes back to, well, Huxley and Orwell, two writers who — though this is not mentioned as often as one might expect — knew one another from Eton, where Orwell was Huxley’s pupil in the 1910s.

Orwell had not yet written 1984 when he first questioned his former teacher’s prescience. In the early 1940s, a reader of his newspaper column solicited Orwell’s opinion of the danger that consumerism and the pursuit of pleasure posed to society. Orwell replied that, in his view, the time to worry about Brave New World scenarios had passed, for hedonism and “vulgar materialism” were no longer the great threat they once had been.

In October 1949, just a few months after Orwell published 1984 (a work that presumably spelled out the more pressing threats he had in mind), Huxley wrote to his former pupil to make the opposite point. Orwell’s book impressed him, he said, but he did not find it completely convincing, because he continued to think, as he had when crafting Brave New Word, that the elites of the future would find “less arduous” strategies for satisfying their “lust for power” than the “boot-on-the-face” technique described in 1984.

Huxley wrote that letter in Britain during a month that began with a momentous event taking place a

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By Tina Vasquez, for The Children’s Book Review
Published: February 28, 2011

The Crows of Pearblossom

by Aldous Huxley (Author), Sophie Blackall (Illustrator)

Reading level: Ages 4-8

Hardcover: 28 pages

Publisher: Abrams Books for Young Readers (March, 2011)

Source: Publisher

For anyone who’s ever taken a high school English class, the name “Aldous Huxley” may ring a bell. That’s because the English writer was the author of Brave New World, a now classic piece of literature about a futuristic society. In the children’s book The Crows of Pearblossom, we get to see a different, softer side to the prolific writer.

In this charming tale we’re introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Crow, who live in a cottonwood tree above an old rattlesnake. Mrs. Crow, a devoted wife and avid homemaker, has wanted baby crows of her own for years and can’t quite figure out what happens to her eggs when she goes off to the market each day. The astute reader will quickly figure out that the old rattlesnake is the one eating Mrs. Crow’s eggs each day, but when she finds out one afternoon it comes as quite the shock.

When Mrs. Crow informs her husband of what the rattlesnake has been doing, Mr. Crow and his friend Old Man Owl devise an ingenious plan to teach the rattlesnake a lesson and keep him from eating any more of Mrs. Crow’s eggs.

It’s a simple, sweet story, but what really brings it to life are the brilliant illustrations created by Sophie Blackall, who gives each creature in The Crows of Pearblossom an infinite amount of charm and character. From Mr. Crow’s hat and briefcase and Mrs. Crow’s pearl necklace and polka dot dress to the rattlesnake’s “rattle watch” and Old Man Owl’s bunny rabbit slippers, Blackall has created an intricate world that these soon-to-be-beloved creatures inhabit. Hopefully, this delightful tale will become a classic, much like Huxley’s other works.

Add this book to your collection: The Crows of Pearblossom

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