R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

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.

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..."