Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/18/edition-of-fahrenheit-451-that.html
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Reverse Redaction.
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“Applying fire to the pages” ≠ “burning the pages”, methinks.
Seems mighty gimmicky. I question whether Bradbury would approve. Though of course it will sell enough.
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While I’m glad there’s no actual book burning involved, I still have to wonder how bad is this for the environment.
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Friends and I attended one of his talks in LA many years ago. Believe me; if there was a buck in it for him, he would have approved.
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The message here is very confusing.
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“It was a pleasure to run the lighter over the pages, realise that lighters get uncomfortably hot when you leave them on for more than 20 seconds, wait a bit for it to cool down, then run the lighter over the pages some more while you try to find where you were up to”.
Classic Bradbury.
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I for one welcome the Books as Art movement. Bring it on.
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I think it would be better/safer to just use a hair dryer.
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We’ve seen the likes of this before. I think it’s probably more visual pollution than anything else.
Art is primarily concerned with symbolism and is not concerned with being overly literal. We’ll leave the explicitly literal interpretations to those writing engineering documents.
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It seems the kindle version comes with a ransomware.
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I’m finding this a very mixed message.
In one way it’s sort of like making the book a dangerous thing, as if you can only read it by candlelight in secret which fits with the novel.
On the other hand, it’s applying flame to the book which is a very bad thing in the novel and seems to miss the message. I actually think it would be a much better gimmick on a different book where book burning wasn’t a theme.
In a novel where books are burned, getting to pretend to burn the book doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Also, I don’t care if Bradbury would approve, I don’t approve.
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And yet this gimmick (or “art”) is clearly a literal example of engineering.
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I see it as a play on the streisand effect: banning/burning books for censorship reasons perversely makes them more popular and more likely to be read (see: satanic verses, spycatcher). In this case the only way to read the book is by symbolically doing the thing the book warns about.
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It’s pretty cool as a concept, but man if they ever issue a DVD, watching it is gonna be a pain in the ass.
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Not good reading material when you take a flight somewhere.
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Seems simplest to pop the while thing in the oven for a bit, just set the temperature to something below 451 degrees.
But then there’s the problem of turning the pages while wearing an oven mitt.
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Engineering implies it is done to solve a problem. It is art in that it expresses something, even if it is something that most people don’t appreciate. It’s probably not great art.
