Osakatomebaby

Okay I'm reading Fahrenheit 451 which is one of the best books I've ever read. Why it takes me so long to get around to these things I don't know.

So some wee quotage from Beatty, soon to be flambéd fire station chief from a page I dogeared the other day--not something I normally do, but I'm about to fold this book in half. There's really no point.

Don't step on the toes of the dog lover, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. This people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, or course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

No offense to manga...