R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

xp (Unless you try to make a movie starring Rod Steiger out of it. No thank you, but an E for effort.)

That Brin piece just reminded me of 'All Summer in a Day,' which I'd almost forgotten. I am positive that's the first Bradbury I'd ever read, back in third grade or so. Between that and a lot of Charles Schulz you got as perfect a description of child-on-child cruelty as you could imagine.

'zero hour' scared the hell out of me when i first read it. funny how many bradbury stories seem to turn on the idea that very young children naturally resent and hate their parents.

RIP

his last ever article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_bradbury

RIP

xp I guess that's a fitting send-off. RIP

Back in the 1970s when Laguna Beach was still a weirdo artist beach town and not a MTV meme, there was a bookstore called Fahrenheit 451. The store carried a lot of counter-culture and beat lit along with lots of sci-fi and it always a hang-out for me. Ray Bradbury would always come by a couple times a year to read, sign books, and just yak with people - perpetually bemused that someone named a store after one of his books. I went to see him there... I was ten years old and completely in love with The Golden Apples of the Sun short stories. First time I stood in line to meet anyone - he signed my book and then said ""with a book, you'll always have a friend." Never forgot that.

Anyway, next to his writing perhaps Bradbury's most important lesson is in how to be a cranky old man and yet still be cool and enthusiastic.

Other great picture of him is his reaction shot on seeing the Rachel Bloom video.

I'd put October Country up against any other scary story anthology. So great.

― Quiet Desperation, LLC (Deric W. Haircare), Wednesday, June 6, 2012 12:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh my goodness yes. "The Man Upstairs" and "The Jar" are worth the price of admission by themselves. For some reason "The Next In Line" has always stuck in my mind. It's vague and abstract, the plot more a sketch than a drawing, and that is exactly its strength.

...The October Country is his most surreal book, I'd say. And probably my favorite. Though you can't mess much with The Illustrated Man.

― cue "White Rabbit" (kenan), Wednesday, June 6, 2012 12:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Julio Cortázar mines that territory very well, too.

a roundup of ray bradbury videos, tributes, etc that i just did:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/06/remembering-ray-bradbury/

Well done.

the future was built into the machinery of the present

Was it William Gibson that said that the future is already here, it just isn't well-distributed yet?

There's a copy of The Martian Chronicles on the surface Mars.

Attached to the deck of the lander (next to the US flag) is the "Phoenix DVD", compiled by the Planetary Society. The disc contains Visions of Mars, a multimedia collection of literature and art about the Red Planet. Works include the text of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (and the radio broadcast by Orson Welles), Percival Lowell's Mars as the Abode of Life with a map of his proposed canals, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars. There are also messages directly addressed to future Martian visitors or settlers from, among others, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke. In 2006, The Planetary Society collected a quarter million names submitted through the Internet and placed them on the disc, which claims, on the front, to be "the first library on Mars." This Phoenix DVD is similar to the Voyager Golden Record that was sent on the Voyager 1 & 2 missions.

The Phoenix DVD is made of a special silica glass designed to withstand the Martian environment, lasting for hundreds (if not thousands) of years on the surface while it awaits discoverers.

http://www.planetary.org/assets/images/society/messages/phoenix_dvd_on-mars.jpg

Wow. Beats the hell out of those gold CDs they used to sell. What a rip-off those were.

"All Summer in a Day" changed my world, too

I read both that and "The Veldt" in my brother's Great Books compilations

I'm pretty sure I read Bradbury as a kid but I don't remember.

Where should I start?

The October Country.

And Something Wicked...

I remember going to a party in New York about 35 years ago. They all called me Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. I said, “You, ma’am, your name and phone number? And you, sir, your phone number? And you, sir?” And they said, “Why are you taking our phone numbers?” I said, “Because the night we land on the moon, you’re going to get called.” I was in London when we did. I called three of them, and when they answered I said, “Stupid son of a bitch,” and hung up.
Ray Bradbury, to Newsweek, Nov 12, 1995.

Hero.

Love that him and Harryhausen (also 91!) were lifetime buds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27DymGi3w2E

Aw man, that moon landing story is the best. HERO indeed!

Yeah, of course ~10 years after they gave him the numbers (sounds like the party was circa 1960) they may well belong to different people.

Hopefully he asked for them by name first.

I love the ordering of identifiers in this headline.

Also wish I could have been at this:

Library and city officials scheduled public festivities to honor Bradbury on Wednesday night in downtown Waukegan, including an outdoor screening of an episode of “The Ray Bradbury Theater,” the anthology series that ran on HBO and the USA Network from 1985-1992.

The event was also scheduled to feature a candlelight ceremony at 8 p.m. outside the County Street library, along with a reading of Bradbury passages by Sabonjian and library director Richard Lee.

there's a story that i remember. i think it's bradbury, and i think it's martian (but not in the chronicles) but i don't remember really. just that the plot involves the last man on mars (or maybe earth), and he's been alive for years, and alone for years, and he starts getting phone calls and letters and soforth which torment him. they were all set up to be sent by his younger self, in the throes of a sort of aggressive loneliness and despair. i think about this story all the time, since it's just such a perfect metaphor for all sorts of things. anyone remember this story, or where it's from precisely?

“It’s driven a lot of writing...I want to be one up on death. I want to leave a lot of me behind. Every time I finish a new novel, there’s that triumphant moment when I pop it in the mailbox and think, ‘OK, death. One up. One up.’”

sometimes Facebook gives me a headache:

my friend shared a link to the huffpo announcement of Bradbury's death on FB with the following note to her friends: "omg! we JUST stayed in his house last week in Palm Springs!!!!!"

u_u

I guess they were not there during the soft rain season.

xxxp Night Call, Collect. I think it's in the collection I Sing The Body Electric. Unsettling as all hell. That book also had The Haunting of the New, one of my favorite story titles ever, and a really nice variation on the classic haunted house story (the house is haunted by the knowledge of what it used to be, and just wants to stop existing).

I posted this on facebook, the last couple paragraphs of "Mars is Heaven!":

In the morning the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes, and along the sun-filled street, weeping, came the grandmas and mothers and sisters and brothers and uncles and fathers, walking to the churchyard, where there were new holes freshly dug and new tombstones installed. Sixteen holes in all, and sixteen tombstones.
The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the mayor, sometimes looking like something else.

Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they cried, their faces melting now from a familiar face into something else.
Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping, their faces shifting like wax, shimmering as all things shimmer on a hot day.
The coffins were lowered. Someone murmured about “the unexpected and sudden deaths of sixteen fine men during the night –”
Earth pounded down on the coffin lids.

The brass band, playing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” marched and slammed back into town, and everyone took the day off.

went to a few used bookstores this afternoon, primarily to scout paperbacks of gene wolf's urth of the new sun series (got the first three in "timescape" pb's for $3). while out and about, i also picked up copies of the october country and the vintage bradbury best-of collection. haven't read RB in probably 20 years, so i'm looking forward to revisiting some of my favorites. maybe something wicked... next?

anyway, was nice to commiserate/reminisce with bookstore peeps about ray's passing. hard to find dedicated readers my age who don't hold him dear. i wonder if he means much to young folks, or if he's slipped over the horizon of "weird old stuff". probably, but the youngish bar crew i talked to later on were shook to hear he'd gone.

Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, et al., offer remembrances: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/bradbury-death-steven-spielberg-obama-stephen-king-damon-lindelof-tribute-334275

thanks joe. found a recording of it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR36HbWgxYw

this is such a cruel story. breathtaking.

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.