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The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm
The post I was going to make this morning will have to wait, because I turned on my computer and found that Ray Bradbury had died.
The summer before I started high school, I had to read three books for Social Studies and English: Brave New World (1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). I had read Bradbury before; there were short stories of his everywhere in my parents' collections and I loved The Halloween Tree (1972) (illustrated in one of its editions by Leo and Diane Dillon, speaking of others who are gone). "Fever" was included in some seventh-grade workbook I'd read around in and in eighth grade we'd been assigned "All Summer in a Day." It wasn't like reading Tanith Lee's Secret Books of Paradys, where I could feel the inside of my head rearranging itself with each fevery line. But after that summer, I began going methodically through my parents' shelves, taking down The Martian Chronicles (1950), Dandelion Wine (1953), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and as many anthologies as had his name in the table of contents, because I had found someone who wrote the way I liked. There were novels, but there were many more short stories. His prose was poetry in paragraphs, sometimes more whispering and evocative, dry autumn leaves of a season that never stayed away, sometimes as blue-sharp and sudden as the lightning that was another of his favorite images. The authors I would buy on sight in used book stores all through high school were Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison, all teaching me different ways to damn Strunk and White and put words together. From him, I really think, I learned that you could write about space as if it were as mythical as the Titans and as immediate as your fingernails. We had different views on autumn, but I gladly kept reading his.
The last time I looked him up, he was still alive. I had just discovered him grousing about prunes at Stan Freberg; I was glad to see he was still around. I said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ap_aelfwine, "Bradbury makes everything better."
He made it darker, more wondrous, full of the ghosts of an America I never lived in and futures that even in his lifetime would never turn out as he wrote them, as alien and instantly known as the copper-waning face of Mars. Everything his words touched became one myth or another—progress, past. You could look up into the night sky and see his stories.
Late that night, I dreamed the fire balloon came back and drifted by my window.
—Ray Bradbury, "Take Me Home"
The summer before I started high school, I had to read three books for Social Studies and English: Brave New World (1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). I had read Bradbury before; there were short stories of his everywhere in my parents' collections and I loved The Halloween Tree (1972) (illustrated in one of its editions by Leo and Diane Dillon, speaking of others who are gone). "Fever" was included in some seventh-grade workbook I'd read around in and in eighth grade we'd been assigned "All Summer in a Day." It wasn't like reading Tanith Lee's Secret Books of Paradys, where I could feel the inside of my head rearranging itself with each fevery line. But after that summer, I began going methodically through my parents' shelves, taking down The Martian Chronicles (1950), Dandelion Wine (1953), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and as many anthologies as had his name in the table of contents, because I had found someone who wrote the way I liked. There were novels, but there were many more short stories. His prose was poetry in paragraphs, sometimes more whispering and evocative, dry autumn leaves of a season that never stayed away, sometimes as blue-sharp and sudden as the lightning that was another of his favorite images. The authors I would buy on sight in used book stores all through high school were Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison, all teaching me different ways to damn Strunk and White and put words together. From him, I really think, I learned that you could write about space as if it were as mythical as the Titans and as immediate as your fingernails. We had different views on autumn, but I gladly kept reading his.
The last time I looked him up, he was still alive. I had just discovered him grousing about prunes at Stan Freberg; I was glad to see he was still around. I said to
ap_aelfwine, "Bradbury makes everything better."He made it darker, more wondrous, full of the ghosts of an America I never lived in and futures that even in his lifetime would never turn out as he wrote them, as alien and instantly known as the copper-waning face of Mars. Everything his words touched became one myth or another—progress, past. You could look up into the night sky and see his stories.
Late that night, I dreamed the fire balloon came back and drifted by my window.
—Ray Bradbury, "Take Me Home"
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It's the kind of nostalgia that he probably would have appreciated.
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You can still mourn for the stories. I'm going to be a mess when Ellison dies. It doesn't matter that he was often and enthusiastically (as
"I became a great Tarzan fan," says Ray, "and began cutting out the Burroughs comic strips and pasting them in a huge scrapbook. I had already started collecting Buck Rogers comics in 1929. I also saved Flash Gordon, and Prince Valiant was another favorite. I still have all these beautifully drawn comic adventures down in the cellar carefully packed away in an old trunk. When I want to recapture that era I just tip back the lid. A writer's past is the most important thing he has, so I've been a packrat. I've kept everything I've ever cared about."
Not all of us are able to do that. He was still one of the pieces of my past I'd keep.
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Yes. Yes. He taught you well.
Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.
Nine
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I don't remember if I'd known before yesterday that he designed the story for Epcot's Spaceship Earth. Which has gone with the years like all of my childhood memories of that park (Horizons!), but it seems he was in my head even earlier than I'd believed.
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Good god, I had forgotten about that. I think I actually knew that at the time, and I loved the hell out of that attraction (my early childhood was in Orlando, FL so there were several trips out there in my past).
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I think we determined recently that I'd been twice with my family, the last time in 1989. That would be the trip where I remember falling out of a palm tree onto a deck chair. Probably also the one where I persuaded my parents that I really, really was tall enough to ride Space Mountain and then spent the entire experience convinced we were going to smash into something in the dark and die. But we watched a shuttle launch on television from our hotel room, even if we couldn't get to Cape Canaveral, and I knew that when I grew up, there would be outer space to go into; it wasn't even a question. I think I was reading Valentin Lebedev's Diary of a Cosmonaut (1988) that year, too. I wanted to be an astronaut until I realized I'd have to go through the military first.; then I comforted myself with the thought that if I was a researcher or an academic, I'd have equal reason to be sent on missions. (I didn't read Contact (1985) early enough to think of the artistic route: "They should have sent a poet.")
I'm half afraid to go back to Epcot; I have been learning from
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The Martian Chronicles I read sometime in eighth grade, I think. I already thought Mars should be full of ruined cities, because of E.R. Burroughs,* but the lyrical strangeness of Bradbury's ghost-haunted version was something very special, and I'm troubled at my inability to think of some better way of saying that.
I saw him speak once, sometime in maybe my first or second year of high school. He was brilliant. Even my father admitted it, despite his distaste for both science fiction and Milton Friedman, whom Bradbury praised at some point during the talk. I got a signed copy of Zen and the Art of Writing (1990), which I will re-read soon.
...all teaching me different ways to damn Strunk and White and put words together.
Indeed.
*And it sounds as if Bradbury came to the same conclusion for the same reason
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I never saw him in person; none of the writers of my childhood except Jane Yolen and Susan Cooper, I think, and that only in the last few years. I'm glad you did.
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So I read all of my first Ray Bradbury collection by moonlight, and he kept my mind off the mosquitoes until the sun came up and drove them away. By morning I was probably a very different person, if very tired and bitten. Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. You probably saved my sanity.
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That is a wonderful reason to remember someone.
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I also just found out it's on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWmahMdeGU
Edit to add: The first minute already gave me the chills just from the memory. Funny how you remember some things . . .
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I have books and movies like that. I'll watch it.
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My first contact with Bradbury was "The Martian Chronicles" tv series. A few years later, I read the original, "Something Wicked", "The Golden Apples of the Sun", and I fell in love. I've had a twenty-five-year long affair with his autumn, and I'd like to hear your different take on that season. If Bradbury and I differed, it was over God. He was probably the first writer I came across that showed me you could be a poet and prose writer at once. I could have lived in those little chess cities.
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His autumn is usually a thing of darkness:
"'For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these peoples, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad? What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.'"
I was born in October; it is my season, even if in the last few years it's been filled with more ghosts than I want. I would simply start feeling better the moment the light turned and chilled and the air started to smell like brittling leaves. It must have scared Bradbury very much as a child, for him to keep writing it full of mummy-dust and death's-heads. (He was summer-born.) But he also used it for books like From the Dust Returned (2001), which I'm sorry was never a collaboration with Charles Addams in the 1950's, and The Halloween Tree (1972), which is one of the best invocations I've ever read of the season in all its fires and masks, and even into random stories his leaf-rustle and pumpkin-flesh and beetle-clicks creep in and I love them. My autumn is not quite so unholy as his. But it's still one of my favorites. I wish my copy of The October Country (1955) weren't in a box.