Ray Bradbury seems to have caught a bad case of Intentional Fallacy.

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

So tell us, Ray. What’s it all about?

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

You know what else might harm reading literature? Telling people who’ve read, enjoyed, and thought about your book for decades that it turns out they don’t get it. Why even write a book, Ray, if fifty years later you’re just going to stand up and say, “TV is bad. Oh, and you’re all wrong.”

No, Ray, we’re not all wrong. See, that’s the great thing about art: it’s not a quiz. There’s no right answer, not even yours. You wrote the book, you got it published, and then it went into the great big world on its own. For fifty years it’s made its way through the minds of others and now, suddenly, you want to write it again? You want “backsies” on fifty years of interpretation? Sorry, Ray, it doesn’t work that way.

This is not to say that Mr. Bradbury doesn’t have some worthwhile thoughts on the damaging influence of television. And it’s not to say that there isn’t a good dose of anti-television material in the novel. but to say any different or additional interpretation is “wrong”?

Next thing you know, you’ll be saying Guy Montag was a replicant!

—
Thanks to J-Walk!

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007

I was going to do a long post about what he and his works meant to me, but I don’t think there’s a need to. I don’t think I know anyone who wouldn’t feel similarly.

We have truly lost one of the greats. One who, in these times, we can’t really afford to lose.

I’ve been looking for this pseudo-sonnet by John Ciardi for ages, and discovered this morning that the reason I hadn’t found it until now was because it’s not by John Ciardi. It’s by Frank Sidgwick. I first read it in a book written by John Ciardi, which was why I had made the connection. Now that I’ve found it, I share it with you.

I don’t know much about Frank Sidgwick; Wikipedia doesn’t even have an entry for him! If you know something about him and feel like editing Wikipedia, you can create the entry for him. Here’s something to start with: he wrote this poem. I call it a “pseudo-sonnet” because although it has resemblance to the sonnet form, particularly in the rhyme scheme, it obviously lacks the iambic pentameter of the sonnet form, since there’s only one word per line. I still think it’s pretty cool.

The Aeronaut to His Lady
(Frank Sidgwick, 19??)

“I
      Through
      Blue
Sky

Fly
      To
      You.
Why?

Sweet
      Love
Feet
      Move

            So
            Slow!”

I finally finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I had been wanting to read some of his stuff for a long time, as a number of people had recommended him to me. Thing is, I never see any of his stuff in the used book stores. That’s a pretty good endorsement, as it implies that people who read Murakami don’t get rid of their Murakami. I had read After the Quake, a collection of his short stories, and that only made me want to read a longer work, to see what happened when he had time to flesh out his ideas more. Finally, at a used bookstore in Princeton, I found this book, and quickly snatched it up.

The book is about Toru Okada, a man who goes to look for his missing cat and ends up with a missing wife. Supposedly she has had an affair with another man and is therefore leaving him, but this doesn’t ring true with Okada. So he begins to search for her, starting at the bottom of a well. Along his quest he meets two psychic investigators, a war veteran, a mystic healer, a faceless man, a menacing politician, an odd teenager, and a strange phone caller, among others. The search transforms him, mentally and physically, and takes him into strange parts of this world and stranger parts of another.

It all sounds very fantastic — and it is — but Murakami has a crisp, clean style that makes every part of it work. When Okada goes down into the well, it seems like the absolute most sensible thing for him to do. The reactions to these bizarre happenings are very real and sincere. And in addition to the strangeness, there are very concrete events, mostly referring to World War II, that are both fascinating and harrowing. There is a scene, for example, in which soldiers are ordered to kill all the dangerous animals in a zoo, and it’s one of the most moving pieces I’ve ever read.

I’m a slow reader, and I pick the absolute worst time to read (right before I’m going to sleep) so it takes me even longer to get through books than it should. And this one took a while. Still, Murakami’s captivating prove and engaging story pulled me right along, and I found I would often read 40 or 50 pages at a time without even noticing. He’s really got a great style.

I’ve been told that Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the book of his I need to get next. I also think the blurb for Sputnik Sweetheart sounds good. I plan to read more, so it’s just a question of which one to read next. I’m glad I’ve finally discovered Murakami and won’t be just looking in used book stores from here out.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream
(Wallace Stevens, 1923)

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

And now it’s time for Somewhat Obscure Literary Reference T-Shirt Theater!

Back at LSU I took a course called “Theories of Myth”, taught by Robert Segal. One of the theorists we studied (alas, I don’t remember which) said that all myth (including the myths we’ve promoted to the category of “religion”) strive to answer two questions:

1) What happens to us when we die?

2) How is it that we see people who have died in dreams?

I finished reading VALIS by Phillip K. Dick last night (which I neither loved nor hated, despite predictions) and formulated my own theory of myth (which I’m sure has been formulated by others many times over). Western myths, it seems to me, assume the following:

1) Death is scary.

2) The world is horrible and imperfect.

3) Humans are special.

4) Since humans are special and the world is horrible and imperfect, something has clearly Gone Wrong.

5) Someone who isn’t us will fix this.

That’s the 200+ pages of revelation of VALIS, pretty much in a nutshell. Oh, it’s a pretty entertaining time getting there, but that’s the gist of it. In all its talk of pink lasers, rock star messiahs, living information, escape from time, and such, the driving theological/mythological idea is, “Something is Wrong and someone needs to fix it.”

This is, of course, the same message as Christianity. For that matter, it’s the same message as Scientology. Something’s Gone Wrong, and we humans, though special, are unable to fix it without the help of Someone Else.

How do we know something’s Gone Wrong? Because clearly we special humans were meant to live in a perfect world, and this world is not perfect. There’s death and suffering, to begin with. How can there be death and suffering in the perfect world we’re obviously meant to inhabit, being special and all? So something’s Gone Wrong. And only Someone Else can help us, because if we could help us, then we would, and things would be perfect.

Can you count all the contradictions?

Of course, the difficulty in talking about VALIS is that it’s a novel, but it’s not. It’s an infuriating mixture of “reality” as perceived by Phillip K. Dick and fiction. For me, a creative work must stand on its own; I don’t care a whit about what the creator has to say about it in interviews. So it’s difficult to separate what’s intended as “real” and what isn’t. Granted, this is true in every myth.

VALIS is also infuriating because it couches all of this in an excruciating mix of Christian and New Age gobbledygook. To its credit, it seems to realize this, and recognizes that there’s always the possibility that this could just all be a load of kack. However, that possibility is never really seriously considered, because there are two things in the novel that can’t be overlooked:

1) The skeptic character, Kevin, becomes a convert. This is always a bad sign. In fact, the only character that never completely drinks the Kool-Aid is a character named David, and he only because his strong Christian beliefs won’t allow in the New Age kookiness the others are pushing on him.

2) The matter of Christopher. Nearly everything given as evidence of mystical interference in the life of the narrator/protagonist can be easily written off except for this one thing. (Unfortunately, it isn’t written off, so instead of it all coming down to a single difficult-to-explain event, the attempt is made to make it appear there are many difficult-to-explain events.) The mystical information that the character Horselover Fat allegedly receives from the entity called Zebra/God/VALIS includes a diagnosis of a then-undetected birth defect in his infant son, which turns out to be exactly true. It’s not a common birth defect, and the information supposedly comes from nowhere, and yet proves to be 100% correct and saves the child’s life.

So, Skeptic, how do you explain that? Obviously, I can’t. I wasn’t there. I’ve no idea what happened and how. For all I know, a holographic living entity time traveling Roman Christian in a satellite beamed the information into Dick’s head via pink lasers. Or maybe there’s an alternative explanation. I don’t disagree that it certainly is an intriguing story and mystery, and it’s pretty easy to understand how someone who experiences such a thing might become obsessed with figuring out what the hell happened. Nothing kooky about that.

What’s kooky is, and we see this all the time in so many circumstances, assuming that because this incredible thing happened to me, I am special and it has larger ramifications for humanity as a whole. As a kid, I once accidentally ran through a plate-glass storm door. I should have been shredded by broken glass, but I emerged unharmed except for a small cut on the palm of my hand. Am I protected by a guardian spirit because I’m a new messiah? Am I the harbinger of the race of super-entities into which we’re all evolving? Or did I get extremely lucky?

(I once read somewhere, or maybe I made it up, that “Religion is, in a sense, the worship of not understanding statistics.” Always keep in mind that anything with a “million to one” chance against it can happen eight times in New York City (population 8,104,079) alone.)

VALIS comes down to one guy trying to explain one event. And for some reason this event grows into a bizarre conspiracy and philosophy that haunts people and ruins lives. As a novel, this is interesting. As reality, it’s sad.

I finished Infinite Jest this weekend. And by “finished” I mean, “decided life is too short.”

I got about 100 pages in, not counting footnotes pages, before saying, “Yeah, okay, we’re done here.” It’s not a bad book, just tedious. The good bits are just mired in pretentious logorrhea. It’s like sitting on a plane between a six year old with a new joke book and the guy from your creative writing class who claims to love Gravity’s Rainbow.

It doesn’t take long before you realize you don’t care what the particular drug he’s talking about is or does. And in even less time you realize that the phrase “Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment” is funny only so many times, and it’s debatable if “times” should even be plural. I kept waiting for a point to show up amid all the “get me I’m clever” crap, and was afraid that that was the point.

So I’m done with that. I’m either too young or too old for it. Maybe some other time I’ll try it again, but I wouldn’t count on it.

So now I’m onto some quick reads and will pick a book or two for myself, and then you folks will get another chance to pick for me, even though I wasn’t totally thrilled about the first two things that were chosen.

I read The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, as was decreed by those who voted in the “Pick My Next Book Poll”, but I never really talked about it, so I thought I’d say a few things.

Regarding the book itself, I found it a quick and entertaining enough read, but my socks remained intact. I realize how important it is to view the work in terms of context, but for me the book suffered from the failings of the few other works of classic science fiction I’ve read — some interesting ideas that happen to entirely bland and forgettable characters.

Being more a collection of short pieces tied around a central theme, the wide array of characters with unremarkable, generic space names blurred together. Whenever Character A talked about Character B I often needed a refresher as to who that was, since their names, personalities, and in many cases actions were fairly unremarkable.

The ideas themselves were pretty interesting, though the levels of control that Hari Seldon seemed to have over the future got increasingly absurd. Psychohistory can predict things accurately down to the hour, it seems, except of course when it can’t because it’s more of a generalized study of statistics on large groups. When The Mule, a completely unpredicted element, shows up and threatens to send the whole plan haywire, things started to get interesting, and we came very close to actually having a memorable character, but ultimately he and his threat fizzle out and leave little lasting impression.

One notable and interesting element of the books is the technological predictions they make, which are more or less flat out wrong. It’s interesting to see how completely unexpected the transistor and integrated circuits were, as everything is mechanical and clunky. Computers are fairly nonexistent, and even the logarithmic slide rule is still around, though it gets a bit of an upgrade over the centuries. Asimov was a smart cookie, so this is not a product of any ignorance, just an indication of the incredible and surprising leaps and bounds technology took in a fairly short amount of time.

There is also the treatment of atomic energy. The first book was written in 1951, just a half-dozen years since the power of the atom was demonstrated to the world, and the United States was of course caught up in an atom-age frenzy. Isaac Asimov was no exception. However, the phrase “atomic energy” can easily be substituted throughout the book with the phrase “magical pixie dust”. Asimov joins the many who were certain that atomic energy was going to change everything, though sketchy on the details of what and how.

Science fiction, with its inherently predictive nature, will always have the problem of being outpaced or under-paced by reality. For every book out there that had us still using vacuum tubes in the year 2000, there’s another that has us jetting around on the moon in flying cars. Even Neuromancer, utterly bleeding-edge when released in 1984, seems adorably quaint now. The ideas can be fascinating, but ultimately they need to be tied to an interesting plot and interesting characters to sustain the work.

At least, that’s my opinion, obviously countered by the fact that the Foundation Trilogy is still around, still entertaining people, and still impressive enough that folks highly recommend it to others.

I’m now reading the second most popular choice, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I’m not terribly far into it yet (I got sidetracked a little) but am enjoying it so far.