Ray Bradbury
Writings and thoughts on my literary hero, Ray Bradbury.
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Marguerite Bradbury
Who ends up with the memories of a love when one of a pair passes away? Surely they will last forever in the skull of the survivor: The ring-ding of the door bell in the bookstore where she stood organizing shelves and watched in suspicion the strange man overdressed for a warm LA day when…
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Bradbury Makes Pulp into Paper
Most people want to be shiny quarters Just punched out of the mint Jingling in cattle-like surety Marveling at the cleverness of their security. Stick a pen in their hands Paper under their digits And watch the ink make potty Pooling on the paper like a child Losing their sobriety. Its panic plain and simple…
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The Apotheosis of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury is 100! I can still see him, larger than life, when I close my eyes – he has never died. He existed on the planet of his birth for over ninety sweeping orbits of its sun. Transitory was his life, specular, reflective, but also burning with his own light like that sun. Doing…
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Inspiration
I had to buy some inspiration the well had run dry the go-to stash was Poe in macabre navy blue an old print, just a fancy cover to make it new the pages crisp as fresh twenty dollar bills the little red ribbon bookmark starched like my father’s old button-on collars. There goes the ramparts…
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The Third Expedition
Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Martian Chronicles‘ is one of my favorite books. Composed by taking several of his short stories and interweaving them together to create a long-view version of humanity’s contact with and subsequent colonization of Mars. Of the various stories, one of my favorites is the chapter titled ‘The Third Expedition,’ which was originally…
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Sci-Fi Society
We were young crowded around those tables knocking elbows cockeyed looking at the ladies trying to be suave trying to be Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart with Cagney faces but we played fire with words hitting keys hard typewriters splintering that wide future seductive, erotic in the way virgin boys dreamed about it while the…
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What is in a Place? (Audio)
The writer was old. He existed on the planet of his birth for over ninety sweeping orbits of its sun. Transitory was his life, specular, reflective, but also burning with his own light like that sun. Doing the impossible on a Monday, or a Tuesday, erecting stiletto monuments of flashing silver thundering out from his…
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“Bradbury was right!”
Out of the sun came the flaming silver needles. Landing in amongst the fragile bone-chess cities, red sand kicked up hard into quiet pale blue skies, was a ship from the third planet. The men inside, grizzled and fuzzy-faced, looked out the portholes and exclaimed each in turn, “Bradbury was right!” The dry seabeds rolled…
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Ink and Flame
I It was a pleasure to read. The black letters scattered across yellowing pages like ants on a lemon cake, each receding line swallowed whole with a cursory chew. The rain echoing on the plate glass and rat-a-tatting on the thin metal roof was a joyous cacophony to peach fuzzed ears in the early evening.…
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By Chance Two Separate Glances Meet
Light exploded around the sky in flashes of blue ice and dragon’s fire red, orange phosphorescence and acid greens. The crowd, thousands thick and thronging the great plaza, all watched together. The celebration was for the achievements of the human race, for all of their hard work, all of their dreaming and hoping. All…
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Acres of Memories
When I was younger I used to frequent a bookstore in Long Beach, California. It was called Acres of Books. This place was like Disneyland for book lovers! I believe it had over one million books in it’s inventories, with literally miles of shelving made of orange crates and all sorts of stacked odds and…
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If Only We Had Taller Been…
There is a video circulating from the 1971 conference revolving around Mariner 9’s mission to the Red Planet. I found it while browsing io9.com- it was embedded in an article describing how NASA has named the Curiosity rover’s landing spot “Bradbury Landing.” There gathered in that room are three of the greatest thinkers of any…
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Ray Bradbury’s Words
I love and miss you Ray…I wish I took the chance to send you this: I’ve walked with you through so many ages, smelled the odors of countless alien winds on a multiplicity of worlds, braved the frights of ghouls and felt summer suns shine on youth benign. Being a child with limited access to…
The Numinous Cosmos 