Ray Bradbury: The Greatest Science Fiction Writer

So, today came the sad new that Ray Bradbury, the greatest living science fiction writer, has now become the greatest science fiction writer, period.

Here's what the NYP obituary had to say (thanks to friend Richard for the link):

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/ray-bradbury-popularizer-of-science-fiction-dies-at-91.html?_r=1&hp

Jeff Grubb has a moving personal response about what Bradbury meant to him:

http://grubbstreet.blogspot.com/2012/06/singing-bradbury-electric.html

My own personal favorite wd have to be "The Utterly Perfect Murder", a story that shows Bradbury understands everything about growing up, and holding grudges, and letting go. I think that was the point at which I realized Bradbury was not just a major (I wd say the major) science fiction writer of his time but a literary figure, the one most responsible for elevating science fiction into "literature".

It was also about that time when I discovered that Bradbury was a pretty good poet (at least when he cd shake off the malign influence of Melville and Whitman, which was not always the case). And what's kept coming back to me today is my favorite among his poems, I Have a Brother, Mostly Dead:*

I have a brother, mostly dead

And angels perched upon his head

Most of my life, mostly unseen

And yet I feel with him I've been

A cohort playmate friend of Poe

Who tours me where live friends can't go.

He teaches me his mortal park

And where the firefly stops for spark

And how the shade within the night

Is a most fine delicious fright.

I give him words, he gives me bone

To play like Piper when alone;

And so my brother, dead, you see,

Is wondrous literate company.

Thus if my Muse says: Nevermore!

I hear a tapping at my door;

My brother comes to saviour me

With graveyard biscuit, rictus tea,

That tea in which, perused awhile

One finds a lovely mummy's smile

And then again, he bids me snuff

Egyptian dust . . .

So Idea Ghosts sit up again . . .

And shape themselves with words for clothes.

All this my long lost brother does,

This sibling spent before my cause.

He moves my hand and Lo! O Lord!

His tombstone my Ouija Board.

He shouts: Stay not in buried room,

Come forth, sweet brother, flower my tomb

With words so rare and phrase so bright

They'll bonfire burn away the night.

All this to me lost brother is

And I his live sweet Lazarus.

His shout ignore? his cry refuse?

No, no! Much thanks, long-dead fine Muse.**

*I've provided the stanza breaks.

**from WHERE ROBOT MICE AND ROBOT MEN RUN ROUND IN ROBOT TOWNS [1977]

...........................................................

It was a good long life (almost 92 years). The world is a better place for his having been here.

--JDR

Taum: Twenty Years

And of course August is another anniversary for us, being that August 19th will mark the twentieth anniversary of Taum Santoski's death. Janice and I saw Taum virtually every day during the two long years between the time he was diagnoses as terminally ill and the end, and I think it was his death that really taught me the lesson that a friend is irreplaceable. You can, and will, make new friends, but the memories of time you've shared with those who are gone gets oddly cut off, almost self-contained, once you're the only one to remember it. It was the same with my friend Franklin, who died just within the past year; even though I'd only seen him once since graduate school, it feels v. odd to have so many vivid memories that no one else now remembers. Just one of the things about growing old, but it came as a shock with Taum, who was the same age I was (literally, having been born exactly one month earlier).

Not quite knowing how to commemorate his death, I thought I'd start posting a piece he wrote that's never been published. Back in '83-84 I started reading and thinking seriously about the history of fantasy as a genre and Tolkien's place in it. In the course of our many conversations on this topic, Taum at one point started setting down his own ideas about fantasy. But rather than an essay (the form the opening chapter or Introduction of my erstwhile dissertation would have taken), he set down a sequence of twenty-four aphorisms -- what might be called 'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'. It was so divergent from my own work that I found it more puzzling than enlightening, but in the interests of those who might be more in tune with Taum's thinking I present it now, in my authority as Taum's literary executor. In order to keep the sequence distinct from anything I might say about it, I'll post each entry separately as its own blog post, labeled 'Taum Santoski (I)', 'Taum Santoski (II), and so forth. I'll be particularly interested to see what, if any, comments these might elicit.

--John R.

PARKER

So, I wrote a tribute to my cat Parker (May 1989- August 4th 2002), who died nine years ago last week. But after I posted it, blogger.com somehow ate it, apparently beyond retrieving. Luckily Janice, who knew him better than anyone but me (while fond of her he was always My Cat, just as she's Rigby's Favorite Person), got to see it before it was wiped out. So rather than go through re-creating it again I'll just say: rest in peace, Parker. You are not forgotten.

The Late, Great Satoshi Kon

So, I was stunned last Friday when reading a sidebar in an article in an anime magazine to see a passing reference to PAPRIKA, my favorite animated film, as "the last film of the late Satoshi Kon".

A quick check proved it was all too true: last spring Kon was strikened with pancreatic cancer and, unlike those who maintain a public presence throughout their final illness (like Warren Zevon, who recorded a heart-breaking version of "Knocking on Heaven's Door" shortly before he died), seems to have gone home to quietly live out his final days, dying just three months later.

Here's how Lord Dunsany described a similar loss of a genius, much appreciated by those who knew his work but virtually unknown to the public at large:

We have lost, in a time of losses, when loss is nothing out of the ordinary,

a genius whose stupendous imagination has passed across our time

little more noticed by most people than the shadow

of a bird passing over a lawn would be noticed

by most of a tennis-party.

—Ld Dunsany, "S. H. Sime" [1942], THE GHOSTS OF THE HEAVISIDE LAYER

As for Satoshi Kon's work, there's surprisingly little of it: just four movies and one short (thirteen-episode) tv series.

First off, there's PERFECT BLUE, the fascinating and disturbing story of a pop singer trying to become a serious actress while coping with a seriously scary stalker. What makes this film really disturbing aren't the violent scenes (though these mean it's definitely R-rated) but its being told from the point of view of three people, all of whom are going mad -- so that sometimes we see scenes that don't actually take place. Similarly, scenes that only take place in the film the actress is making are presented just like the ones in her real life. This one deserves the sobriquet "Hitchcockian" more than any other non-Hitchcock film I've ever seen: Brilliant but disturbing.

By contrast, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS [2001] is a much less sinister affair. It uses the frame story of two men going to interview a famous actress to weave two threads together: her life story (particularly her lifelong search for the artist she fell in love with as a teen) and the roles she played, with the documentarians getting caught up in the story (literally, as in appearing in the scenes as they're witnessing). Very much a filmmaker's tribute to favorite films: everything from samurai epics to her last film, which looks a lot like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

TOKYO GODFATHERS [2003], the only one of his films I don't have a copy of, is (surprisingly enough) downright heart-warming: the story of three homeless people (an old drunk, a transvestite, and a teenage runaway) who find an abandoned baby they have to take care of. It's like having all the events of Chaplin's THE KID condensed into one hectic day in snowy Tokyo, and is remarkable for ending in a totally appropriate miracle.

With PARANOIA AGENT [2004], we're back in disturbing/creepy territory, from its far-too-cheerful opening music (with pictures of the character laughing as they stand in front of nuclear explosions and tsunamis) to the lessons of people getting what they asked for, not what they wanted. Things get progressively more surreal episode after episode, but my two favorite moments are (1) the episode featuring three people who've made a suicide pact (two of whom conspire throughout to save the third) who are stymied time and again by other peoples' deaths everywhere they go,* and (2) the opening scene in which an old man who looks like an absent-minded professor is writing a complicated mathematical formula on the sidewalk in chalk: he ends by drawing an equal sign, and then looks up in wonder at the realization of the solution.

And then, finally, there's PAPRIKA [2006], the latest and greatest of the lot. I've written about this one before; suffice it to say that it's weird, and fascinating, and scary, and funny, and wholly absorbing.

It's a shock to think there'll be no more of these -- given that Kon was five years younger than I am, I expected he'd be producing masterpieces far into the future. For lifetime achievement, I'd rank him second only to Hayao Miyazaki (who's in a class by himself -- but then, so was Satoshi Kon). Apparently he was working on one more movie when he died, THE DREAM MACHINE, which has been described as a sort of road movie for robots, intended for a somewhat younger audience than most of his works. The people working on it with him have decided to go ahead and finish it.

I'll be waiting to see it -- but with that strange reluctance that sometimes prevents me from reading the only-book-I've-never-read by a favorite author, knowing that after this there's no more.

--John R.

current reading: OSSIAN REVISITED, ed. Howard Gaskill [1991]

current audiobook: THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER by Kate SUmmerscale [2008]

*think 'somedays you just can't get rid of a bomb'

Mr. Alspaugh

About a month ago I heard the sad news that Mr. Alspaugh, my old scoutmaster, had died. I had not seen him for a long time.

I was one of those who was really into scouting, going to the camporees every spring and fall, summer camp for a week every year at Camp De Soto over near El Dorado, most of the weekend hikes/camping out the Burnt Bridge Road, even one Survival. And of course there were the occasional bigger trips: up to Little Rock for the Quapaw Line Trail [?1970], over to Vicksburg [1971], and even once to Shiloh [1972]. And of course all the way up to the Jamboree in Moraine State Park in Pennsylvania [1973]. I made it all the way to Eagle Scout, plus a sashful of merit badges (from Public Safety to Indian Lore), two palms, and the God and Country Award.

When I first joined Troop 32 -- which must have been around the end of 1969, when I wd have left Webelos, where the scoutmaster had been Mr. Jean* -- it was a large troop, but its numbers dwindled over the years --largely I think because the Powers That Be within Scouting tried to reconfigure and reinvent the Boy Scouts during that era to shift the emphasis from camping and hiking in the countryside (which we enjoyed doing) to doing good works in large cities. I think I joined Troop 32, over at the Methodist Church, rather than the troop over at my own Presbyterian Church because I'd already been in Webelos (the Methodists being the only group which had a Webelos program). I think Mr. Alspaugh's older son, Bill, had already left the troop by that time, but I certainly knew his younger son, Wally (whose nickname, for reasons never made apparent, was Worm).

Too many memories for one post: the Monday night meetings at the scout hut, where we might be called on to recite out our daily Good Deeds for the week. Getting to meet Danny Thomas and, what impressed me much more, Col. Sanders at the Jamboree (Nixon didn't show up, the first time a president had blown off the Scouts' big once-in-four-years-event since FDR). Doing the Mile Swim at camp, and discovering wild huckleberries. Biking around a good deal of Columbia County with Mason Cozart and Jim Polk.** Working on Astronomy and Space Exploration merit badges with Mr. McGee at the college, one of my favorite absent-minded professors. Discovering genealogy through work on another merit badge (for a time I was the youngest member of the So-We-Ar, or Southern Arkansas Genealogical society, of which Mrs. Alspaugh was a member). Carrying along a copy of THE HOBBIT to re-read at summer camp.

Mr. Alspaugh himself remains one of my chief icons for stern-but-fair. I think we often exasperated him, but he never yelled and I only once saw him lose his temper (when some people were horsing around during a flag-lowering ceremony). In daily life he worked at the post office; I remember learning quite by chance once that he was a World War II vet, having served in the Pacific. He was also a man of many talents: years later, when I'd found my grandfather's old Seth Thomas clock and was trying to get it running again, I discovered that he'd once been a clockmaker and he volunteered to undertake the task of cleaning it up (it turned out it'd just wound down when Dr. Smith died nearly thirty years earlier).

One particular memory involved the Order of the Arrow. I got inducted into this, and later reached the middle rank of Brotherhood. Mr A. (as we called him) went all the way to Vigil, and to commemorate the occasion I gave him an Eisenhower silver dollar. Twenty years later, when I saw him for the last time after having been out-of-touch for years (having moved away to graduate school and he having retired from the post office), he pulled out of his pocket a large silvery disk, worn almost smooth, which I cd just recognize as the same 1971 silver dollar; apparently he'd carried it as a good-luck piece ever since (just as I carry a 100-mon coin with me every day).

I'm sorry to hear he's gone, but glad that at 87 years he had a good long life. I wish I'd kept in touch more, but I'm glad I got to see him that last time. I'm glad to have known him, and hope he knew that he meant a lot to a lot of us.

Rest in peace, Mr. A.

--John R.

*whose son, Lane Jean, was with me in scouts and more recently has been Magnolia's mayor.

**now Rev. Polk