New Ray Bradbury Review Number 3 (2012)

Description

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed principally to study the impact of Bradbury's writings on American culture and is the chief publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies-the archive of Bradbury's writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Like its pioneering predecessor, the one-volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. While Bradbury's effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed, there is no doubt about his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his admirers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of readers.In this third number, the Center presents an all-archival issue devoted to Bradbury's fragments. A prolific writer, Bradbury composed openings for stories that he never finished, together with pages of notes, sketches, and drafts that he kept in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in various narrative projects he was considering, as well as fragments of completed stories that are now lost. These pages are of great interest to anyone drawn to Bradbury's creative mind, for they reveal his imagination at its most spontaneous. Readers will be excited to discover in this issue Bradbury's sketches for "The Venusian Chronicles," revealing a landscape and characters that, while clearly incomplete, carry on the themes of The Martian Chronicles. Included is a checklist of Bradbury's extensive fragments, compiled by Donn Albright and Jonathan R. Eller.Fans and scholars alike will welcome The New Ray Bradbury Review, as it will add to the understanding of the life and work of this eminent author, whose work has received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Science fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781612776583
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE NEW RAY BRADBURY REVIEW
Number 3 (2012) Edited by William F. Touponce

Published by The Kent State University Press
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
D ONN A LBRIGHT
Pratt Institute
J ONATHAN R. E LLER
Indiana University
S ARAH L AWALL
University of Massachusetts
P HIL N ICHOLS
University of Wolverhampton
THE NEW RAY BRADBURY REVIEW
Number 3 (2012)
CONTENTS
In Memoriam: Ray Bradbury WILLIAM F. TOUPONCE
I Am My Grandfather, My Grandfather Is Me RAY BRADBURY
Introduction WILLIAM F. TOUPONCE
From the Archives: A Selection of Ray Bradbury’s Fragments EDITED WITH COMMENTARY BY WILLIAM F. TOUPONCE
Part One: Youth, Old Age, and Death
1. WHEN THE WEEPING STOPPED
2. THE ONE WHO FELL
3. THAT’S HOW DEATH IS.
4. ALL GOOD THINGS ARE OVER
Figure One—Grammy
Part Two: Other Writers
1. We have Art that we may not perish from Truth
2. THE MENACING MARTIANS IN OZ
3. Edith Wharton
Part Three: Characters
1. Darkside’s Folly
2. THE MAGICIAN
3. I heard them all laughing
4. THE ALL HALLOWS FAMILY
5. The Acid Clean Man
6. THE BED IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM
7. THE SAVED SADNESS
8. THE JIGSAW
9. THE COLORED SHOE MAN
10. THE SCISSORS GRINDER
Figure Two—The Medicine Show
Part Four: Reveries
1. Fire is baroque
2. THE BURNT PEOPLE
3. The steadfast sea
4. When the sound of the sea and the smell of the sea/Come in
5. At night the wind plunged through the house
6. The wind all around
7. TO MAKE THE UNFAMILIAR FAMILIAR
8. To lie upon the dusty nap of the rug
9. GREEN AFTERNOON
10. It was a melon patch
11. “It is a clear cool morning”
12. In the window of the candy store
13. He lived in an element of mud
14. To watch the great round mouths turning
15. THE PLAYGROUND
16. THE DIFFERENT PAT
Figure Three—The Cool Cold Smell of Water
Part Five: Dreams
1. THE MONK, THE MONK
2. SUMMER NIGHT IN THE COURTHOUSE SQUARE
3. “What’s it get a woman?”
4. THE DREAM
Part Six: Houses
1. THE CELLAR, THE ATTIC, THE PANTRY
2. Very early that morning
3. LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT
4. THE BOARDING HOUSE
5. The house drifted with dust
6. The house was a good house
7. In other parts of the house
8. Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace
9. The House of Sighs
10. The town was a beautiful ruin of a place
Part Seven: Climates/Seasons
1. In the yard the three apple trees grew up
2. On those clean spring days
3. THE HERB FOREST
4. It was one of the early Sunday afternoons in fall
5. She woke on a winter’s morning
Part Eight: Space Travel/Other Worlds
1. THE NEW CRUSADE
2. The rocket was a silver thimble
3. THISTLE-DOWN AND FIRE
4. They spoke of the spaces between the stars
5. THE LONG MIDNIGHT
6. It is not nice to spill down space
7. LONGFALL
8. THE WITCH
9. THE VENUSIAN CHRONICLES (Prelude/Chapter One/ THE GARDENER/THE UMBRELLA MAN)
10. The carnival was set up and ready to go
Part Nine: Mars
1. He felt it when they came from the rocket
2. The berries were ripened
3. THE CHILDREN
4. Many nights he could hear the voice calling to him
5. “Come down, come down!”
6. The robot
7. “What is it?”
8. THE COMEDIANS
9. The Carnival arrived about seven that night
10. THE DUPLICATE CIRCUS
Figure Four—The Fourth of July
Textual Commentary WILLIAM F. TOUPONCE
The Albright Collection: Bradbury Story Fragments DONN ALBRIGHT, JON ELLER AND DIANA DIAL REYNOLDS
Copyright © 2012 by The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Address permissions requests to: The Kent State University Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions, PO Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001.
Story fragments are © 2012 by Ray Bradbury and are reprinted with permission of Ray Bradbury and Don Congdon Associates, Inc. They may not be adapted, quoted, copied, stored, or published in any format without the permission of the author and his agents.
ISBN 978-1-60635-147-5 Manufactured in the United States of America
To order call 419-281-1802 or order online at www.kentstateuniversitypress.com .
The New Ray Bradbury Review is edited by William F. Touponce at The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis, 902 E. New York Street, ES 0010, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, and published periodically by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242. The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies accepts no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion made by contributors.
Send inquiries and submissions to the Jonathan Eller, Director, The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at [e-mail] . Submissions to The New Ray Bradbury Review should be typed and double-spaced in 12-point Times on letter-sized paper. Electronic submissions on disk or via e-mail must be in Microsoft Word. If photographs, diagrams, or other graphic material accompany the document, include each in a file separate from the text or send them as individual e-mail attachments. Scanned greyscale images must be in TIFF format at 300 dpi or higher resolution; line images should be in TIFF format at 1200 dpi or higher resolution. Any material owned by third parties must be accompanied by complete copyright information for proper acknowledgment. Authors are required to obtain written permission from the rights holder(s) of such material submitted for inclusion in The New Ray Bradbury Review.
Cover illustration by Folon. ©ADAGP. Courtesy of Paola G. Folon.
In Memoriam: Ray Bradbury
22 AUGUST 1920–5 JUNE 2012
In the 1950s, when he first became influential and widely known in America and in Europe, Ray Bradbury believed that we now live in an Age of Information, where facts replace facts at an alarming speed in our minds, destroying the roots of any coherent experience. Experience itself, he felt, had been narrowed down by our technological civilization to what was thought important: scientific knowledge expressed in facts. People no longer had or took the time to find original metaphors—their own or discovered in the writings of others—to express their inner emotional lives, which were largely being replaced by the products of the entertainment industry. They felt no need for authentic poetry.
This in summary is the dire situation to be found in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Bradbury’s most famous book, which he insisted is not really about censorship at all but rather about the effects of mass culture (i.e., television) on people. At several points in the story, Bradbury evokes a pervasive melancholy among the citizens of this future world (interpreted in Truffaut’s 1966 film as a kind of narcissism). People no longer seem capable of experiencing anything deeply. In the opening pages, Montag is given a dandelion test by his teenage neighbor, Clarisse, to see if he is in love. He’s not. The turning point of the book comes about when Montag the fireman, in an open act of rebellion, switches off the wall-sized telescreen and reads from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to a group of numb people, who suddenly, because of the effect of the poem’s powerful figurations of war, ignorant armies, and the melancholy withdrawal of faith and love from the world, begin to remember their feelings and their pain, and a bit of the trauma of their recent history (since Bradbury so thoroughly personifies books in Fahrenheit 451 , the burning of books can be understood as a holocaust). Bradbury obviously felt that there was something important for our survival as human beings in the slow reading of books, and in examining an author’s unique figures of expression.
In one way or another, in everything he wrote, in whatever genre he wrote in, from The Martian Chronicles to Dandelion Wine and especially in his many story collections, Bradbury engaged in an attempt to recover and to preserve some of the richness of human experience. He sought to broaden and indeed reinvent the wonder and terror of modern experience in an age that sought to narrow it. In the introduction to his own collection of modern fantasy, Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow (1952), Bradbury characterized himself simply as an “emotionalist,” unfortunately risking being misunderstood as an anti-intellectual. Later on in his career, he described himself as a storyteller who wrote fairy tales about the modern world, which is a closer formulation of his talent and lyrical appeal. But I think that these two self-descriptions taken together provide a clear indication of what Bradbury’s legacy is and will continue to be. Bradbury has written hundreds of emotionally charged stories that give a shape and a name to feelings that are on the wane, feelings that go much deeper and are much more nuanced than simple nostalgia and sentimentality, of which he is sometimes accused. Consider “Hail and Farewell” (collected in The Golden Apples of the Sun ), which is among my personal favorites. It tells of a young boy of twelve who is immortal and never ages in appearance, of his moving on from town to town and from family to family where there is a need for a child, until the unsuspecting parents discover his true nature and he must move on again. The story deals with the emotional problems of containing the old man of experience within the young boy’s body, and with the difficulty of always having to make an end of happiness and then to begin again somewhere else, somewhere new. This particular story alludes not to the common dandelion but to Wordsworth’s poem about the daffodils as a metaphor for the paradoxes of innocence and experience.
One can take this story to be a kind of parable indicating how Bradbury’s stories in general will travel and survive. Living on throughout the world in whatever language they are encountered, they will help people give a shape and a name to the finer emotions