It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon – well, for me at least – and so, a quiet post. Jessica and Sophie went to a party yesterday, and were delightful. It’s Jessica’s seventh(!) birthday tomorrow. I can’t believe it. I’m older, fatter, balder, and much, much tireder than I was seven years ago, but it’s been quite something.
Since I packed everyone out the door this morning at 11.30am I’ve baked some chocolate muffins, done a few loads of laundry, listened to some Van Morrison, spoken to a couple friends on the phone, done some ironing, and basically taken it fairly easy. It’s been very pleasant. I’m now listening to The Decemberists (one of the few things I’d thank rock critics for of late – along with Sufjan Stevens) . I did notice, btw, that all of the Van Morrison albums from the 70s that I was playing contained less than ten tracks apiece. He was no progrock maniac either. That’s about 35 minutes per album. Brevity can be fine.
Speaking of brevity, I’ve been reading John Klima’s Logorrhea. Put simply, there are some spectacularly good stories in this book. I figure, if you buy all of the year’s bests next year you should end up with about a third of the stories in the book. It’s just easier to buy Logorrhea. You’ll thank me if you do. The Daniel Abraham, Tim Pratt, and Dora Goss stories are well worth the price of admission alone.
Oh, and I’m just about over the flu. This week I’ve got a birthday to celebrate, a party to help run, and an anthology to, like Frankenstein’s monster, stitch together again. It should be fine. I will be at World Fantasy. Come too. We can grab a drink.
Last month, Ray Bradbury became the first writer of science fiction and fantasy to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
“Bradbury still has a lot to say,” reported the LA News Weekly, “especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953.
“…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…says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
“’Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,’ Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: ‘factoids.’ He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
“His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
“’Useless,’Bradbury says. ‘They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.’ He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship.”
C’mon, Ray, Fahrenheit 451 was science fiction. The Internet has changed everything. Behold SF Weekly!
Fans not only read, but write in—the vast majority to react to what they’ve seen on TV.
I’m puzzled. How does this comment relate to the post above?
As you are an sf editor who keeps up with the genre, it might be worth reading.
True. But, you could email me, or post it to a more relevant thread. It just seems something of a non-sequitur in context. Still, thanks for thinking of me.
I want to thank you for mentioning Logorrhea here since somehow I missed hearing about it (I try to keep current with original multi author sf&f anthologies) and it’s extraordinary. I alternate one story from it with one from The New Space Opera (which is also extraordinary), at a rate of one or two a day and until now I’ve had a great, great experience.