Ray Bradbury's Big Read: Fahrenheit 451 ignites Racine & Kenosha, courtesy of UW-Parkside

[T]hey didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life.  People talked too much.  And they had time to think.  So they ran off with the porches”

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The temperature in the ballroom at the University of Wisconsin - Parkside may have been closer to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but the excitement in that audience of hundreds burned white hot.  Sam Weller, a professor of creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago & the authorized biographer of Ray Bradbury, gave a stirring keynote speech on Wednesday evening, September 24th.  The communal spirit of reading was thriving in that big warm room.  And so the Racine-Kenosha Big Read began with a BANG of applause & an echo of  audience questions. 

Sam Weller sustained us, a crowd of hundreds, hungry for his personal stories & biographical tidbits about the Master.  Bradbury wrote & published Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, angry at the national hysteria about alleged Communists, alarmed by the spectacle of his beloved country’s post-war fit of witch-hunting.  From the halls of Congress to the local schools, repression & fear chilled free speech.  So Ray gave us a cautionary tale, set in the foreseeable future, when firemen burned books - and even people - rather than saving them.  It still resonates around the globe with its message of love & hope for misguided humanity.  

Fahrenheit 451 poses a now familiar society, in which numbing drugs & televised distractions (on large flat wall-mounted TV screens, no less) threaten to dehumanize everyone.  Fireman Guy Montag ironically comes to see the beauty in books, in people, in all the life-affirming things that his bureaucratic superiors are determined to control or crush.  He escapes to a wooded utopia of soulful rebels who memorize books as a form of resistance.  They constitute a living library, a mode of survival amidst social madness.

Now, I've never been a fan of science fiction as a genre.  Even Stanley Kubrick's trippy1968 film 2001:  A Space Odyssey (an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's bestselling novel) put me to sleep.  I do not drool over high-tech gadgetry or fantasize about sexy titanium robots.  But Ray Bradbury's book The Martian Chronicles moved me when I read it at age 13.  The interconnected stories, featuring lonely, nostalgic astronaut families struggling to make sense of life, rang true.  Who cares if the author got the scientific details - e.g. Mars has an atmosphere similar to Earth's - wrong?  It remains a credible portrait of humans forced to live on an alien planet due to man-made disasters.

Early on, Bradbury was dubbed the Poet of the Pulps.  His writing style, his unique voice on paper, was inspired – even when his tales of dinosaurs, rockets & killers appealed mainly to weirdo commercial (i.e. lowbrow) tastes.  Fueled by a vast imagination, Ray also had the artistic determination to set his visions & memories down for others to enjoy.  

Born in 1920 in Waukegan (Illinois), just north of the metropolis of Chicago, Bradbury was drawn to the mass media of his era:  Buck Rogers comics, Oz & Tarzan books, silent as well as talking pictures & network radio shows.  His aunt Neva encouraged the energetic, clever, curious boy to read, to dream, to write adventures of his own.   

He lived ninety-two years, passing into the Great Beyond in 2012, after producing a steady stream of stories (his goal:  one a week), novels, radio dramas, screenplays for both Hollywood (John Huston's Moby Dick, 1956) & TV (Alfred Hitchcock Presents & The Twilight Zone, among others), theatrical plays, poetry & journalism.  He also consulted with fellow "imagineer" Walt Disney on the design of EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) in Florida, so that the USA would have a permanent World's Fair.  Ray's was a fertile mind indeed.  

Remarkably, this literary muse of the Space Age, never drove a car.  Bradbury refused to use a personal computer & he didn't fly in an aircraft until late in life.  The prestigious accolades that the cultural establishment eventually gave him, such as the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters & the National Endowment for the Arts National Medal of Arts, mattered less to him than the respect of fellow writers.  The adulation of Ray's many fans & the money it brought must have been a great comfort to a child of the Great Depression. 

In essence, Bradbury remained a wonderstruck boy from Waukegan, an enthusiastic toy collector, a wannabe magician, a devotee of dark carnivals, speculative circuses & flickering cinemas.  A loafer on warm summer front porches.  A dreamer, a stargazer, an unrepentant sentimentalist.  His name said it all:  like a Ray of Light, Mr. Bradbury's prose pierced the finite universe of literature, entering the cultural lives of millions.

Those fortunate residents of Racine & Kenosha, that thinking community of thousands, took up UW-Parkside Library Director Jo Cates's welcome challenge to read & discuss a dystopian novel from the Cold War.  Perhaps we even met, you & I, over a beer at the cozy tasting room of Public Craft Brewing Co. (creator of No Front Porches Imperial Smoked Red Ale).  Or was it at Rustic Road Brewing Co. (inventor of Fahrenheit 451 American Pale Ale, brewed with jalapeno peppers & Malabar peppercorn additions) in downtown Kenosha instead?

Maybe we sat side by side, time traveling at Racine's 1964 Golden Rondelle for that screening of Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 - a scratchy print of an analog film from 1966.  Or were we sitting together at the UW-Parkside Cinema for 1984, the British film adaptation of Orwell's dystopian classic (filmed in 1984)?  Well, we certainly burned the midnight oil reading Ray's book, then dipping into Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles:  The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005).  And, as the novel says:  "It was a pleasure to burn."

Bradbury enjoyed giving advice to aspiring fiction writers.  In his essay “Zen in the Art of Writing” (1973), he boiled it down to three words:  Work, Relaxation & Don’t Think.  Freeing the subconscious to express an individual’s innermost truth - rather than money or fame - was the ultimate goal.  If a writer achieved that breakthrough, Bradbury said, then “[t]he time will come when your characters will write your stories for you, when your emotions, free of literary cant and commercial bias, will blast the page and tell the truth.”  Good advice for us all, in a way.

We defiant ones, we readers in this alienating digital age, bombarded by video & social-media nonsense, heed the advice of Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose epigram opens Fahrenheit 451:  "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."  And as Bradbury warned in Fahrenheit 451:  "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them."

Thanks to Ms. Jo Cates & her UW-Parkside staff for reminding us that wise souls resist censorship & conformism.  This Big Read may have ended on October 22nd, but the fire it lit in the readers of Kenosha & Racine will yield glowing embers for years to come.

[© 2014 by Joe Crawford Mrazek]