Tuesday Morning LitLinks
The Sunday Times’ Richard Brooks digs back into the fascinating story of how T.S. Eliot, while director at Faber and Faber, rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Also featured: an archival copy of Valerie Eliot’s 1969 letter to the editor, which includes her husband’s 1944 letter to Orwell.
Bradbury talks about Fahrenheit 451 and his reasons for writing it.
I guess it was inevitable that Microsoft would surface in the Google Book Settlement drama.
Cory Doctorow says authors are missing the point in the Kindle 2 text-to-speech dustup.
Today in Literature: On this day in 1809, Edward Fitzgerald was born; on this day in 1859, he published his “free translation” of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
AuthorScoop
March 31st, 2009 at 1:30 pm
The Bradbury article was very good, if brief, but what interested me most was one of the comments to it. An English Teacher from Boulder wrote:
“To authoritatively state that “Fahrenheit 451 is about How TV Destroys Literature” is as nauseating as someone telling me what the Bible is “about.” And we know how much dispute there is about that one. Books speak, not through the mouth of the author, but on their own. What a book means to you, or to me, IS precisely what it means–not what some author, teacher, or literary critic says it means. “
I’ve heard this argument a lot, but for me, writing, out of all the arts, is the least dependent on the interpretation of its audience. Music and the visual arts seem very specific to the context of their ingestion and the memory of these pieces more specific to the mindset of the patron’s moment.
A book totes its own context between its covers and the overall success (not popularity or notoriety) of a work of literature is the achievement of how much of the author’s intent came through the words he chose.
Now this is entirely my opinion and the margin of individual reaction and interpretation is fascinating and can be quite fun. But Bret Easton Ellis’, AMERICAN PSYCHO, comes to mind. It sold many copies and boosted Ellis’ fame, but because of its wide misinterpretation (according to what Mr. Ellis claims he meant) I have to wonder if it feels, to him, as a success or a niggling missed mark.