Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 13, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. When you are Ray Bradbury in 2001, and you have picked up nearly every award out there, in fact the year before you were given the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, then you are entitled to a full jacket of a Charles Addams painting. Addams died in 1988, but the painting had been commissioned in 1946 to accompany Bradbury’s second story published by Mademoiselle (thanks Truman Capote!). In From the Dust Returned (2001) Bradbury reconfigured and reshaped and remagicked stories from 1946 to 1999. The novel is a consideration of what happens when a world seems to be increasingly alienated and hostile to the dark figures of the imagination — the man-bats, the ghosts, the ghouls, the werewolves. What happens to us when we scare ourselves with ourselves — and not with things that go bump in the night? Bradbury saw a danger in that, a stress that was worse, inescapable, claustrophobic in its lack of imagination. On the other hand, this is what happens when you do have imagination: you welcome Anuba as the first arrival to the homecoming, because the Cat must be first. “And so Anuba, her fur a sooty fire, her whiskers like lightning sparks, with ocelot paws strolled into the House on that special night, ignoring the empty rooms and dreamless beds, to arrive at the main hearth in the great parlor. Even as she turned thrice to sit, a fire exploded int he cavernous fireplace. While upstairs, fires on a dozen hearths inflamed themselves as this queen of cats rested.”

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 12, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. My family returned to the Carlisle area in the summer of 1974. We had been here in ‘71-‘72 when my father attended the US Army War College. At first, before I came to know Bosler Memorial Library, I enjoyed using the Post Library above the PX. It was run by Terry Munson, who was a tough short no-nonsense white-haired woman with a soft spot for this boy who loved books. The Post Library had an exchange case where you could bring in books and trade them for library cast-offs or extras. At this time I had read Ray Bradbury only in school anthologies or sf/fantasy collections (I was 12). The Post Library exchange case supplied me with these five books, which I still have. One is stamped ”Courtesy of Post Library.” It was my Rocket Summer (the title of the first chapter of The Martian Chronicles). I discovered Ray Bradbury, and my life as a reader, as an aware human, was changed. I notice the prices of the books range from 95 cents to $1.50. They are priceless to me. They thrilled me, terrified me, dazzled me, made me laugh out loud, intoxicated me, and made me want to be a writer. I was a kid who worked hard on the farm we moved to, who explored every rock and tree on 60 acres, and who read every minute I could. Ray Bradbury was an essential part of a lifelong education. Rocket Summer.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 11, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. It is important to be mindful of how young Ray Bradbury was when he was first published. He "sold" his first story when he was 18. He had to skip college because his family could not afford it. His higher education was writing, writing, writing with the absurd and unlikely goal that he would be able to make a living being a writer. Three stories the first year, six stories the second year (most of them collaborations with fellow fans in the social life of science fiction and fantasy), slow and steady increases to slightly bigger markets, actually getting paid with that progress. Bradbury took a sharp turn into crime stories in 1944 (he's turning 24, remember), all of which are featured in the new publication, Killer, Come Back to Me. At the end of 1945 a young intern at Mademoiselle, a slick well-paying big market for fiction, picked up "Invisible Boy" out of the slush pile and begged that it be published. The intern was Truman Capote. The publication put forth the long plank that would be the bridge out of sf and fantasy and crime stories to the mainstream river of American fiction. Bradbury was 25. Dark Carnival, his first book, a collection of short stories, was published published two years later in a print run of 3112 copies.