Ray Bradbury on His Perspective and Critics

From The Paris Review interview last year with author Ray Bradbury:

Q: There was a time, though, wasn’t there, when you wanted recognition across the board from critics and intellectuals?

BRADBURY: Of course. But not anymore. If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic. … It’s the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York critics, that caused [Vonnegut’s] celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana

I wouldn’t call it a suspenseful book. And yet Two Years Before the Mast kept me in suspense. I wouldn’t call it a book that’s hard to put down, and yet I read it in great chunks, reluctant to stop.

It’s an old book, and it’s written in the manner of an old book. And yet this reader felt the living presence of an intelligent, brave-hearted and sympathetic narrator at his elbow, one he is glad to have become acquainted with.

In 1834, Richard Henry Dana was a Harvard undergraduate. Stricken with the measles, he recovered with his sight damaged, unable to read much. He chose a radical form of therapy.

…a two or three year voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.

This was no pleasure cruise. “Before the mast” is a nautical term meaning the forecastle area, the place where common seamen bunked, where officers went seldom, and the captain almost never. Life before the mast meant constant labor, little sleep, unvaried food, and much danger. One crew member is lost overboard before the brig “Pilgrim” has rounded Cape Horn. Continue reading Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana

Walker goes to church. Nation reels.

I went to church Sunday, for the first time in about a month. I’ve been out of town, for various reasons, several weekends in a row.

Frankly, I’d have been inclined to skip it, if I didn’t have absences to make up. I prefer to skip Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in church, for personal reasons. Please understand that I don’t object to the honoring of parents, just because I myself chose my mother poorly, and have not achieved fatherhood. Heaven preserve me from the kind of people who run around being all outraged all the time, because everything doesn’t include them.

But I prefer to let other people alone in their observances. I’d rather stay home in the bosom of my own bosom.

(Also, I think it would have been nice if Trinity Sunday had gotten at least equal billing. Just sayin’.)

But I went, and it was as uncomfortable as I feared. All the men were given numbered tickets as they came in, and then at a point in the service we were all asked to come forward. It wasn’t just fathers, but all men, so it was inclusive and all that. I stayed in my seat anyway, because I didn’t want to presume to patriarch status, whatever they said.

After congratulations and a prayer, they drew two ticket numbers and announced the winners of the Father’s Day drawing. I think the prizes were restaurant gift certificates.

In the cases of both winners, though, the claims came, not from the men up front, but from their wives back in the pews. Both winners had given the tickets to their wives to hold.

I think there’s some kind of profound lesson, or caution, there.

Don’t know what it is, though.

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The Breaking by Loren Eaton

Our friend Loren Eaton has a short story in the latest issue of Port Iris.

In “The Breaking,” a cripple named Moses struggles to beat back ever-encroaching growths named krim as they slowly advance upon his rag-tag village. For help with the work he has only an orphan, a ditchdigger’s son and the indolent child of a wealthy trader. Blasted and apparently barren, the krim look like dead, weather-beaten bushes. Yet they continue to spread, inexorable and merciless, and no one in the village heeds Moses’ warning of a flame that will soon sweep through them, devouring as it goes. …

Not exactly the code of the West

I made a discovery lately, while in my Wild West mood, that clears up a mystery that’s bothered me, off and on, for most of my life.

My maternal grandfather had a few shelves of books in his home. One which I read with interest, and took as my own after his death, was the extravagantly titled tome, Capt. W. F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago (As Told By Himself, As a Sequel To His Famous Book, “Thirty-One Years On the Plains and In the Mountains”). Published in 1910.

The frontispiece is a studio portrait of the old scout:

The book tells of the narrator’s adventures, first as a young protege of Kit Carson, then as a wagon train scout, and also as an Army scout fighting Indians. It’s an interesting book in the old style, with similar pleasures and difficulties as the Buffalo Bill memoir I reviewed the other day.

The books seem to have been fairly popular in their time. A source I’ll link to further along quotes a letter to H. P. Lovecraft by Robert E. Howard, who’d seen Drannan in a Texas town as a boy:

…wandering about the streets of Mineral Wells … trying to sell the pitiful, illiterate book of his life of magnificent adventure and high courage; a little, worn old man in the stained and faded buckskins of a vanished age, friendless and penniless…. what a lousy end for a man whose faded blue eyes had once looked on the awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain, who had ridden at the side of Kit Carson, guided the waggon-trains across the deserts to California, drunk and revelled in the camps of the buffalo-hunters, and fought hand to hand with painted Sioux and wild Comanche.

Over the years, as I’ve read this and that about the West, I’ve looked for other mentions of Col. William F. Drannan.

To my puzzlement, there was never one. Not one. I think I recall a passing reference in an article in a Western history magazine, but nothing, ever, in a book.

I began to smell a rat. Continue reading Not exactly the code of the West

Left Turn and Stomp On the Gas

“The liberal bias of the mainstream media tilts so far left that any outlets not in that political lane, like the Drudge Report and Fox News Channel, look far more conservative than they really are, according to a UCLA professor’s new book out next month.” writes Paul Bedard in a review of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind

Do They Have Crime in Ireland?

John Connolly talks about Irish readers’ lack of interest in crime novels. He says the Irish naturally clash with systemic qualities of crime fiction, such as urban life and respect for police. An Irish inferiority complex may come into play too.

After all, crime fiction is less about the world as it is than the world as it should be. As William Gaddis wrote in his novel JR (1976): “Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”

Crime fiction refuses to accept that this should be the case, and in doing so it reflects the desire of its readers for a more just society. Even at its darkest it is, essentially, hopeful by nature.

Perhaps, for the Irish, that hope is yet to come. (via Books, Inc.)