Feed

I left M.T. Anderson’s Feed half finished when I was volunteering at Patrick Henry High School in North Minneapolis, and, luckily, the opportunity to finish the book arose from taking this class. I had a scheduling conflict that didn’t allow me to volunteer there when my class of high-schoolers finished the book, but I did get the chance to go with them to hear M.T. Anderson speak about literature while promoting his new book (Feed) at the Minneapolis Public Library. M.T. was an incredibly witty and funny guy, and the students really enjoyed listening to him. It came as no surprise to me that he was a quirky guy since what I had seen in Feed was so delightfully strange.

We actually listened to the book in class on an audio CD, which really contributed to the book’s comical edge. This was especially true for the recurring advertisements that play in the characters’ heads. The audio book’s reader also performed the characters as I think M.T. would have wanted them performed – whiny, somewhat naïve, needy, and fully of futuristic slang. This book lent itself to some awesome conversations about the future, technology, and other science fiction sort of inquiries in my classroom. We talked about Anderson’s comment about how he actually came up with the idea of advertising products directly into a person’s head when he was in New York City walking by a department store: he all of the sudden received a text that gave a preview of the store’s prices and bargains. “Pretty scary stuff,” he said.

Regarding the slang words and vocabulary of the young characters in the book, Anderson described how much slang actually evolves over the decades. When he was young, words like “rad” or “righteous” were hip, but today they aren’t necessarily. He included this formula for his science fiction novel, and I’ve seen students respond positively to this technique.

The two antipodes of the novel are clearly Titus and Violet. Titus isn’t as obnoxiously futuristic as his friends, but he is still pretty clueless and very naïve. He undergoes a significant change when he meets Violet – a girl who would probably fit in just fine in 2009. She is sort of a hippy, free spirit. She is ultra conscious about human’s terrible treatment of the environment, and was even home schooled. Titus, on the other hand, received his education from School™, which is a sort of inter-cerebral University of Phoenix of the future. Violet doesn’t really fit in with Titus and his friends because she doesn’t have the feed, and therefore isn’t a blind consumer like them.

Like any good science fiction book, Feed sheds light on the problems of today. Anderson claimed that even while writing the book some of the futuristic technologies sort of came true. If you use a program like Facebook, for example, it will advertise things according to your interests – just like the feed. Technologies such as Bluetooth and the Iphone are also reminiscent of Anderson’s ideas.

Overall, I really liked Feed because I got to see how students react to it, and also had the chance to meet the author. This is most definitely a book that a person couldn’t just pick up and read and understand the author’s intent. A reader needs to understand that it is satire, but serious satire, and comedy, but a serious comedy that touches on real-life, pressing issues that our society faces.