I'm trying to catch up on some classic novels on my must-read list. I finally read Fahrenheit 451, and now I really want to burn it. I can't bring myself to do it, but I think it'd make for a funny photo. read more

Maybe it was all the hype, or maybe I should have read it as a teenager, but I wasn't very impressed. I'm glad I read it, and it had its moments, but I just didn't care about the characters at all. I didn't buy the world as a functional place. I figured, ah well, he was a young writer, and I was willing to let it go, but then I read the recent interview with Ray Bradbury at the end of the book, in which he said, "The whole problem of TV and movies today is summed up for me by the film Moulin Rouge. It came out a few years ago and won a lot of awards. It has 4,560 half-second clips in it. The camera never stops and holds still. So it clicks off your thinking; you can't think when you have things bombarding you like that. The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking." Me, I wholeheartedly disagree.
Maybe he can't think like that, but (even though I only watched Moulin Rouge at my girlfriend's insistence, thinking it would be a sappy "chick-flick"), I thought it was brilliant, and stimulating... And I did think, despite all those flashy lights.
I like my input, and I like it fast. High-speed internet, tabbed browsing, streaming a/v.. Hell, in his book, people turn off their minds just by driving really really fast. Too bad. I'm at an intellectual peak when I'm doing 75 mph, changing a CD, talking on my cell phone, smoking a cigarette, drinking a soda, and reading people's bumper stickers.
Oh no, the pony express was replaced by cars, then airplanes, and now by e-mail, it's all moving so fast, we're all gonna die!! Whatever.
I think we're capable of even more...
Ugh, sorry.