Banned Books Week

by Bryan

3 comments

1 Kryten42 { 09.22.13 at 12:02 pm }

I couldn’t agree more Sir! Sadly… *sigh*

And people who know me wonder why I don’t think much of the human race. Given my past, no sane, honest individual could really think otherwise.

You probably know that Ray Bradbury (RIP 2012) wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of Hitler. From an interview Jan 2005 by Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts:

Dana Gioia: How did you come to write Fahrenheit 451?

Ray Bradbury: In 1950, our first baby was born, and in 1951, our second, so our house was getting full of children. It was very loud, it was very wonderful, but I had no money to rent an office. I was wandering around the UCLA library and discovered there was a typing room where you could rent a typewriter for ten cents a half-hour. So I went and got a bag of dimes. The novel began that day, and nine days later it was finished. But my God, what a place to write that book! I ran up and down stairs and grabbed books off the shelf to find any kind of quote and ran back down and put it in the novel. The book wrote itself in nine days, because the library told me to do it.

DG: What was the origin of the idea of books being burned in the novel?

RB: Well, Hitler of course. When I was fifteen, he burnt the books in the streets of Berlin . Then along the way I learned about the libraries in Alexandria burning five thousand years ago. That grieved my soul. Since I’m self-educated, that means my educators—the libraries—are in danger. And if it could happen in Alexandria, if it could happen in Berlin, maybe it could happen somewhere up ahead, and my heroes would be killed.

The Big Read: Fahrenheit 451 – Reader’s Guide – About the Author

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
–Ray Bradbury

2 Steve Bates { 09.22.13 at 8:24 pm }

In honor of BBW, I am reading, for the first time ever, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. I don’t know if it was actually banned, but its first publisher insisted on changing the title to The Cynic’s Dictionary, which just doesn’t have the same edge to it. Twentieth- and 21^st-century publishers restored Bierce’s title, so I suppose his shade can rest… somewhere.

I am grateful for what Bradbury did in his long and productive life, even as I cannot find it in myself to be a fan of his (ahem) overheated writing style. But I have been run off at least two blogs for expressing that opinion on a thread, so I won’t push my luck with more details here.

Kryten, I’m finally getting around to reading a 2008 work of one of my favorite hard-s/f authors, Aussie Greg Egan’s Incandescence. IMHO, he is one of the best in the world, and you may claim him proudly. He is a veritable Beethoven: he’s written fewer than a dozen novels, each a genuine masterpiece.

UPDATE: heh. Egan has written exactly nine novels, one for each Beethoven symphony, I suppose. 🙂

3 Bryan { 09.22.13 at 10:24 pm }

Bradbury told stories. Most of his stories were about things that people didn’t want to deal with, but he put it out there. Most of his work would make decent episodes for TV series in the hands of the right director. It wasn’t per se great literature, but it was great story telling that encouraged other people to start writing their own stories.

Ambrose Bierce is a wonderfully nasty writer. He was very lucky not to have been lynched for some of the stuff that he got published, given the tenor of the times in which he wrote. There were certainly a lot of people who considered him a minion of the devil, if not Old Nick himself. It is amazing how well the Devil’s Dictionary has maintained its relevance.

Mark Twain understood his times, which is why he had the publication of his autobiography delayed for a century.

The worse form of censorship is self-censorship, which we are now seeing in the mainstream media. They won’t make a stand on anything.