More Bradbury Literary Dividends

(1) IN VINO VERITAS. How’s your Finnish? Tähtivaeltajablogi has put up a post about the translation of Bradbury’s Dandleion Wine, “Kirjat – Ray Bradbury: Voikukkaviiniä”. The beautiful cover speaks for itself!

(2) LASFL DAZE. “Ray Bradbury’s Clubhouse” chronicles Ray’s earliest contact with fandom at First Fandom Experience.

…In Surround Yourself With Your Loves and Live Forever, edited by John L. Coker III, Bradbury’s friend Ray Harryhausen later recalled:

“In the mid-1930s when I was still in high school, Forry told me about the little brown room in Clifton’s Cafeteria, where the Los Angeles chapter of the Science Fiction League would meet every Thursday. Robert Heinlein used to come around, and a guy named Ray Bradbury. We were a group who liked the unusual.

“Ray would arrive wearing roller skates. After selling newspapers on the street corner he would skate to the meetings because he had no money. He used to go meet the stars at the Hollywood Theater where they did weekly radio broadcasts.”

(3) RAY & RAY. Eyes on Cinema presents an undated video of these two friends and creators in dialog: “The importance of curiosity with Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen.”

(4) CALLING. This is from an interview with Tobias S. Buckell in the June Locus.  Buckell grew up biracial in the Caribbean Islands.

“Ray Bradbury has a story in The Martian Chronicles about a couple with a kid that dies.  The Martians can adopt whatever form people around them want, so one of them goes to their parents and looks just like the kid.  Their son is back from the dead, and they don’t care why–they fold him into their routine.  He starts disappearing a lot, so they follow him, and realize he’s also being a lot kid for another family along the way.  The two families call him back and forth like a dog until he just rips apart and dies.  I read that in high school in the US Virgin Islands and broke into tears.  That story literalizes a metaphor about the question you asked earlier, about being pulled to one side or the other.  That story is not about being biracial–but for me it was.”

(5) DESPARACION DE LOS LIBROS. Ray Bradbury was interviewed by Cristina Mucci on the Argentine TV show Los siete locos in 1997. The program is “dedicated to the dissemination of books and culture.” Bradbury’s answers were broadcast with Spanish subtitles. Early on, he was asked about Fahrenheit 451.

(6) A VISIT ON CABLE TV. The Planetary Society has posted this 1982 interview with Bradbury on their YouTube channel.

Mat Kaplan crossed paths with author, poet, and visionary Ray Bradbury many times across three decades. UK Planetary Radio fan and Bradbury expert Dr. Philip Nichols recently revealed that he had a VHS copy of Mat’s first interview with Ray, conducted in 1982. The author of The Martian Chronicles was a frequent visitor to Long Beach, California where Mat managed a cable television channel. Here’s that interview.

(7) SCREEN PASS. Christine Novell considers “Modern Plagues and the Prescience of Ray Bradbury” at The Imaginative Conservative.

…In the world of pandemia in 2020, Bradbury’s stories resonate with a different irony. For those who can afford the technology, screen life has become more critical than ever, critical to education, business, government, and ministry. It has become a way of connecting, a method of community. It keeps us close, yet as Bradbury thought, isolated from our neighbors and family. But that’s the nature of the current virus, a destroyer of community. Bradbury did not predict a plague-inspired isolation, at least not this type of plague.

Instead I think he saw technology as the plague that isolates, a relentless social force. He would ask us, “What are we dependent on? What can we not live without?” As if Bradbury was thinking aloud, he offers several “solutions.” We could destroy technology, especially if we realize it controls us too much. In “The Murderer” (1953) Albert Brock is arrested for shooting a television set, murdering a telephone, a wall radio, a wrist radio, intercom system, and other things. Brock is happily committed to an institution for six months in a quiet cell. This is the stance of a rebel, not a conformist….

(8) THE TAKEAWAY. Sam Weller, the Bradbury biographer, has assembled an online course for Columbia College Chicago, “Creative Storytelling Featuring Ray Bradbury”.

Experience the transformative power of creative writing through the life and works of famed fantasy writer, Ray Bradbury. As the author of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury remains one of the 20th century’s most visionary and celebrated writers. This course explores practical creative writing strategies through a deep dive into the “dark fantasy” of Ray Bradbury.

(9) APOLLO 11 NIGHT. Ray Bradbury is interviewed on the night of the first moon landing by Mike Wallace. From Comic-con 2009, Ray’s own DVD. Part 1 of 2

Ray Bradbury Moon Landing Interview part 2

Marc Scott Zicree (“Mr. Sci-Fi”) tells where he was when the Moon landing happened. And he also relates Ray Bradbury’s anecdote about why he skipped out on David Frost’s show that night to find someone who would interview him about this great event.

(10) WICKED GOOD. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Angela Haupt asked 13 novelists “which books they like best when they need to get away.”  Pierce Brown recommended Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Diana Gabaldon is the only sf or fantasy novelist whose name I recognize (I don’t know current YA novelists) and she recommended Shogun. “Salman Rushdie, Diana Gabaldon and other authors reflect on the books they find most transporting”.

(11) NO THANKS. It’s a 1980 rejection letter from Ray Bradbury to Stan Lee. Makes you wonder what Stan submitted to Ray…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster, for these stories.]

4 thoughts on “More Bradbury Literary Dividends

  1. #11 is a CLINIC on how to turn somebody down gently, and respectfully.

    You know you’re a good writer when you write this well. I never came within a parsec.

  2. I’m glad the Planetary Society found Mat Kaplan’s 1982 interview, because Ray Bradbury said inspiring and positive things in it which I enjoyed watching,

  3. @OGH: I’m not parsing @9: was the interview during the first moon landing? (Sounds like it but there are no hard references.) If so, that wasn’t Apollo 13. It’s interesting to hear Bradbury predict a resurgence in church attendance; he was pastoralist/midwestern in outlook, but I wonder whether he’d be pleased to see the rise of megachurches with their prejudices.

  4. Thanks Chip. Apollo 11 is right.

    Bradbury only died in 2012. He was around for the phenomenon, and may have expressed an opinion about megachurches somewhere.

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