“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury

Not only is #112 on the List of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, still pertinent because of all the bozos out there who are trying to ban books in 2024 (or, worse, treating the dystopian classic as a how-to guide), but also because there’s an undercurrent in America that seems hell bent on bringing the spirit of this nightmare to fruition.

A lot of people know that “Fahrenheit 451” is about burning books, but they think the novel stops there. “The bad guys don’t want anyone to read books so they go around burning every book they can find.” This is true, and I think the message has spread — people who physically burn books they don’t like are thought of as insane, they are ostracized, shunned. Which is fine; like I said, they’re bozos. But the pleasure of burning isn’t the actual problem.

The problem is that people find ways to get rid of books, to take them out of the hands of people who need them most. Why? Because ignorant people are easier to exploit.

To sprinkle a little Rage Against the Machine into the mix: “They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove them.” Burn a book and you’re a fascist, but, for whatever reason, convince millions of people that books aren’t important and nobody bats an eye.

The real message of Fahrenheit isn’t that we need to coat books in asbestos — the threat in Bradbury’s work isn’t as much a flamethrower as it is the presence of an anti-intellectual movement that has been growing like a dumb weed in the ditches of middle America.

Books are representative of knowledge. They are the virus that causes the disease of not-being-a-moron, they give rise to questions and oblige us to right the wrongs of the past. Anti-intellectuals, though, call that “unrest,” and they’ve convinced so many people to find pride in never having cracked a book.

Who are these anti-intellectuals? The U.S. is rife with them and they’re often in the news:

They are people who, when confronted with a worldwide pandemic, get mad at doctors who tell them to get vaccinated and/or wear a mask.

People who, after seeing the disastrous effects of climate change, send death threats to meteorologists.

People who, after wave upon wave of school shooting, don’t listen to any politician who says that maybe we all shouldn’t have access to goddamned assault rifles. (“But then how will we shoot cans of beer in protest of trans people?!?”)

“Fahrenheit 451” is about a man, Guy Montag, who goes woke. Or, as Elon Musk would put it, he gets infected by the “woke mind virus.” (If any of that just made you vomit in your mouth, just know that you aren’t alone, and be sure to take the time to brush and floss. If you don’t know I’m talking about: Here’s two idiots chatting about it. Note how the oligarch currently trying to buy votes in Pennsylvania talks about how “moderate” he is.)

A fireman by trade (a person who does the book-burning in this context), Montag meets a free-thinking youngster when he’s walking home one night and commits the egregious sin of becoming curious, which, a few people might recognize, is the first step down the slippery slope of learning. Montag begins to wonder why they burn books — what’s in them that’s so terrible? Does anyone know?

After he watches a woman get burned alive with her book collection, things start to spiral. He takes a few books home, he flaunts them in front of his wife and her friends. He starts questioning things. A robot dog sniffs around his door — a sure sign of trouble! Montag feels like he needs to do something.

But Montag doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to do. Once you realize that your whole society is based on a series of fallacies, what can one man do to fight it? Print more books? Run away? Actually fight back by planting books in the houses of firemen and then reporting them so they get arrested?

Montag doesn’t have the answers; nobody does, not in the novel, nor in our actual world of “Fahrenheit 74” (which is so named for the temperature at which assholes turn on their air conditioners).

Montag makes a series of rather bumbling mistakes (but they’re the “right” mistakes) and ends up getting found out (his wife turns him in) and running for his life before he encounters a bunch of other intellectuals who are on the run from Project 2025 … er, I mean, this nameless dystopian government that bears no resemblance to any current trends in American politics.

These roving intellectuals have each memorized a book and essentially serve as a walking library, hoping only to survive long enough to ensure that the knowledge they keep can be passed on and, maybe, be of use to the future. Because certainly, certainly this government can’t last.

(It can’t. Shortly after Montag goes on the run, his whole city is blown up in one of the wars that seem to start every day.)

It’s a bleak ending, but looking at the world today, one can’t help but feel that bleakness is the zeitgeist.

Because all those people who would have been burning books if they were fictional characters have realized that it’s much easier to convince people that they don’t want to or shouldn’t read books. It is astounding to me the number of students (and adults) who proudly proclaim that they don’t read, that they haven’t read a book since sixth grade. They say it as if they’ve cracked a code, or pulled the wool over someone’s eyes.

“Those wily teachers tried to fool me, but I got around them — I just had ChatGPT summarize the whole book for me while I watched YouTube shorts. Checkmate, atheists!”

One thing that I don’t believe was true when Fahrenheit came out (1953) but is certainly true today is that reading is considered work. The news I keep hearing from university professors is that more and more students are coming to English departments across the country unable to read books.

When I studied English, ages ago in the early 2000’s, I took any number of literature classes that would assign one book a week. Now, though, that amount of reading is impossible for many incoming university students. Is it an attention span issue? Are public schools failing us? Are parents and their “just give ’em an iPad” mentalities to blame?

A little of all of them, I’m sure. One thing is for certain: A whole wealth of knowledge, tremendous variety of perspective, and just general fun is being placed out of students’ reach — and all without the use of kerosene or matches!

Similar to Guy Montag at the end of “Fahrenheit 451,” I sometimes feel that we English teachers are wandering through the wastes of tomorrow, carrying information and skills that we hope will someday be valuable again.

Last week, I took an informal poll of my approximately 220 students, asking how many of them had heard of Mark Twain. You know, the author. All told, about 15 of them knew who I was talking about.

“Wait, really?” I asked. “You don’t know Huckleberry Finn? Tom Sawyer?”

I was met with a sea of blank faces.

And in the distance, thunder.

Blog: Food Over My Head, Roof in My Belly

Last week was an odd one. There was meeting on top of meeting at school, with one whole day given over to “Professional Development.” This is when everybody in the English department gets together to listen to presentations about textbooks and online resources.

Classes for teachers, basically.

I get the feeling that, because teachers are teaching classes all the time, they really want to believe that more classes is always a good thing. Sort of like if there were a meeting of gastroenterologists and they all went to get colonoscopies, thinking, “This is what regular people do!” It’s fine enough in theory, and everyone can do with a good flushing out, but sometimes all you want is a chance to sit down and do your goddamned work.

Plus, most of these “Professional Development” sessions are led by textbook salesmen. Shills, in other words.

After such a long week, I was really hoping to unwind. Sarah and I do this by just sort of existing at home. We don’t go out too much and aren’t all that adventurous. Sarah knits and reads. I read and write. The cat vacillates between her lap and mine and we make a real time of it.

We had to go places, though, on Friday. My dad asked us to drive to where he lives so we could visit a Brazilian steakhouse. It was only a 45-minute drive and we honestly haven’t been visiting…anybody as often a we should, so we hopped on down and made a night of it.

The pseudo-Brazilians kept coming around with meat on skewers and all of us had…too much. (The salted pork was particularly delicious.)

The next day, my older brother came to town for a sports thing and brought a whole bunch of beef for us to take home, so now our freezer is full. This is a thing that happens often in Nebraska — a friend or relative kills a whole cow and spreads the beef around. Like Jesus except with red meat instead of fish.

A part of me wishes we were the adventurous people we used to be — not all that long ago we were living in Indonesia, eating shakshuka on the beach, driving a scooter through rice paddies and forests where monkeys steal cell phones. I spend too much time these days wondering, “What changed?”

When did we become a couple of chumps who just sit at home in Nebraska of all places?

It happened, as many other things did, during the pandemic. I feel like we haven’t been able to “recover” since then, as if the world has been getting slowly and inexorably worse in every measurable way. Our health, both mental and physical, haven’t been great. Everything financial is pretty much f*cked. Everyone is divided, storms are destroying everything, and it turns out Joker 2 probably won’t be very good.

As often happens when I’m in this kind of mood (I’m sick today with some kind of flu and feeling blue about it), I tend to blame myself for things that are going on.

Things aren’t even really that bad. We have food and a roof over our head. We’re getting older and maybe want to settle down a bit. I’ve got to practice gratitude. Even though I’m not all that good at it.

Still. I look around where I live, look at what’s going on in America, and I think, “Why in the hell is everyone working so hard to maintain….THIS?” We’re like people on the Titanic hanging up “ICEBERG 2024” signs and complaining about all the immigrants locked up below decks. Who would want to shovel coal in that scenario?

I don’t have an answer. But grading papers in which students write that Elon Musk INVENTED the goddamned ELECTRIC CAR to HELP HUMANITY makes me wonder what in the hell I’m losing sleep over.

Sigh. Food over my head. Roof in my belly. This is my mantra.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

I try to emphasize in this blog (as well as in the classes I teach) that literature is a conversation that’s been going on since the invention of history. Authors respond to authors, books to books, and #21 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is Maya Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” It drives home one of the practical reasons why viewing literature this way is apt: For years and years in America, people were excluded from that conversation.

I just finished teaching a unit with my Juniors in which we had a chance to read and discuss people like Frederick Douglass, as well as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other authors from the Harlem Renaissance. “Hughes was one of the first black Americans who was able to make a living as an artist,” I tell my students. “That’s an astounding fact when you consider he’s the same age as my great-grandmother.”

Maya Angelou is one of the major African American voices to follow the likes of Hughes and Bontemps and has become essential reading for anyone who is interested in African American literature.

I read the book mostly while sitting at my desk in the teacher’s plan center, thinking about how I just don’t “get it.” Not that I dislike it or don’t understand, but that it wasn’t a book meant for me.

Race and issues of race were about as far from my experience growing up as they could have been. The town I’m from has about 1,500 people in it and is about as ethnically diverse as Sweden — very white, very middle-class; a town that existed as a place where highways met and where there was a John Deere dealership. I don’t consider that a good thing, necessarily (it was a safe place to grow up, certainly), but books like Caged Bird were one of my only windows into the experiences of black America.

Was it a good window or a window that provided an accurate depiction? Probably not. I can only try to understand what Angelou is talking about. I didn’t “get it.”

Crispity, Crunchity, Peanut Butter-y

One of my first memories of Angelou comes from Saturday Night Live, in a satirical sketch starring David Allen Grier. It’s a sketch I still randomly quote to this day:

The joke being, I suppose, that Maya Angelou would never stoop so low as to to advertise for anything, much less a candy bar. Such was her integrity that the very notion of her appearing in a commercial was comical. That was my impression of her — she was a serious woman who talked about serious issues and spoke the kind of poetry you were supposed to frown at and say, “Hmm, yes, I see,” in very sombre tones.

Which is, quite honestly, one of the things that has prevented me from ever really connecting with Angelou’s work — it’s the sort of thing that seems to preclude humor. The sort of thing that you daren’t laugh at or make light of.

Oh, there’re funny bits in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — or, at least, bits that are supposed to be funny — but it’s the sort of humor that you feel obliged to laugh at. Like when your drunk uncle tells the same joke for the 10th time that Christmas and you better laugh or you’re going to get it — that’s the sort of energy Angelou brings to telling a story about how she laughed so hard one time in church that she peed her pants.

A Book Club Member’s Book of the Month Club Book

The particular edition of Caged Bird that I have features a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, who uses her introduction to express her disbelief at finally reading a book that spoke to her, a book that seemed to capture an experience both she and Angelou shared — namely, the experience of growing up as an awkward black girl.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt the same way about a book. Sure, there have been books that I liked — I would even say there are a few books that I have absolutely loved — but I’ve never felt as if an author were reaching across some unfathomable gulf to tap directly into my brain, saying, “We’re alike, you and I.”

Mostly, I admire books by thinking, “Jesus Christ that author is talented.”

Even if it were possible that I could connect with an author like that, and it very well may be, I’m not sure I’d want to read that book. I barely like myself on the best of days and don’t particularly want to spend any more time in my own head than absolutely necessary. (Hello, darkness!) And if a person were able to capture what it was like where I was born and raised — really capture rural Nebraska — I probably wouldn’t care. It’d be like accurately capturing the essence of a random pigeon. Small towns are mostly boring and there’s a reason why Nebraska is called “fly-over country.”

(I have a theory that books and movies are only set in Nebraska if the authors/producers want a setting that is a metaphor for depression. I don’t have a problem with it. I think that’s fair.)

Still, I suppose I do take for granted that there are a plethora of books and movies that are about little white kids who go off on adventures. I never had to deal with the dissonance of wanting to play with a doll that didn’t share my skin color because I thought the other one was “normal.” That’s part of what Angelou is responding to — there’s an inherent question of why can’t we normalize books about the black experience?

Which is a fair question that a lot of people have asked and now it seems like we’re making progress in that direction. Or, at least, there are more published black authors today than at any point in America’s history. That doesn’t make up for anything, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Even if Maya Angelou is awfully dry.

What’s That Tractor For, Though

I’ve known several people who were that way — the kind of people that you’d just better laugh at or there’s going to be trouble. One of them was Grandpa Don, who was the sort of person who, when he retired, moved from a regular house in Iowa to a full-on farm where he had a tractor and a barn even though he wasn’t a goddamned farmer. He was just a guy who listened to Rush Limbaugh and thought farming was just peachy.

At Grandpa Don’s funeral, one of my cousins stood up at the pulpit and told a story about how Don one time pulled him, my cousin, and my other cousin around on a trailer behind his tractor. The boys were eating apples for some reason — that’s what they did for fun, I guess, was drive around on a tractor trailer and eat apples all afternoon. Anywho, Don cut a massive fart, presumably loud enough to be heard over the sound of a tractor, and turned around to say, “How do you like them apples?”

Everyone in the church laughed when my cousin told that story, even though nobody thought it was funny. Even my cousin didn’t really think it was funny — he’d only gotten up to tell the story because his mom had made him. It was a funeral, goddamn it, and you were supposed to tell stories. And you’d better laugh at those stories because we’re a family and that’s what family’s do.

I didn’t cry when we buried Grandpa Don, even though I very explicitly tried to. I stood right next to the casket and looked at the hole in the ground and thought, “Alright, better start the waterworks.” I got sidetracked though when everyone said the Lord’s prayer and I thought, “When in the hell did everyone memorize this nonsense?”

Seriously, were we supposed to know that? Just, like, at the drop of a hat?

We’re Dying to Know

Maya Angelou died in 2014 when I was in South Korea teaching kids how to write essays very quickly.

I said to the children, “Maya Angelou died today. Do any of you know who that is? Er, was?”

They all unsurprisingly said that they didn’t. South Korea is just as homogenous as the town I grew up in — almost everyone who lives in Korea is Korean. And, while Koreans are mostly….ambivalent towards the Japanese, there isn’t a whole lot of racism going around, and thus there has never been a struggle to overcome it. They’ve got a whole different set of cultural issues; sexism, ageism, a tremendous teen suicide rate; they’re just as messed up as Americans are, but for entirely different reasons.

I thought about how best to explain who Maya Angelou had been, but struggled to do so without bringing up how goddamned racist America was. In the end, I just said, “She was a very talented author.”

Which is, quite honestly, what I think about her. Maya Angelou speaks to experiences that are beyond my reckoning. I recognize that she’s very good at writing and I can get lost in her prose just as much as the next guy, but she’s never been an author that spoke to me.

I’m sad about that. Should I be? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just that I want to feel like I “get it” when I really don’t, when I’m just some kid standing by a hole in the ground wondering why he can’t cry, mouthing along with some alien litany. “Our father who art in heaven…”