Authors. Feh.

[cnoocy]

Apparently Ray Bradbury has been saying that Fahrenheit 451 is not a book about censorship, but one about television. And everyone is up in arms about it trying to prove that he once said different.

Can I just say it doesn't matter? If there was ever a clear piece of evidence that the author is not the ultimate authority on a work, it's right here. Stop paying attention to Bradbury and talk about the book. Talk about the book as an anti-censorship work. Don't rebut Bradbury in terms of his brain. It's kind of his turf, so it's not going to go well for you.

I notice that a lot of the people commenting on this are themselves authors, so maybe they have trouble letting go of their own, um, authority. If you're an author, learn to be one of many readers of the book you've written. Find and read Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Pharaoh's Daughter" because she's an author who gets it.

Comments

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

There is a wonderful story in Dandelion Wine about a woman giving up the people she was in the past, realizing that those people don't exist anymore, and that the only real person is the old woman she is now. She throws out all the stuff she's collected - ticket stubs, playbills - and gives her other possessions to the children who insist that she was never young.

Bradbury is no longer the man who wrote Fahrenheit 451 or Dandelion Wine or the Martian Chronicles, a fact made clear by his really terrible reworking of his Family stories into a book length travesty a few years ago. That person is gone. It's too bad he doesn't know it.

[cnoocy]

Interesting! If we can't hold on to ourselves, how can we hold on to our works?

[(Anonymous)]

I met Ray Bradbury at a book signing, and I was so utterly in awe of him that I could barely manage to give him my name so he could sign the book to me. (I still have the book.)

Then I saw his appearance on "Politically Incorrect" in which he shrugged off Bob Packwood having sexually assaulted his secretary with a kind of "well that's the way guys treat girls, so what?", and even Bill Maher was like, um, you don't mean that, do you? There's been no doubt in my mind for years now that reconciling Bradbury the author and Bradbury the man (possibly just Bradbury the elderly man) is like trying to reconcile Jane Fonda the political activist and Barbarella.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

(Curses. That anonymous comment just now was me.)