R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

just wrote this on my facebook. put it here too. this is basically how i feel about him:

it wasn't even that long ago that i started reading his stories with great enthusiasm. he turned a light on in my head. it dawned on me that you can go anywhere you want to go in fiction. anywhere that your mind can go. and this is true of all writing. and life! it was kind of jaw-dropping to me how many ideas he could come up with within a single story.

And good god, "The Veldt."

What a wonderful curmudgeon.

i mean, it was somehow really liberating to learn that at an advanced age (6 or 7 years ago). or RE-learn it. i always knew that when i was kid. about writing and the imagination. but it was truly inspiring to read his stories. it made me fall in love with books again. for real.

aw, RIP

i agree w that scott, just the sheer density of ideas in some of his stories is amazing. i feel the same way about a few other folks--Leiber and Sturgeon come to mind immediately-but it's also something I didn't learn to appreciate until later in life. As a young teen/pre-teen, I was too engrossed in 'adventure' to really fully grasp how inventive Bradbury was.

getting that 4th video wall put in to honor him.

From the io9.com story, a memory from his grandson:

If you're looking for any single passage to remember him by, I just picked up my copy of The Illustrated Man, my favorite of his books. The introduction is entitled "Dancing, So As Not to Be Dead," and there are some great lines about death. My favorite:

"My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M.

So as not to be dead."

I'm an actor, something he was always been really proud of, and told me once, after getting cast in a play. "You're living out my life! You're doing everything I wanted to do but couldn't!" He was such a driving force in my life, but what always fascinated me were his impact on others. How his stories lifted people up and saved them from lonely summers. Who among us was never buried deep in a Bradbury story, lost in his meticulously yet effortlessly crafted metaphor?

Haven't read nearly enough of this guy. Something Wicked is a classic and childhood fave and of course I've come across a fair few of his stories in various collections across the years. Also Fahrenheit 451. Will seek out more - RIP.

RIP

"The Veldt" changed my life as a kid

So at what temperature do they perform cremations at these days?

Hoping they donate his ashes to NASA so they can take him along on the Mars mission.

RIP

really one of the first writers to really engage me deeply to the point where I voraciously checked out everything by him from the public library over a period of years.

when I moved two years ago I lost, somehow, one box of books, the one that included signed first editions of a bunch of douglas adams books but more importantly, a signed first edition of the Illustrated Man. Had to have been left and pilfered at my storage spot. Damn!

RIP

rip. his writing was one of my first great literature loves. i read so much stuff by him, of course all the short story collections, but also something wicked this way comes and a graveyard for lunatics. illustrated man, dandelion wine, fahrenheit 451, martian chronicles, i think the last thing i read by him was the short story collection Quicker Than The Eye - which i remember buying in hardcover when i was idk, around 12. one of the first grownup lit purchases i made on my own.

met him once at a booksigning when I was a kid. awesome dude. RIP

RIP, my first favorite author. i should revisit this stuff, haven't read it in forever.

I dunno if it's just me, but his writing always felt very intimate....like he was pulling you in to tell you a secret. There was always a sense that I was reading something that no-one else had ever read, despite his fame etc. I can't really explain it...

RIP. Thanks for the journeys!

91 years old! RIP

I love his books so much, and I've read them so many times over the years, that they feel like part of where I'm from. Going back to The October Country or Martian Chronicles now is like returning home. And a place that was passed down to me, too -- my father was the one who gave me my first copies of The Illustrated Man and The October Country. I will do my best to pass them along to my own kids. I'd love to be there the first time they read "The Veldt" or "The Crowd." (Actually, I might keep a safe distance when they read "The Veldt"...)

R.I.P. Thanks for the stories.

I need to read a ton more things by him.

I'd heard a Caedmon Records reading of this story by Leonard Nimoy in the '70s, but YT only has Burgess Meredith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXKT7QQsVx0

one of my first big loves too. i have the big red book of short stories, it is great for dipping even when a story turns out to be thin and hysterical. something wicked and "the veldt" both total masterpieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM

RIP dude. I love that EC documentary where you do an extended interview as a bonus feature and couldn't be bothered getting dressed for it.

my father also introduced me to bradbury xxxp

His writing got more ornate and would-be poetic as he went along, not to its benefit. But pretty much everything through S Is for Space is essential, imo.

My favourite short story writer. I too was fortunate enough to get some Bradbury fed to me at school. "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" and "The Veldt" made such an impression aged 13.

RIP

did all you people who loved 'the veldt' have terrible parents?

does everyone who loved the little assassin have terrible babbies?

haha.
it's funny, even though I was probably eight or nine when I read the martian chronicles, i remember *getting* that the stories weren't supposed to be some kind of truly speculative version of what Mars might be, but more of this imaginative fantasia kinda thing that was more about humanity than it was about spaceships or whatever. not saying i was a super-precocious reader or anything, just that Bradbury was able to get that across to a nine-year-old.

I'll have to read The Veldt at lunch to figure out if I've read it before.

http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm

Ha, I have a brother 12 yrs younger than me who was a baby at the time I read "Small Assassin." I had a nightmare where he was walking around holding a scalpel. One of two specifically Bradbury-inspired nightmares I can remember, though there were probably more.

there's a great moment in Fallout 3 where you step into a bombed out house where all the humans are dead but a robot keeps up the maintenance and reads 'there will come soft rains' to the children's skeletons

re-read the October Country recently and The Scythe creeped me out something proper.

ha, i thought i was the only one who was really effected by The Veldt as a kid

RIP

This is a sad day. I read Something Wicked... just a few months ago, having managed never to read it before, and it really is a masterpiece. The short stories, and the work approach of the man himself, such huge influences on me in so many ways, right down to autumn in Minnesota automatically being BRADBURY'S TIME.

This dude GOT IT DONE.

We should do a rundown of the various film/TV/radio adaptations. Here's The Electric Grandmother aka a version of "I Sing the Body Electric!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvUWvifigLs

And of course I presume we all know about Something Wicked This Way Comes.

he was awesome. i remember reading an old book of his stories when i was a pre-teen and just loving it so much, total young-mind-shaping times.

xp ha, just found out my friend's dad did the screenplay for that w/ bradbury!

and the cat pic is perfect.
RIP

how is the film of Something Wicked? He wrote the script. It got p good reviews in '83 but did no business, I think.

Purists were upset with the Truffaut version on F451, but I thought it came off reasonably well, esp the last scene. (and considering the director hadn't mastered English)

And he adapted Moby-Dick for John Huston, which I haven't seen either.

He was involved on some level with the big Harryhausen/Schneer fantasies too right?

Jesus Morbs, see Huston's Moby! It slays.

i remember meeting ray bradbury as a teenager. i asked him to sign a book for me and i said a bunch of well-meaning but inane teenage hero worship shit about his books. maybe it was because his books were the first adult books i'd read where i grasped a certain level of thematic subtlety.i mean i had read adult books and i had read stuff like heinlein and stephen king and whatnot and i'd "got the message" and i had read philip k dick and understood the plot (if not necessarily the message), but i remember the nihilism of things like the martian chronicles and fahrenheit 451 and the way he undercut his heroes. maybe it was the first time i really grasped the feeling of a pyrrhic victory?

anyway, i met him and had him sign the small pile of paperbacks that i'd gradually nicked from the school library and he said something back that was kind and diplomatic but at the same time somehow also made me keenly aware that what i'd say was a bunch of inane teenage shit. i think this was maybe the first time an adult other than my parents had really done that to me and i sort of remember it as the beginning of a long decline into the self-loathing, frustration and isolation most of his best characters (guy, spender, etc) seem to embody. it was years before i went back to ray bradbury - maybe not even until after college - and i never really

thanks a lot big guy.

This is spectacularly sad to me; Bradbury saw me through puberty. I'm genuinely choked up. Love this guy, RIP.

I've read that the Something Wicked production was rather fraught. Shit got changed a lot from RB's draft, some Disney interference, the score which Georges Delerue wrote and fully recorded was thrown out, etc.

(the rejected Delerue score is one of the best film scores of all time BTW)

There's also the animated movie The Halloween Tree which looks kinda bad but I wanna see it someday...

Of course he's a hero of mine:

Ray Bradbury had a lifetime of amazing accomplishments but perhaps most notable was living 50+ years in LA without ever learning to drive.

JL, I have to read Moby-Dick first.

i think they still read martian chronicles in schools

actually i'm certain they do

Yeah, but they actually read them in Martian now. Maybe Klingon. Whatever.

Wonder what old Ray thought of the con lang movement?

There were definitely a few years where Bradbury was my favorite writer. (I think it went something like Frank Herbert->Ray Bradbury->Kurt Vonnegut->Thomas Pynchon.)

Don't think anyone's linked this Paris Review interview yet. Pretty interesting stuff:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury

thinking about it a bit, bradbury's decaying future seems to presage a fair amount of cyberpunk, not to mention the chums of chance storyline in Against the Day...

I checked the massive story collection out of the library this morning and, yes, I HAVE read "The Veldt." Good times.

some other necrophile hadn't beaten you to it?

Students don't check books out of the library.

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

lol, much love

Things were better before the mechanization of print. Nothing beats the smell and feel of hand-tooled leather and monk sweat. But still, manuscripts got nothing on the oral tradition, when dudes had to memorize some shit before they got lazy and started storing their knowledge in codices.

I just like the idea of priveleging how reading material smells

I guess I never realized how many cranky, oddball opinions Bradbury holds - but I cut him a lot of slack since his genius seems intertwined with his metaphorical view of life.

This is great: "I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!"

ray otm

what is wrong w/ cranky oddballism?

I started reading "The Better Part of Wisdom" at lunch. Is this a story with gay characters...?

what is wrong w/ cranky oddballism?

Nothing! People up-thread alluded to some of his Tea-Party-esque political views - but perhaps those are rather normal for someone of his generation, and not examples of oddballism.

loveable cranks are cool

I just like the idea of priveleging how reading material smells

I actually do! Bradbury totally nails why I prefer to read from books over screens. I just get a kick out of the "damn kids get off my lawn" aspects of bibliophilia.

If cherishing printed and bound paper is now considered bibliophilia, then I'm an old crank as well. I don't want or need every book that I will ever read in that format, but some books require it. My giant hardback edition of the complete works of e.e. cummings. That same shitty paperback of Catcher in the Rye that everyone has, with the inexplicable 45-degree rainbow in the top corner, like a generic brand from Aldi. Emily Dickinson with a broken spine. James Burke with huge pages, an illustration on literally almost every one of them. Some books require texture, and their own specific gravity.

I got the e.e. cummings book used from Powell's. It's unstained, unread, and very likely unopened. There is writing on the inside front title page:

Jill,

May you find inspiration and comfort in this book. You have been and continue to be a truly wonderful friend! ((The exclamation point has a heart where the dot should be.)) Thank you for teaching me to be "mindful." Love, Alex.

Either Jill didn't much care for the book and still hasn't told Alex, or Jill and Alex aren't speaking anymore. Either way, there's a story in this book. Just this one book.

Re: The Better Part of Wisdom, yes, it is. I remember it being a little bit awkward, as if Bradbury was pushing himself to write about something he wasn't really that familiar or comfortable with. But it's a sweet story.

Reread "The Jar." God, what a creepy little bit of ugliness. "Tom Carmody, who would never smile again..."

The whole damn book is like that! And god I love it.

warning: video

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/414933/june-06-2012/sign-off---ray-bradbury-tribute

Re: The Better Part of Wisdom, yes, it is. I remember it being a little bit awkward, as if Bradbury was pushing himself to write about something he wasn't really that familiar or comfortable with. But it's a sweet story.

The section of the grandpa's monologue reminiscing in the most lyrical terms his golden friendship with the boy comes as close to authentic poetic prose as I've ever read. I'm astounded Bradbury could write this well. As a result, I tore through about nine stories in one sitting.

btw my first awareness of RAY BRADBURY as an eminence came when Epcot, then known as EPCOT Center, announced that he'd contributed to the development and script for the Spaceship Earth ride.

And funny you should say that!

http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2012/06/honoring-ray-bradburys-contribution-to-epcot/

'Make sure when you wake up in the morning that you know you accomplished everything you possibly could the previous day. And then do it again!’

There are two kinds of people in this world....

Mr. Bradbury and Dr. Morbius

"Doctor" if you're feeling nasty

As with R A Heinlein, I prefer his earlier work to his old coot pronouncements.

oh I dunno: Morbs still writes excellent reviews.

I saw that coming from miles away like the last Martian astronomers saw the rockets leaving the surface of the Earth

I knew Colbert was a fan (thus the link above) but how had I missed the existence of this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSoigRHHNLM

Such a great story.

could not turn that off (meta!)

i think that was the first short story i ever read

it was kind of all downhill after that

And now his house is gone.

http://file770.com/?p=20397

There came soft rains?