When you work for a long time in literary affairs, you get used to the idea that people who write brilliant books sometimes say foolish things. But you never entirely stop wincing.
Specifically, he’s talking about Ray Bradbury, who would have us now believe that Fahrenheit 451 isn’t really about censorship — and, more to the point, that we’ve never had censorship in this country. (Even though, as Hayden points out, he’s said pretty much the exact opposite of this in the past.) I love the man’s stories dearly, but he seems like such a grumpy old man, and it’s hard not to wince at some of the foolish things he says.
The same now goes for Eric Idle, who is apparently upset over the coconut gag in Shrek the Third:
“…there it is in the first 30 seconds — you go — wait a minute, John [Cleese] and I are in this film and you steal our joke? Um, I don’t know how the others are going to take to this … I hope they (Dreamworks) cleared it with them — the first I saw it was in the premiere — and I was SHOCKED — my whole family went WHAT! How dare you! So I walked out — calmed down — and walked back in — but I was shocked and I think if you steal peoples jokes, I don’t think that’s homage, I think that’s theft.”
I’m really hoping Idle is kidding, and that that’s just not coming across in print. Because the cocount gag, more famously from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was one of only a small handful of things I truly enjoyed about the third Shrek movie. It definitely felt like an homage to me — not least of all because, if you weren’t familiar with the gag in Grail, you probably didn’t even notice it in Shrek.
I think we are at the point where some of our heroes are going senile. Bradbury was particularly a disappointment — I read a salon interview, I think in 2004, where Bradbury came out in support of George W. Bush with an argument that would have been wingnutty if it wasn’t so incoherent.
F451 was clearly about censorship; Bradbury, mentally, is no longer with us.
Yeah, Hayden touches on that and links to the Salon interview. What Bradbury said about Bush, basically, was, “He’s wonderful. We needed him.”
In all fairness, this was in August of 2001, and I don’t know if Bradbury has revised his opinion of Bush with all that’s happened since then. My feeling is he likely hasn’t. Which would be sad.
I think senility is probably an unfair characterization. He seems perfectly coherent and lucid to me, just foolish and overly set in his ways. I’ve seen worse from authors whose work I admire — Orscon Scott Card’s right-wing politics come to mind — but it’s disappointing when you need to separate the artist from the art before you can appreciate the art.