Review: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

I recently reread Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451  and was immediately struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment.  Bradbury's novel, first published in 1953, follows the personal  transformation of Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to set fire to houses that contain books. Set in the not-so-distant American future, the novel depicts a society that "dreads the unfamiliar" and so bans books and makes "the word 'intellectual'" into "the swear word it deserved to be" (58).  Books were not initially banned because of state censorship, but by the effects of advancements in media technology and a waning public interest in critical thinking.  As the Fire Captain Beatty explains, the decline of a book reading public coincided with mass population booms, an accelerated sense of time, and the popularization of television and film.

"Picture it. Nineteenth century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your cameras. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

Film Review: Birth of a Party

Birth of a Party (2010) is an experiential look at the contemporary American political system from the vantage point of three aspiring political activists working to create a third party, Conservative Party USA.  Inspired by the Tea Party's emergence in American politics, these three white, middle class men attend a three day convention in New Orleans. The documentary follows their travels and attendance at the convention.  Time spent consuming a surprising amount of booze, weed, and cigarettes to a comedic effect.  Surprising and comedic perhaps because of our mainstream preconceptions of the White Conservative American Male. We expect perhaps a more straight laced type, but Birth of a Party considers its subjects, Jesse, John and Brad, not merely as 'Types,' but as human figures prone to vices, losses of faith, small triumphs and illusionary hope.   Experiences we can all relate to, our politics aside.

It is the experiential quality of Birth of a Party that delivers the real delight. You are brought into the haze of the party- in smoky hotel rooms stocked with coolers of 'Heinies,' at the formal inaugural convention that verges on the absurd, and the delirious carnival swirl of Bourbon Street. It is a film about their collective political dreams and individual realities. The film watches as their ideals and expectations meet the stark reality of how the political system operates in America.  As the director, Emile Doucette, explains,

Let’s face it, the world of politics is an insider’s club. And since most of us don’t have a clue about how to get in, or even find the door, we either fall in along strict party lines, or chalk it up as a broken political system and walk away. Some of us pull our hair out in frustration; some of us simply don’t care. But our differences aside, I think most Americans agree that our country is in serious disrepair.

Birth of a Party shows both the roadblocks and possibilities of establishing alternate political parties in the United States.  It is about individuals coming together as a group, talking about their views and hoping to find some collective sense. In that way, no matter your politics, Birth of a Party, with all its comedy and despair, sneaks up and surprises you. In a modest way, it restores my faith in the power of a small collective to enact change.  Doucette's film makes you believe that, "despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are those among us that believe our democracy works, especially when they take it into their own hands."

Criticism Online

I'm an English PhD student and I'll admit that from a financial standpoint I've chosen the wrong career path. But I did not choose it for the promise of riches, but rather for the love of ideas and art.  I do it because I love it. But, the material realities of my life demand a certain level of financial stability (gotta pay those bills). Talk of career prospects in humanities  graduate departments tends to be highly pessimistic.  Our professors encourage us further in advanced degrees, yet warn of the hard road ahead.  Few tenured teaching positions at universities, few publishers interested in converting your dissertation on medieval literature into a book, few editorial positions at scholarly print journals.  We dread the coming day of graduation with anxious thoughts about the Death of the University, the Death of the Scholar.  "No one is reading anymore!," we lament and complain, blaming the problem on a disinterested public.

Reading "Howl"

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" :



This weekend I read The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, a collection of essays from poets, academics, and friends of Ginsberg's who recount their initial encouter with Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl."  A common thread throughout these accounts is the immense disruption that the poem caused to readers' understanding of themselves, of America, and of poetry. Edited by Jason Shinder, the volume includes essays from Frank Bidart, Sven Birkerts, Amiri Baraka, among others, which testify to the influence of "Howl" in shaping our contemporary sense of human experience.  "Howl"  speaks to a collective experience of both American dreams of "supernatural ecstasy" and capitalist nightmares of "sexless hydrogen" "Moloch."  But, "Howl" testifies to a collective experience that is on the fringe, the edges and extremes in the barely understood realms of human experience, of "Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!"  "dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!"  "Howl" validates that "sensitive bullshit" of our bodily, affective experience, resanctifying it as "Holy! Holy! Holy!" "Howl" speaks to those "who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity."  Yet, while Ginsberg speaks to those dwelling on the misunderstood edges of 'polite' and 'normal' middle-of-the-road American society, "Howl" also assembles a new community that understands humanity via its connectivity, one bridged in the recognition of experiences and ways of being that are conventionally partitioned off in those "buildings" of "judgment,"the "invincible madhouses" and "incomprehensible prison!"

In Process

The vision

Progress and Roadblocks

Would you call yourself a writer?

It's strange transitioning from a student into a writer.  To call myself a writer feels pompous, cocky and strange, yet I can now acknowledge that this is what I want to do. I love to think about ideas and I want to share that love with others. The problem is the doing. The actual act of putting hands to the keys.  I've recently filled yet another journal of hand written material, notes and reflections. This is all too familiar ground for me. I have stacks of these journals resting in the back of closets under beach towels and sweaters. But little good they do me until I type the words out and hit submit. Submit to who?  This is the second trickiest part of this transition.  How do you actually get published?  I've been looking around at different online magazines and academic journals, and seeing the detailed submission requirements continuously makes me cower away. Yet the daydream remains, and over these years has been building momentum, the dreams are becoming insistent, compelling me forth to write. And here I am, expressing it here to get in the practice, establish a routine, to push myself past the uncomfortable fear of the unknown.

Anyone else going through this process? Advice for navigating this terrain?

Modernizing Dreams

I've been reading a literary history of American modernism, weaving  my way through the key figures and broad strokes of a past time and the culture those generations amassed in response. A response to the  horrors of the First World War, that battleground of 'experience' and romantic adventure. And a nation churning its way into a new age, its vast land opened up and symbolically condensed in its network of urban centers, traveled with mechanical speed. A people wrenching in this turn, resistance in the nostalgia and convention of the past, the known and recognized codes and orders. Jubilation in the treasured fleeting Now, and wistful dreams of a new America.  An art that wants to turn with a new lens, to show our dreams and fears to us.

The puzzle is getting harder to master, to piece these glimpses of orders and piles of details together into an understanding of the span.  That world constructed and reconstructed in words. Those worlds. These novels seeking to recognize the splinters left after the War. wars. Those conflicts abroad and at home, en masse and individual. Henry Adam's multiverse. Freud's unconscious. Zelda's schizophrenia. They are moments of recognition in art of the variety of human experience, of consciousness, of feeling. They seek in their symbolic form to multiple the possibilities, adding new complexities to humanity's record.