Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 22, 2020 [final post in series]

Final Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. This is the last of the posts in the centennial month of Ray Bradbury’s birth, August 22, 1920. I was happy to see that Simon & Schuster, the BBC Radio 4, and Otrcat all made notice of the day. I did not see anything from Penguin Random House or HarperCollins, his other major publishers. Whatever stresses in publishing or neglect Bradbury may undergo as a writer, though, he will survive. He worked hard and long at getting it right, the cliché of what it means to be human and what it costs and what blessings it may bring. In writing these daily posts for a month, all archived on the store’s website blog, I have discovered a tighter and better organic unity to his works. I have a better discernment for his control of his style in particular works. I have a renewed head-shaking wonder at the power he coursed into my own life as a reader and writer and bookseller. All of these among other lessons, of course. A hundred years since his birth, eight years since his death, Bradbury and his writing still teach, thrill, and inspire. Here is a picture of the world-changer at 3 years old, already a witness to those fire balloons that he wept in their beauty and which he wrote in their meaning. Tomorrow, another centennial begins.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 21, 2020

Penultimate Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. Ray Bradbury, born August 22 (tomorrow!), 1920, died June 5, 2012, 91 years old (or young, as he probably would have said). He had suffered a stroke in 1999, recovered some mobility, but he usually dictated his writing to one of his daughters for the next decade. On May 28, 2012, a week before he died, he wrote a short essay for the New Yorker’s “Sci Fi” issue which was published in the double issue of June 4 - June 11. The New Yorker, applying its usual misunderstanding and condescension of science fiction/fantasy writers, illustrated the essay with a painting of a skull on fire, a dark demonic image. Bradbury’s essay was about his love for his grandfather and a fire balloon they launched from the lawn in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1924. It is a remarkably gentle, deeply affectionate revelation of awe, transition, loss, and beauty. The grandfather died the next year. In a few spare words, his farewell as best as he could make it, Bradbury for one last time lit a pathway from a sense of wonder to an intimation of immortality. He explained one marker of this experience was his short story “The Fire Balloons,“ which was later incorporated first into The Illustrated Man and later into The Martian Chronicles. Thus once again, as he had consistently accomplished throughout his writing life, Bradbury brought his art around again to unity, to wholeness, to reconciliation. The essay was wasted on The New Yorker, but it was a graceful wave to a lifetime of hard work, his joy in that work, and to millions of readers around the world.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 20, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. Retrospect is valuable and hazardous. Reading Bradbury retrospectively brings to light connections shadowed by the fine writing, the ideas, the kaleidoscope of so many stories. I see now the late Hollywood trilogy, I understand the connection Bradbury drew between the death of the imagination and the rise of totalitarianism, and I appreciate his use of different prose styles in different purposes. Now, thinking about Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), I see its setting in the Green Town stories, which include three novels and at least two collections. In particular, I am fascinated by the summer brightness of Dandelion Wine and the autumnal shadows of Something Wicked This Way Comes. The two books, part of that Green Town series, are intimate cousins, two sides of the same coin. The coin is Bradbury’s payment to the debt of his childhood and his self-education. A carnival comes to town. Two boys become involved in the thrill, psychically, physically, spiritually involved. The stakes are high, the characters are complicated, the shadows shift and reveal contradictions in what we thought we knew. Significantly, Bradbury delivered Something Wicked as a whole novel, as if he knew that the story must be taken as a whole draft, a mug of apple cider, rather than the tray of caramel apples that his collections were. Bradbury, despite comments by inattentive critics, was capable of the big picture both in the work and across the works. Something Wicked demonstrated this and thus is a key to more treasure. The hazard I mentioned in the beginning? Bradbury was 42 when he published Something Wicked. He had been published for 24 years. He had 50 years of creative life left. He published an essay in The New Yorker a week before he died.