Burn This Computer

I just read Fahrenheit 451, a book by Ray Bradbury. My understanding is that most high schoolers are forced to read it. Somehow, I wasn't. And so I didn't side with the firemen, stop reading and quit school to work on a farm to raise, have sex with, and butcher livestock.

Bradbury's not good. And not the one to make the case against burning books.

(Of course, I'm much worse than he is. But I'm not making the case for saving word-strings.)

Get a load of Faber. The character and his relationship with Montag was so goddam contrived how could he have been anything other than a police-plant?

But no.

And the ending -- saving books inside people, people negating themselves, considering themselves only the books they carried in their heads.

Fine fucking life.

Of course, preferable to the shitstorm of the city, to having Denham's Dentifrice drilled up your nose into your frontal lobe and wagged about.

Still, the book ends with the book-band marching away from the city.

What?

The city is utterly ruined, and you guys are off to be walking shelves.

Why not take what was the city and make it a big goddam library, grab all weapons available to fight off the government -- if it remains at the closing of the book... It could have been bombed to nothing as well -- make what you want and protect it?

That the walking books choose to roam around the not-cities seems to champion pastoralism. Blech.

...Thus ends Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which you could burn Fahrenheit 451: A bunch of ass-hats are roaming the countryside, many books within them, to wait until the phoenix of man rose from the ashes of its war-lust.

...They do so instead of making whatever their ideal society would be from the ashes of the bombed-out metropolis so conveniently behind them.

They make a simile (phoenix) and then can't use it.

Goodbye, Blue Monday!

ETC.

(I also re-read Breakfast of Champions. The Vonnegut writing machine was set to Massively Self-indulgent prior to aforementioned book's creation. ...But the man draws a fine asshole.)

Mixx it!