Had some help with this one.

Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury: 1920-2012

By Christine Schofelt and Hector Cordon 
14 June 2012

The death of American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury June 5 at the age of 91 in Los Angeles has prompted a good deal of analysis of the author’s work, as well as the rather flimsy claim by some on the political right that he was one of them.

Certainly, Bradbury did declare his admiration for Ronald Reagan and King Vidor’s film version of The Fountainhead (1949—based on the novel by Ayn Rand). In the months before his death, moreover, Bradbury expressed the wish that the upcoming election would see a reduction in the size of government, to be followed by a further reduction “soon.”

Bradbury in 1975

This only demonstrates that the relationship between the conscious political views of an artist and the sense he or she makes of the world through his art is not a simple or mechanical one. Bradbury, something of a “libertarian,” was a self-educated, or as he later put it, a “public library-educated” man, who even in his old age would hold readings to benefit a local library. His work evinces a humanism and sympathy for the oppressed completely at odds with the imbecilic selfishness of the Rand cult.

This is the same man, after all, who wrote stories such as “Way in the Middle of the Air,” from early editions of The Martian Chronicles, about persecuted African-Americans taking to the skies to settle on Mars, away from the bigots. Like so many of his stories, this is a hopeful piece, a search for a solution to a seemingly intractable problem on Earth. It was also a bold story to put out at that time—first appearing in Other Worlds in 1950, before the eruption of the civil rights movement—and shone a harsh light on the prejudice and violence faced by so many.

One might suggest that Bradbury, like other, more prominent literary figures before him, was “compelled to withdraw into the past” (Trotsky) by the conditions of his time. His oft-idealized hometown of Waukegan, Illinois made an appearance in a number of his works. Though generally writing about the future, Bradbury was often reaching back to the past with an almost Hawthorne-esque shake of the head at what science, technology and even desire had wrought.

In his own life, Bradbury rejected much of technology, agreeing only last year, for example, to have one of his books, Fahrenheit 451, released as an ebook. The writer was, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of an eccentric, even a technophobe. He never learned to drive a car, quite extraordinary for a resident of Los Angeles his entire adult life. Bradbury did not board a commercial airliner until the age of 62.

Yet Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—about a future America where books are banned and a fireman’s job is to burn them—is remarkable for its almost predictive qualities when it comes to gadgets such as tiny personal radios, flat-screen televisions and in-ear communication devices.

Bradbury’s writing on occasion even inspired the development of such things. In an interview with Book Magazine in 1998, Bradbury explained, “I’ve never set out to predict. I just write what later seems to evolve and be true.” He continued, “I was in Japan working on a short film, and one of my hosts came to me and put a Walkman on my ears and said, ‘Fahrenheit 451, Fahrenheit 451!’ The young man who invented it had read [about such a device in] the story and decided to build it.”

There can also be genuine pessimism in Bradbury’s works. In Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), for which he also wrote the screenplay, this comes out quite strongly. The attempts to change what the characters are not satisfied with—in most cases their ages—lead to disaster. Those who do succeed in altering their condition end up dead or enslaved, and the lesson learned by the central characters seems to be to just accept what is.

There was bravery as well in what he wrote. In releasing Fahrenheit 451 at the height of the anti-communist witch-hunt, Bradbury took a significant risk. However, the writer insisted that a statement against McCarthyism was not his intention. Although the novel was viewed and taught for decades as a work aimed against censorship, Bradbury often downplayed the latter issue, and asserted the danger he was warning about was the phenomenon of television.

One can view a video at his siteentitled “Bradbury on Censorship/Television” in which the author declares, “I wasn’t worried about freedom. I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV.” When the interviewer notes that Sen. Joseph McCarthy had banned books, Bradbury dismisses this with a casual, “Well, [President Dwight] Eisenhower said put them back, so it was, you know, a few days.” He exhorted librarians to “just quietly put the books back” if censors removed them.

It is doubtful that such comments will stop the use of Fahrenheit 451 as a literary “poster child” for those fighting censorship—after all, Bradbury noted this same thing in a number of other interviews over the years. However it does bring up the question of what happens when an author’s work takes on a meaning not consciously intended by its creator. Fahrenheit 451, far from being a mere complaint against television, is a beautifully wrought work which has inspired generations of free-speech advocates.

In his introduction to Dandelion Wine (1957), Bradbury makes a comment that may reveal more than the writer intends: “It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.

Bradbury in 1959

“I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life.”

Bradbury was in his “early twenties” in the midst of World War II, the greatest slaughter in world history. Did this and subsequent events have an impact on the writer?

According to Bradbury’s version of things, he wrote instinctively, with his unconscious mind creating the subject and his conscious mind giving it direction. Perhaps, for various reasons, Bradbury was unable to locate himself consciously as an opponent of racism, or McCarthyism. Perhaps his approach was the only way by which he could take on the complex and often grim realities of the time, and offer up his concerns and opposition. He seems to have responded to the difficult present with a series of morality stories encased within a semi-futuristic wrapping.

Bradbury was apparently compelled to project into the future a solution to the problems of racism, the threat of nuclear war, the stultifying atmosphere of the period. It may not be that Bradbury was “repelled” by the new, so much as he was deeply troubled by the post-World War II period. How could he not have felt the impact of the Holocaust, the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the onset of the Cold War? Bradbury’s dilemma was one that confronted an entire generation of artists and intellectuals in the US, many of whom turned to the right and helped strengthen a reactionary cultural climate.

Bradbury’s output was remarkable: over 600 short stories, numerous scripts for films and (the loathed) television (including those he wrote for his own show in the 1980s and early 1990s), poetry, nonfiction and children’s books. Most impressive is the quality of the writing itself; he had a tremendous respect for language and brought to the science fiction-fantasy genre a standard to which many subsequent writers have aspired.

Bradbury himself was well read, and inspired by such authors as W. Somerset Maugham and Ernest Hemingway. In an early mantra typed in or around 1947, according to his biographer Jonathan Eller in Becoming Ray Bradbury (2011), he wrote, “Keep chapters to FOUR pages, no more than EIGHT pages. The purpose of a chapter is to contain ONE IDEA! And ONLY one! See Jane Austen! See Tolstoy, Dostoevsky!”

In his own uncompromising approach, Bradbury often found himself at odds, for example, with the writer and anthologist August Derleth, who, as editor ofWeird Tales, Bradbury felt was pushing him to produce formulaic work. He resisted and persisted, a struggle from which we have all benefited.

After decades in the book business

I left it. Sort of. I don't know if one ever really does. Example: While interviewing to get into the last bookstore I worked for I noted that I'd been reading the trade papers, though out of the business for about 4 years at that point. "You need to get a life," said the interviewer... Luckily, I was hired into another area of the company entirely.

So I worked there for five years, which is the longest I have ever worked anywhere, what with being a constant mover, and then last July I left and here I am living in the hinterlands now. It was, though, until the last six months, the best bookstore I'd ever worked in.

The reasons are many, but really it boils down to this: Management at the store hired us as and treated us like adults - adults who knew and loved books - which we are. In the time that I was there I was in charge of a variety of sections, business, politics, humor, self-help, outdoors (me, who'da thunk it?), for a minute health and sex, and I helped in romance (which provoked a lot of eye rolling on my part, so I had to leave after a while. It was mostly due to costuming anachronisms on the covers.).

Now... I miss books a lot, and do still alphabetize "for" other bookstores when I visit. ("No, no, you'll see, it's better this way...")

I also still read the trade papers, because I have a life, and it's books.

I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight- Margaret Cho

(Note - this ended up in the "Drafts" section - from 2007. Some things have changed - others not so much. I'm putting this out there to get it out of the drafts file, though it's not really really finished yet. Oh, but I did finish the book.)

Margaret Cho is an interesting person. I've been watching her for years- her standup and even a couple of episodes of her show, All American Girl. Her standup is hilarious. Her show was not so much, for a variety of reasons, over most of which she had no control. She has provided a voice (a very loud voice) for Asian Americans of my generation (30's), and I have suspicions that we went to middle school together.

Her book, checked out from the library, because I am poor but have managed to pay off my outstanding library debt from having mislaid a children's book, is I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight. I am about half way through it and may or may not finish it.

So far there is a politically semi-panicked unfocusedness to this collection of essays. Rife with swearing (fuck, mostly), most of which serves to detract from the point, and in one notable case, the beauty, of the thoughts struggling to get through. That notable case is in an essay called "good-bye", in which Cho catalogues, passionately, and heartbreakingly, what you will never be able to do again if you lost someone to the war. It ends:

"They're never coming home. Never. They bring back bodies, hidden beneath flags, pictures of which the government doesn't want us to see, but it's not them, anyway. They are gone, far away from this world, to heaven, I suppose, and, for their sake, I hope there is one, because here on earth it's fucking hell."

The piece itself is powerfull, and Cho's outrage is palpable, her words drag the reader into her emotion. Cho can write.

It is, perhaps, unfair to ask that someone so subject (and subjected to so much) to issues of identity- being Korean-American in America not be obsessed with it. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970's and 80's, she was surrounded by her Korean family, the Chinese and Japanese students in school, and all the stereo-types associated with what an Asian Girl Should Be- most of which she was not. She was not thin, she was not considered pretty (having a "fat face" was one of the "problems" her relatives let her know she had), and she did not excell academicaly. She was shy, scared, and lonely. A lot of this due to pressures from within her groups, and exclusion from the outside. She has every reason to be pissed off about it all, and she is.

She identifies herself in many ways- American, Asian-American, Feminist, etc. It seems she is having trouble just Being Cho at times, due, no doubt, to the afore-mentioned troubles coming up. The troubles relating to race and racial stereotypes did not end when she hit 18- even at the supposed top of the game, having her own show, she was forced to diet by the show's producers, was attacked by Asian groups for employing the "wrong kind" of Asians as characters on the show, and on and on.

Throughout the (first half of) the book, Cho expresses what can be commonly seen in the letters to the editors' pages across the country now- an impatience and confusion about the War in Iraq, a distrust of politicians. Also commonly expressed is a wish for change without any clear direction of what shape that change would take. She advises us that it is time to "Warrior Up", but is not really clear about what that means. Cho's exhortations to get "militant" seem to go nowhere, as what that means is likewise left unexplained. Militant how, exactly? Write letters? Voting is suggested, but this falls into the tired Anybody But Bush camp of rhetoric.

Dust Jackets

There have been a number of hardcover books coming out in the States of late which do not have dust jackets. I approve, just to get that out of the way. Recently I found a bag of dust jackets which I'd removed from the books so that they (the jackets) would not get tattered while the boy or I were reading/playing with/losing the books. The bag was crushed, of course, so all dreams of "someday I will sell this for a mazillion dollars,which will come in handy as there will be no social safety nets soonly" were dashed. I'll just have to keep stuffing bullion into the mattresses instead.

Dust jackets are a relatively recent invention, as anyone in antique books can tell you. The covers of books have long been embossed, or had pictures on them. For some reason, somewhere, it was decided that an extra layer of paper was needed. One boss of mine was very particular about the Care Of Dust Jackets. Do not use the side flaps as page-savers in Utah, just a warning.

Anyhoo- I like this new trend and have taken to snickering when I see an environmet-oriented book clad in the extra layer (ahem, Al Gore).

Some of the new books sans DJ are made in imitation of the older books, it's true, but a number of them are not, and the design is rather good. I am hoping that this will continue, or that attention will re-focus to the spines of the books, rather than the obvious advertisment factor of the Glorious Dust Jacket For Facing Out on the shelf.

And then another year..sheesh

I have not been doing nothing. Latest is this:

Remembering Maurice Sendak - published on the wsws.org today

~The death in May of Maurice Sendak just a month shy of his 84th birthday was greeted throughout the publishing, art and reading world with deep sadness. Sendak, perhaps best known for his book, Where the Wild Things Are (first published in 1963), was beloved by millions, and for good reason.


Whether Sendak worked on his own stories or collaborated with other writers, his portrayal of children was always humane, and often humorous. No matter the emotions involved, Sendak pulled no punches, and illustrations such as that of the fit-throwing Max in Where the Wild Things Are, or the range of feelings in the otherwise simple One Was Johnny (1962), are honest depictions of children’s intense feelings.


Sendak did not consider his books to be children’s books per se, remarking once that he did not believe there was an absolute demarcation between children’s and adult literature. He objected to the way children were treated when it came to literature, saying, “ ‘Oh, you can’t tell them this, oh you can’t tell them that.’ You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true, you tell them.”


What is clear in all of Sendak’s work is that he considered children to be complex beings possessing a full complement of emotions and all the wonder and distress entailed therein.


Although the writer said he had “an intense nostalgia, a passionate affiliation for childhood,” Sendak did not let that nostalgia descend into the mawkish celebration of a lost utopia. He rejected the trend to idealize childhood, commenting in a New York Times interview late last year, “There’s a certain passivity, a going back to childhood innocence that I never quite believed in. We remembered childhood as a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business.”


Since its release in 1963, Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has been repeatedly pulled from library shelves by those considering it to be “too dark.” In the early days of the controversy, he calmly explained, “It is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis.”


The 2009 film adaptation by Spike Jonze, who worked closely with Sendak to bring the story to the screen, received a PG rating and again provoked comments about the work’s being “too dark” for children. Sendak’s response in this case was not as measured. His declaration that anyone who thought it unfit for children could “go to hell” was delivered with a characteristic bluntness. One could not help but cheer.


There is certainly darkness in his work, especially when compared to the often sanitized and one-sided offerings of most children’s literature. His last book, Bumble-Ardy (2011), about a pig’s birthday party, the first he had both written and illustrated in 30 years, raised eyebrows and some ire for his inclusion of the Grim Reaper (death) in the story. Although he did change the book so that the pigs drink brine instead of wine, Sendak waved off objections to the appearance of the Grim Reaper in typical fashion, saying it was the parents who were afraid of the “murderous” impulses children have.



Born in June 1928 in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Sendak was himself very much aware from a young age of the uncertainty and darkness of life. His parents did not hide from him his own fragility, nor the deaths of a number of his relatives during the Holocaust.


Sickly as a child, Sendak was often confined to his home and left in the charge of his sister Natalie, later portrayed in Outside Over There (1981) as Ida: “Ida, very brave, very strong, very frightening, taking care of me.” Other family members were also transformed into characters in his books as the years passed; the Wild Things was based on his aunts and uncles who appeared to the young Sendak as unruly and, though well-meaning, potentially dangerous.


His ability to see and articulate the contradictions within people—for example, Ida’s simultaneous love for and impatience with the baby, the Wild Things’ tender and terrifying sides—is in itself a remarkable thing. His stories are intricate, even when very short, and children (and adults) have loved them for generations because of this. Sendak did not lie or cover up the frightful things in the world or in the minds of children. Rather, he sought to understand and to let us know that we were understood. Even when we were beastly.


He did not give in to pessimism, however, and there is also great joy to be found in much of his work. A Hole Is to Dig (1952), done with Ruth Krause, depicts children in often high, happy excitement as they define holes and other various things—often hilariously. What Do You Say, Dear? (1958), written by Sesyle Joslin, is one of the funniest books on manners ever produced for children.


The vast majority of Sendak’s works were done in collaboration with others, and he had an extraordinary ability to bring out the nuance in even very simple stories, revealing layers that might otherwise have been missed.


This author’s early personal favorite, Amos Vogel’s How Little Lori Visited Times Square (1963), displays the range of Sendak’s illustrative powers—Lori is by turns bored, curious, frustrated, bereft and overjoyed in his complicated journey, and every page is believable, though the story itself is a ridiculous yarn. As was the case with the vast majority of Sendak’s young creatures, human or otherwise, Lori is rendered with tremendous empathy.


There is one more book yet to come from Maurice Sendak. Set to be published in February 2013, My Brother Jack is a poem about his own brother, who died in 1995 and also wrote several children’s books, some of which Maurice illustrated.


Ultimately, Sendak was not only true to himself and his artistic vision, he was true to life itself.