Teeming Brain readers are familiar with my longtime focus on Fahrenheit 451 and my abiding sense that we’re currently caught up in a real-world version of its dystopian vision. This is not, of course, an opinion peculiar to me. Many others have held it, too, including, to an extent, Bradbury himself. I know that some…
Tag: Fahrenheit 451
American media culture as psychic predator and parasite
In a May 21 rumination for The Morning News, James A. Pearson, who “co-founded the humanitarian business Ember Arts and writes from his parallel lives in Uganda and California,” offers an uncomfortable observation about the increasingly heavy psychic net of always-on digital consumer media here in the United States — something to which he is…
Silence, solitude, and self-discovery in an age of mass distraction
“[T]he internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because thereâs a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series…
On living well in Ray Bradbury’s dystopia: Notes toward a monastic response
Morris Berman may not have been the first person to offer simultaneous commentary on American culture and Fahrenheit 451 by observing that the former has basically transformed itself into the dystopian society depicted by the latter. Many people have noted in the decades since Fahrenheit was first published in 1953 that things have been moving…
Facebook, ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ and the crossing of a cultural threshold
One of the most subtle and subversive pieces of social criticism in Fahrenheit 451comes early in the book when Montag, a fireman (i.e., book burner) who eventually wakes up to a recognition of his society’s essential character as a fascist-totalitarian dark age, chats with a teenaged girl named Clarisse. Or rather, it’s she who chats…
On the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition
Have you heard? After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print. Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said. In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age…
New Video: Ray Bradbury on F451, education, life passions, and humanity’s destiny in space
Macmillan, the publishing giant, has just made available an absolutely wonderful new video interview with Ray Bradbury as a marketing adjunct for the release of the new graphic novel adaptation of his Fahrenheit 451, for which he wrote the introduction. (See “Graphic novel of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ sparks Bradbury’s approval,” USA Today, Aug. 3. You can…
The Internet is melting our brains
The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly (July/August) has an interesting cover story by Nicholas Carr — “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” — about the effects of the Internet revolution on human cognition. I bought the issue at the airport last weekend while waiting for my flight…
Anna Nicole Smith Is the Fourth Horseman
The only daily newspaper that originates from my part of the world is The News-Leader, which is located in Springfield, Missouri. It blankets southwest Missouri and part of Arkansas. Last Tuesday, February 13th, editorial page editor Tony Messenger posted a brief observation at his blog, “Ozarks Messenger,” titled “A sign of the apocalypse…” It read…
So just what the hell is post-modernism?
Background: Last week somebody posts a famous quip from Oscar Wilde at a popular message board: “In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.” This leads to a conversation about what the quote means and whether…