Fahrenheit 451 The Big Read Blog

The Great Movies from Banned Books series ended on Monday night October 20. The series of four films based on books that were banned or challenged had a total attendance of sixty two people.

Although Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood was banned for sex, violence and profanity, the book was nominated for a national Book Award and the movie was nominated for Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay and a Golden Globe for Best Picture. The discussion leader for the film, Kevin Watson from local publisher Press53, read the actual article from the New York Times that Capote had seen which lead him to begin his research for the book, which took six years to complete.

The Color Purple, written by Alice Walker, won a Pulitzer Prize. The book was challenged or banned for rough language, violence, sexual explicitness, and negative images of black men. Our discussion leader was Candace Brennan, who pointed out that the author specfically requested that Steven Spielberg be the director of the movie version. The movie was nominated for a total of 11 Oscars, and won the Director’s Guild Award.

The anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut was challenged or banned for violence, ethnic slurs, and obscenity. Our discussion leader for the movie was Dale Pollock from the NC School of the Arts Film School. The movie was directed by George Roy Hill who went on to direct The Sting. Although the movie was not hugely successful at the box office, both the director and the book’s author were very happy with the film version, which won numerous awards.

The last film was based on what some would say is the quintessential banned book, Lolita. The Stanley Kubrick film version was nominated for many awards, including a nomination for a Best Screenplay Oscar for Vladimir Nabokov, who adapted his book for the screen. Sheryl Monks from Press53 lead the audience in a discussion of the book and the film.

In addition to this series, the library hosted an encore presentation of the film version of Fahrenheit 451 on October 5. The discussion was lead by myself and centered on the making of the movie, selection of the leading actors, Ray Bradbury’s favorable opinion of the movie, and the differences between the movie and the book.

Rob Norwood

“We Don’t Sell Garbage Like That”

Kyle Minor

On Sunday nights, the visiting preachers came to town and told us stories of wrestlings among demons and angels and men. These beings, it was said, found sources of power in the objects we thought we possessed, but which really came to possess us. So Sally Shuey went home one evening and threw away the hand-carved totems her son had brought back from a Navy tour of the Polynesian, and Bill Bradford did away with his sitar, his lute, his African talking drum. Sometimes I could not fall asleep until the early morning, because I had seen Gremlins at a sleepover party, and it was said that children who had watched the movie were known to wake with deep claw wounds running the lengths of their legs, their backs, their forearms.

Every year near Halloween, we watched Hell’s Bells, an expose of rock and roll music. We learned of the inextricable link between the Charles Manson murders and the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” We listened to records backwards to hear hidden messages I can still repeat verbatim, such as:
“Start to smoke marijuana,” and “He is the nasty one; Christ you’re infernal.” One Easter, as an offering to the Lord, we gathered our secular music cassettes (mine was Elton John’s Greatest Hits, Volume III), and ceremonially threw them in the dumpster. Our Sunday School teacher said it might have been more satisfying to burn them, but there was the fire code to consider, and it was our duty as Christians and citizens to respect the law. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

At the religious school library, there was a vast section dedicated to memoirs of salvation from the occult, with titles like The Satan Seller and The Devil and Mr. Smith. In later years, nearly all of these were proven by Christian journalists to be frauds, but I read them as though they were true, by flashlight under the covers after bedtime, and nightly felt the rush of the evil they purported to portray: buildings set afire by the casting of a spell, drug-fueled sex orgies on church altars, initiation rites into higher and higher occultic castes, onward and upward, until one entered the ranks of the Illuminati, the secret coven of thirteen men and women through which the devil ruled the world.

A few months later, the school book fair took over the library, helmed by a traveling religious books salesman who sat not far from a table covered with books about the dangers of popular movies, television, the occult. The Satan Seller and The Devil and Mr. Smith were displayed prominently, with copies aplenty for sale. Already their appeal was waning in my child’s heart. For pleasure, for thrills, the magical workings of occult darkness had nothing on the complicated darknesses of human want.

Week after week, I checked out these memoirs of Satanism. Once, the school librarian said, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough Satanism for one child?” But the truth was that I couldn’t get enough. There existed inside me the need to live lives far from my own, even monstrous ones. I wanted to see and hear and understand. I wanted to be thrilled. I wanted to feel.

The librarian, who clearly disapproved of my choice of books, also seemed to understand how they nourished me. “What you need is some adventure,” she said. “Are you interested in space?”

I was. She reached beneath her desk and pulled out a raggedy copy of a Star Trek novel. I had seen them in the bookstores and wanted them, but I had never read one. They were messengers of the secular humanistic one world government agenda. The traveling preacher had ruined me for them.

But now the school librarian was giving it to me. Surely, it was all right if she was giving it to me.

I took the book home and read it in one night. I found a used book store in the Publix shopping center and took to riding my bike twice weekly, my pockets jammed with the quarters the used Star Trek books cost, if you returned the one you just finished. I stretched out into a world of Klingons, warp drives, and telekinesis, and all of it every bit as sexy as any Level 4 Satanic coven, but before long I found that what made the books so compelling was not so much the battle for the galaxy as it was the battle over the exigencies of the human heart. Humans, Andorians, Romulans alike - they all longed to love and be loved. They were all marked by their simultaneous capacities to help and to hurt, to grieve and aggrieve, to damage and to heal. They were, in other words, a bridge to the breadth of pleasures literature can offer, and I felt a shock of recognition at my own self, reflected in the stars.

“Do you have any Star Trek novels?” I asked the salesman. I had five dollars in my pocket, money my father had given me for the book fair even though he could hardly spare it. The salesman’s eyes narrowed. “We don’t sell garbage like that,” he said.

At any earlier moment in my life, I would have taken him at his word, assigned my Star Trek novels to the physical and metaphorical garbage bin, received the shame implicit in his tone and made it a part of me. But already the books had begun their work of fortifying me. All my life, I had been told it was better to be nice than to be right, but the subversive contract writers behind the literary Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had no intention of nice-making, and because of it, they had no quarrel with the dark truths people were quieting all around me.

“Books,” the salesman harangued, “aren’t any good unless they do something good, unless they teach you something, unless they point you to what’s right. Now, let me show you some books worth reading.”

I kept my five dollars in my pocket. Behind me, at her desk, the librarian sat quietly and alphabetized the catalog cards she had just typed. When I turned away from the salesman, I caught her eye, and we shared the briefest of smiles. He was implicating her, too, and even if he didn’t know it, I did. I knew what she kept under her desk, and, full with new knowledge of men and women for whom the search for new life and new civilizations was nothing compared to the search within themselves for their own lives and loves, I wondered for the first time what other secrets she harbored. I spent weeks speculating. Oh, the secrets I could tell you.

Copies of In the Devil’s Territory (ISBN: 0979312361 are available from Dzanc Books (www.dzancbooks.com), Amazon, and booksellers everywhere.

“How I Survived Puberty”

Susan Woodring

During the summer when I was ten, my family set out on a road-trip from North Carolina, where we lived, to Illinois, where most of my relatives lived. It was on this trip, riding in the back seat between my two sisters, first through mountains, then hills, then across eternally flat farmland, that I learned what the word menstruation meant. I also learned, from the middle of that backseat, the ever-important, though sadly, not entirely effective chant: We must, we must, we must increase our busts! I learned how to torture a first-year school teacher, and-what proved in time to be much more useful-how a first-year teacher might regain lost ground. Most importantly, though, I learned that deciding what one believes about God and spirituality is not based solely on who your parents are or how you were raised or where you live. I learned that such a decision could not be arrived at through purely academic means; I learned that faith itself is a journey.

Thinking it would keep me quiet on our 11-hour journey, my mother had bought me a copy of JudyBlume’s classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret at our local K-mart before we left. I had picked it out only because I’d read a few of Blume’s other books, the ones about curing freckles and gathering the courage to go off the high-dive. Margaretwas my first Judy-Blume-sex-ed book-but definitely not my last. I was the most naïve, shy kid on the planet and I never would have survived puberty without JudyBlume. It wasn’t so much that her books instructed me about these things, but rather, because of Blume’s humor and candor, breast buds and maxi-pads became topics I could talk about. Embarrassed? Sure, but Margaret made it so much easier. My mother did not get her wish for a quiet child on that car trip, or at least, not completely. I read plenty, but I also spoke up and asked my questions. You might think it would be awkward to discuss monthlies in a stuffy-hot car with both parents and both sisters on board-and it was. But, curiosity about Margaret’s plight was catching; I kept the family posted. When we crossed the Indiana-Illinois border, Margaret finally got her period. I was thrilled for her.

Margaret’s influence lasted beyond that car trip and even beyond my first experiences with training bras and tampons. Though I didn’t make the connection at the time, her struggle to grasp who God was and what she was, in terms of Christian, Jewish, or other, had a lasting impact on my own spiritual life. She was the first person I knew, fictional or real, who admitted to doubts. Today, I am a Christian, but I still struggle with doubts. Yet, I also believe, as a Christian and as a writer, that truth-even, maybe especially, uncomfortable truth-liberates. Beyond anything Judy Blume has taught millions of young people about wet dreams and training bras, she taught them the importance of facing these issues-and others-with courage and honesty. I don’t know a better way to approach any issue in life.

I think many people are afraid of literature that challenges their values. It is true that the written word is powerful. However, I’d argue that that same power can be used to strengthen values, even the values it appears to contradict. If they are truly our deeply-felt convictions, it stands to reason that they will only be strengthened when they’re tested. Margaret’s questioning who God is, and even her question as to whether God exists, gave me a chance to examine what I believed, and it gave my parents an opportunity to tell me plainly what they believed. Given a child in a backseat with a work of fiction that is brave enough to speak honestly and adults in that same car who are willing do the same, and those avenues of doubt and learning and faith and life will open up, right there in the middle of those endless rows of corn.

Susan Woodring is the author of Springtime on Mars: Stories, recently released by Press 53 and one novel The Traveling Disease. For more information, visit www.press53.com/susanwoodring.html.

“Thoughts on Fahrenheit 451“

Joseph Mills

Censorship

As a writer, I hope someday that someone will ban my books.

It’s not because it might mean a financial windfall.Mark Twain famously said when the Concord Public Library banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “That will sell 25,000 copies for us, sure,” and there are some writers and artists who consider controversy as profitable.However, I don’t have any desire to make a buck this way.

It’s not because I take pleasure in annoying people or I deliberately want to shock them.Nor is it because I think it would be cool.

It’s because the ability of a book to evoke dislike, fear, suspicion, the primary forces behind censorship, means that it is powerful.

I find censoring, “challenging,” banning, and even burning, books, to be oddly affirming because the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference.It would be much worse if people didn’t care what books said, if, instead of outrage, there was simply a collective shrug.When books are no longer banned, it will mean they no longer matter.

Censorship lists can often be regarded as a mark of quality.You would end up with a pretty good education if you read the works on the “Most Challenged Books” list which include books by Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, J.K. Rowling, and Kurt Vonnegut.I would be honored to be in such company.

If someday my work is banned, it will mean that someone thinks my books are powerful.They think my writing will affect people, change them, stir them to act or think.It will be a wonderful compliment.

Watching

I began reading Fahrenheit 451 with censorship in mind, but by the end, I was thinking much more about television.Ray Bradbury got part of the future right.TVs as large as walls.Virtual worlds.A populace that wants nothing more than to sit and watch our “Friends.”

Yet, the problem with our “watching” isn’t necessarily the content (although most of it is terrible), but how screens are everywhere.We now have videos playing at gas pumps and in elevators.Cars have blue lights glowing from them.Bars, restaurants, lobbies, and lounges often have multiple TVs.They are in classrooms and daycares.The waiting room for my child’s pediatrician has a big poster saying “READ” which explains the benefits of reading to your child, but it also has two televisions going all the time.

We are encouraged to watch everywhere we go; in fact we are expected to do so for the very reason that Bradbury suggests.It keeps us quiet while we wait … for the flight, the bartender, the doctor, the undertaker.

Between video screens and piped-in music, it has become almost impossible to find a quiet public space.As a result, it has become almost impossible to find a place to think, to reflect, to meditate.My favorite writer Dawn Powell wrote in her diary, “Modern life is a plot to keep you from thinking.”Vladimir Nabokov would climb into the backseat of his car which he said was the one place in America that was quiet.Perhaps equally importantly, it has become difficult to find a communal space where we can establish a sense of community by talking to one another.Blaring speakers make conversations difficult if not impossible.

I suspect most of us, however, have become not only uncomfortable with quiet, but afraid of it.We’re afraid of our thoughts and embarrassed of our awkward conversations.Perhaps we’re even afraid that we don’t have any thoughts or anything to say.As a result, we’re constantly watching instead.

My Library

When I was young, I wanted to have the largest private library in the world.I imagined myself ensconced in an enormous multi-story one with wooden shelves and leather bound books.It would have those ladders that roll along.Sky lights.A big globe in a wooden cradle.Later, I realized that, without knowing it at the time, the library was a symbol.It would mean I was rich, I was smart, and I had taste.It would show that I had made it because only a man of accomplishment would have such a space.

Perhaps influenced by this idea, I always have owned a lot of books.However, in my twenties, I moved at least once or twice a year which meant I was constantly assessing which books I wanted to keep.As any professional mover will tell you, books are heavy, and they take up space.They weigh you down.Literally.So, moving, storing, and taking care of them requires a commitment of time and energy.

After years of living in apartments, my wife and I finally bought a house, and this sparked a long period of book buying — not just one or two at a time, but boxes and bags full.The Friends of the Library sale was a more exciting date to me than Christmas.Every room of our house now has shelves, stacks, piles of books.

My office is similarly stuffed.Several years ago, my school library, desperate for shelving space, withdrew hundreds of books from circulation and put them on a discard pile for recycling.Many were of little value.It was easy to understand that the library didn’t need four copies of the 1960s manual Motorcycling for Beginners.However, the pile contained a distressing number of books by important writers including the Nobel Prize winners Theodore Dreiser, Heinrich Boll, Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, and William Golding.I borrowed a dolly and hauled boxfuls to my office.Not because I wanted them, but because I couldn’t bear for them to be destroyed.

Yet lately, I have been feeling overwhelmed and hemmed in.So, last month, at the same time as I was reading Fahrenheit 451, I found myself going through the house looking to reduce clutter, and I wondered, for the first time, what I was doing with all these books.Shouldn’t I get rid of some of them?Shouldn’t I get rid of most of them?I didn’t have to burn them, but couldn’t I get someone else to take care of them?

The fact is even if I did nothing but read and had a good long life, I would not be able to finish half of the books I own.Even if I had one of those Old Testament eight hundred year lives, I would never read some books because there would always be others I preferred to pick up instead.Why keep them?

I keep thinking how in the stage version of Fahrenheit 451 the fire chief Beatty has a beautiful library.As he points out, it’s only a crime to read books, not to own them.And, years ago, Life’s Little Instruction Book insisted, “Own good books even if you don’t read them.”I hated that advice, but have I become a type of Beatty?

Why do we own books that we know we probably will never read?

I suppose, in part, I keep them because of that “probably.”I don’t know what my future interests will be.I might develop a desire to read a particular author who doesn’t appeal now.But even if I do need or want these books in the future, couldn’t I find them somewhere?For the most part, I’m not saving rare, hard-to-find, works.

I admit that I keep them not just for rational reasons but sensual ones.I find books comforting to have around.I feel safer in a room with books than one without.Or, as Cicero said, “a room without books is like a body without a soul.”This, however, can turn books into a design element, something I’m wary of.The woman who owned the house before us had, on her buffet, ceramic replicas of classic literature.There were no actual books in the house.I railed against this, but are my shelves of “real” books gathering dust any better?

I do believe that having books around will inspire my children to read and love literature as well.It’s important for them to be surrounded by books, to read and to see me read, and, when they’re older, they may be interested in the authors that I’m not.Yet perhaps they feel just as oppressed (or more) as I do.Maybe they’ll grow up with a desire to escape these piles.Perhaps owning so many books devalues them.

Ultimately I fear my library may be a sign of covetousness.The desire to possess (and whose archaic meaning refered to the acquiring of knowledge).I don’t own them for the right reasons.

And yet, getting rid of them would probably mean their destruction.Is sending them to a land-fill different than burning them?Because that’s where they would end up, perhaps after a few years in thrift stores or on a “free shelf” somewhere.What if you’re destroying books, not because you hate and fear them, but because you just don’t have the space for them?

Who is to take care of them?

__________________________________________

Joe Mills grew up in Indiana, and, in the first thirty years of his life, he kept moving farther and farther West, earning literature degrees at the University of Chicago University of New Mexico, and the University of California Davis. He spent a year in Bordeaux where he met his wife, and, after living for a couple years in the San Francisco Bay area, they moved to North Carolina. Joe teaches writing and Humanities courses in the Undergraduate Academic Program at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

In addition to the collection of poems, Angels, Thieves and Winemakers (Press 53, 2008), he is the author of Somewhere During the Spin Cycle (Press 53, 2006) and A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries (John F. Blair). He also recently edited A Century of the Marx Brothers.

Somewhen I lost the moon.

3:43 a.m., August 20. The light through the bedroom blinds was cool - not the usual streetlight amber sizzle.

I got up and put on a bathrobe, went out through the screened porch and shuffled in down-at-the-heels slippers to the patch of moonlight.

A gibbous moon lofted just above the oaks, too bright to look at long.

Somewhen in those skies, men tumbled in tin-can ships. On the moon’s dusty maria, men walked. Farther out, Venus whirled in her veils, perpetual clouds and the long rain concealing jungles beyond the most fevered dream of the jungles of Earth. Farther out still was Mars, where beside dead seas, aliens haunted ancient cities. These Martians were cool and elegant and intellectual, reading golden books with silver fingers, or transmuted into spiritual globes of blue fire. Sometimes haunted humans wandered there, dying men coughing their lives away in isolation, or the imaginers of wizardry and were-things waging occult war on rocket men with antiseptic minds.

Somewhen I lost the moon, moving last year to a house shaded by tall oaks east, west and south. Early in the morning I stood in its light, and remembered nights when I was a teenager, and the tales of Ray Bradbury changed the hayfield under my window into the veldt or the Mexican highlands, recast the dead moon and Mars and Venus as living places, let me delve into the jealous minds of men, and showed me cities coiled like springs on worlds unimaginably distant in time and space.

I’m rolling a camellia fruit round in my fingers. It is bright snake green, an irregular hen’s egg in shape. This is a surprise, but the whole thing is a surprise. I didn’t grow up with camellias and only lately have come to live with them and watch their cycles. I never before saw a fruit. When this one ripens (and I’ll wait and not pry it open only because I want to observe and know) then I will plant the black seeds or single golden nut inside. I expect it will sprout a camellia and not a magnolia or persimmon, because biology so states. I also expect that the young tree may be touched by a hybrid fire or a gamma ray or midnight curse, and show a strange efflorescence unlike the domestic red blossoms of the parent tree at the back left corner of the house.

My expectations of what might happen, as opposed to what is likely to happen, were shaped by the subtle intentions - or lack of them - that stocked a rack of paperback fiction at the Rexall drug store. I’m sure there were spy novels and romances and westerns on the tall, rotating rack near the soda fountain. (And yes, there was still a soda fountain, in polished stainless steel.) But I remember only the science fiction, four subversive books, formative books that the school board would likely have had removed - possibly burned - if they had any idea what ideas simmered between those garish covers.

The Left Hand of Darkness. Dune. Stranger in a Strange Land. The Illustrated Man. I still have all four on my shelves, the middles of the front covers worn by my thumbs, spines cracked, cheap pulp paper turned yellow. At the opening of the 1970s in a dairy farming town not large enough for a real stop light, beliefs - let’s not dignify them as ideas - followed tracks as set as those of the Erie and Lackawanna Railroad. God rode the clouds above pointed steeples. Black people lived in the city, somewhere distant, and brown people lived colorful peasant lives in places without the benefits of liberty or refrigeration. Girls got “in trouble” often enough, and the boys did the right thing and married them. Men milked cows or worked in a factory, women had babies and homes, except for the pitiful and suspect few who were not attached to men - dedicated school teachers, old maid librarians, whispered lesbians. And bookworms. Which are real things, not just an epithet tossed casually at the too-large girl with glasses and a bad haircut who propped a book between herself and that place and time.

See the evidence, like the images spider-stung into the epidermis or the soul of The Illustrated Man, the figure who frames the stories in the first of many Bradbury books that I would consume. Here, in the back lower outside corner of the book, a wormhole has been excavated from midway through “The Concrete Mixer” to the back cover and a curving half-inch up into the rough pages that lifted dreams as improbable as the fire balloons — blue tissue expanded around burned air.

This book, with those others, and with Bradbury volumes from The Martian Chronicles to Something Wicked This Way Comes, from Dandelion Wine to Fahrenheit 451, reshaped my world view. Already I was glamoured by the Arthurian legends, but science fiction provided another way out of that small place - an array of improbable possibilities, of things that yet might be.

It was a world of things that are coming. Invasions from Mars, invasions from other dimensions. Zero hour, and the gateway between worlds is being pried open by innocent fingers.

It was a world of things that are going away. What if, in that great game of extrapolation, what if we all somehow knew that this would be the last night of the world? What if every author of the imagination lived on through his or her writings, the exiles gathered for a last stand on Mars, their existence blowing away as entirely practical men burned their last books.

Bradbury followed pathways into the most savage terrain imaginable - not only the Martian mountains, or the supersaturated rain forests of Venus, but the terrain of the human heart. Men tumbling to their deaths taunt each other with small villainies, take revenge even as they contemplate their own immediate extinction. A driven explorer chases the man who brings peace and heals the sick, always just a day, hour, minute behind what he cannot understand and therefore cannot reach. Sick men, quarantined, get the unexpected gift of a fellow sufferer who can explode visions of lost places into their minds, then quarrel over the visitor and kill him in their struggle to possess him.

And Bradbury was by no means limited to space opera. He turned his best attention to the small realities of domestic life - the chilling vision of children enmeshed in virtual reality, the lure of a company called Marionettes, Inc., that for a fee could make a clockwork, robotic duplicate to take your place in the arms of an unloving - or too loving - spouse.

What was not there - what I could see only dimly then, clearly today - is the absence of women and people of color as full participants in discovery and exploration and economic life. This reflection of postwar smugness is all the more startling because Bradbury skewers the shallow, consumerist lifestyle in other ways. In these stories, women are present as wives and mothers, not as astronauts or scientists. Most of the characters are white, Anglo-Saxon or Irish, Hollis and Stone, Simmons, Melton, Hitchcock and Hart. The Russians are not there, much less the Chinese, Japanese, Brazilians. Black people make an appearance - and a powerful one - in “On the Other Foot,” as their free life on Mars is imperiled by the arrival of a ship from the apartheid society they left behind. Brown people appear in many of Bradbury’s stories of Mexico, but it is a place apart, as in “The Highway,” where tourists maddened by the end of the world leave Hernando and his timeless labors in the dust of Mexico.

I see new things on re-reading, but what I remember best from those stories - what stayed with me and was familiar without re-reading - was how they ended.

There were terrible benedictions, sterile sand whispering over the shoes of a dying man who had seen his prayer answered - and destroyed. “Peekaboo,” says Mink, as child’s play opens the gate to apocalypse.

And there were the loving benedictions. After having dinner and watching TV and putting the children to bed, and laughing over a forgotten task, the husband and wife at the end of the world say only, “Good night.” And in Illinois, a small child sees a spark in the sky, the meteor trail of a rocket man at the end of a terrible and empty life. His mother says, “Make a wish.”

Bradbury delighted in the inversion of the expected.

He would hope for the camellia fruit to sprout a Venusian vine.

He imagined a fireman who sets fires in books - and then becomes a protector of words.

He saw beneath the pink cheeks of children to their remorseless pursuit of their immediate needs, and past the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on the domestic pattern of wife and husband to the bleeding wounds of expectations unmet or too well met.

Turnabout. To see from an angle unlike that of the others. In the words of the Shaker hymn,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Turn of idea. And oh, turn of phrase, turn of language from the workday to the wild. The texture of language, crushed velvet and satin, tulle crisped into pleats, linen starched, wet silk in the rain smelling of moths and forests.

Bradbury offered a template for word-play, a game of tag, the fox in the forest leaping and swerving through green and green and green, a riotous garden of sensation grasped tenderly in language, like a butterfly held by the glistening tissue of its wings.

In the early hours of August 2008, the moon rode high, a single strong light above the ragged treetops like a ship wrecker’s false lantern on the dunes.

White flowers glowed at my feet, plain begonias I had planted become strange.

All the longing of those years ago flooded back, when I awoke and stared out a farmhouse window at hayfields burning white under a high moon, and imagined, what if this were no particular night or morning, but a place set outside of time, a somewhen?

Thank you, Ray.

Valerie Nieman is the author of Wake Wake Wake, a collection of poems published in 2006 by Winston-Salem publisher Press 53. Other work includes a collection of short stories, Fidelities, as well as two novels and two chapbooks of poetry. Her poems and short stories have been widely published in journals such as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, 5 A.M., and West Branch, as well as several anthologies.Awards have included a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1998 and 2002 Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction from the Charlotte Writers Club and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry from Phoebe.A 1978 graduate of West Virginia University, Ms. Nieman received an MFA in creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte. A longtime newspaper reporter and editor, she is now an assistant professor of English and journalism at NC A&T State University.

Excitement is building for young adult author Chris Crutcher’s appearances in Winston-Salem to kickoff The Big Read.  Mr. Crutcher will make two special appearances at local high schools.  He will speak to students at Carver High School and Mt. Tabor High School on Friday, September 12th.  Mr. Crutcher’s website (www.chriscrutcher.com) is full of photos and thank you’s from school visits across the country, so we know he will be in his element as he talks to local teens.

Chris Crutcher will speak at the BOOKMARKS Festival of Books at Historic Bethabara Park on Saturday, September 13th at 12 noon in the “All That & Then Some” tent.   The public library will also have special guest David Kipen from the National Endowment for the Arts to launch The Big Read.  Big Read Resource Guides, bookmarks and Audio Guides will be available for free at BOOKMARKS.  Check out the Forsyth County Public Library exhibits on exhibitors’ row and in the children’s area.

Please join us as we enjoy Chris Crutcher and celebrate the kickoff of The Big Read featuring Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451.”

In a National Endowment for the Arts “Interview with Ray Bradbury,”  the author  revealed that the book he would save is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Bradbury explained that this Dickens’ classic has it all–life, death, and the consequences of the choices that we make. He said that he is always deeply moved, often to tears, when he rereads the book or watches the film, because the old man Scrooge has a second chance to truly live life, even in his old age he can change. Scrooge realizes the futility and emptiness of his past and fully embraces a life richly rewarded with friendship, family, and love.

What do you think of Ray Bradbury’s choice?

Is there a book that you would save?

The Forsyth County Public Library now has a web page devoted to the Big Read/On the Same Page program for Fahrenhet 451. Visit it here: http://www.forsyth.cc/library/OTSP08_default.aspx

It has links to the events calendar, infomation on the essay contest and much more.

Keep looking back here for a ramping up of blog postings about all aspects of the project. We’ll be covering the events, topics of censorship and writing, discussion questions on the book and more.

Hello and welcome to the Fahrenheit 451 blog!! More to come soon!!