thoughtsignals

Author Ray Bradbury says his landmark novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” is not about censorship.

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.

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.

Link.

(via SF Signal)

YouTube’s managers are walking a fine line when they flag videos like the one conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has complained about being removed from the site, NYTer Tom Zeller Jr. says.

This is not to suggest that Ms. Malkin’s video would not be
particularly offensive to some people. There is little that Ms. Malkin
says or does that is not. But it is hard to imagine what YouTube hopes
to gain by punting such content, or what sort of uphill rhetorical
battle it is setting itself up for when it does so.

Link.

Michelle Malkin says YouTube is censoring her videos: Link.

A Maryland parent has gotten his daughter’s school to excuse her from reading the Ray Bradbury anti-bookburning classic “Fahrenheit 451.” Now he wants the school district to remove it entirely from the curriculum.
The irony in this is incredibly rich, but apparently totally lost on the father in question. He has not read the book, but he’s looked through it, he says, and “found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, ‘dirty talk,’ references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain.”
Link.