Alanis Morissett's song "Isn't It Ironic" & The Banning of Ray Bradbury's "Farenheit 451"

are all the proof you need that

 most people really do not understand the definition of the word "irony!"

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FAHRENHEIT 451, Or . . .

Via. Better Book Titles.

IRONY AND CENSORSHIP

Fahrenheit 451, (1953)

Ironically, Bradbury's indictment of censorship has itself been repeatedly censored. Fourteen years after its initial release, some educators succeeded in persuading its publisher to release a special edition. This edition modified more than 75 passages to eliminate certain words, and to "cleanup" two incidents in the book (a minor character, for example, was changed from "drunk" to "sick").

When Bradbury learned of the changes, he demanded that the publishers withdraw the censored version, and they complied. Since 1980, only Bradbury's original text has been available.

As a result, some schools have banned the book from course lists. Through all these attempts to sanitize or banish it completely, Bradbury has remained diligent in his defense of his masterpiece, writing in a coda that appears in some editions of the book:

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever. ..."

"Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony."

Do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

FIRE BREAK

This one reminds me of the scene in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where the firemen go into the woman's house to destroy her books and she chooses to die rather than give them up. She couldn't stop the firemen's overt actions, but by claiming her agency, she subverted their power over her and ultimately planted seeds of discord and doubt. (Boy, do I sound like an English teacher!) My husband always says that she is me. I'd like to think that I was that brave, but ...

THE SURVIVOR

- Katherine Gallagher
(for Anna Akhmatova)

A woman sits in a corner of sun
tracing a poem. Slowly
she is woven into it like the day
as smells of burning
carry her outside.

There, soldiers and jailers
are blocking the street,
books are being burnt—
thousands of words collapsing
in on each other. Suddenly
she sees her own fate,
her fellow-poet is taken
leaving her only silence.

She goes back to continue the poem:
it will go on for twenty years
islanded in her head
and Russia will remember her
as a lover
waiting for the ice-walls to break,
for her hermit’s cry
to be carried like fire
from hand to hand.

Aint' I A Woman! A Book of Woman's poetry From Around the World, Edited by Illona Linthwaite