It's a shame about Ray

Readers respond to recent articles on Ray Bradbury, the British monarchy, Jonathan Richman and a funny little newspaper column.

Sept. 6, 2001 | Read "Ray Bradbury Is on Fire" by James Hibberd.

I'm a Republican, so I think that much of what is on Salon is bunk. Much of the rest is boring, regardless of political persuasion. But I still check the site every weekday, and often find something worth reading, usually in the cultural or techie areas. Today it was the Ray Bradbury interview; in the past it has been articles about Tolkien, Nancy Drew, Norman's "Gor" books, the recent hilarious account of a hippie childhood and articles on film, computers and video games. This stuff on art and literature is Salon's strength; frankly, if I want to hear guys say they think the president is dumb or that they hate SUVs, I can go to one of dozens of other liberal and leftist journals.

-- Mitchell Glodek

James Hibberd's fawning re-appraisal of Bradbury's hokey "classic," "Fahrenheit 451," is full of praise for the author's anticipation of certain current trends like headset radios and urban unrest, but shamefully silent on some of the book's odder notions, like the eugenicist notion that humanity might be purified by the fires of a nuclear Armageddon.

This overrated novel's most glaring flaw, though, is its skin-deep debate about the evils of censorship. To Bradbury's credit, he attacks intellectual and moral complacency, though it's doubtful that our society would blossom into maturity overnight if everyone put aside his detective novel or her romance book and took up Kant instead. The world of "451" looks ahead to today's university wars about what makes up a literary canon. It fails, however, to take into account the vitality and subversive power of popular forms of culture such as music and films and how the interplay between highbrow and lowbrow feeds into and invigorates the mainstream.

Bradbury's vision of culture is suspiciously purist: There's room for Plato and Dickens and other elitist shibboleths; no room for Danielle Steel, Snoop Doggy Dog or "Pulp Fiction." Exclusive and pretentious, this is scarcely a democratic vision of culture. Bradbury inveighs against the evils of repressing free thought, but it never occurs to him that by championing the great works of Western Civilization at the expense of popular genres (like science fiction, for instance), he's exercising his own equally pernicious brand of censorship. In the end, his self-congratulatory elitism is alienating and, ironically, just as philistine as the broad target he aims for.

-- Patrick Pritchett

Thanks for a new interview from "Papa Ray." My first memory of Bradbury is from age 8 or 9 when I read an excerpt from "Dandelion Wine" in the Readers' Digest. I've been hooked ever since. One of my greatest dreams was achieved when I finally met the Grand Master a few years ago.

As a biologist and hardcore technophile, I've take two things from his stories. First, we should have an appreciation and amazement at the works of our hands. Second, we have a responsibility for thoughtful sobriety regarding our excesses, and must consider their consequences.

The "yak yak yak" debate of whether Ray Bradbury is science fiction or fantasy or [your beloved/hated genre here] begs the point. He spans, crosses, recrosses and blurs all such lines. Ray Bradbury's stories evoke wonder at the works of humanity and provoke hubris at our excesses.

To echo his closing remark, my favorite Bradbury quote is this: "I don't try to predict the future. I try to prevent it."

Amen, Papa Ray. Amen.

-- BJD Cruz

I'm perplexed by your writer's assertion that Ray Bradbury has only recently become a "hot property." In fact Bradbury's work has been excessively mined for television and movies for decades -- in particular, his short stories are endlessly recycled, by the likes of "The Outer Limits." Bradbury's success as a writer for movies and television is mainly remarkable because, in science fiction terms, he's only a middle-ranked writer, overly given to whimsy. "Fahrenheit" is his best work, and it was a better movie than a book. "The Martian Chronicles" is a great name, but they're only a loose collection of stories, based on Mars but with no other cohesive ideas that anyone's ever discovered; I've no wish to see them at the movies. But he's a safe bet, a name well-recognized, and maybe that's what counts with producers.

-- Tom Metcalfe

Next page: Misunderstanding the monarchy