Ray Bradbury Sources Backup
A4 Sullivan, Anita T. "Ray Bradbury and Fantasy." The English Journal 61.9 (1972): 1309-314. JSTOR. Web. 14 Mar. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/813228?ref=search-gateway:86fca805a3157956485809654f27d2f0>.
1 Bradbury's own brand of fantasy ap- parently came to birth in the world of the carnival. His imagination was nur- tured with carnival imagery, both through the teachings of his Aunt Neva and his own experiences
A5 M., C. "Bradbury, Heinlein, and Hobo Heaven: And a New Feature in NOTES: SF Intertextuality." Science Fiction Studies 28.2 (2001): 319-21. JSTOR. Web. 14 Mar. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/4240998?ref=search-gateway:b494485c1fd99baad5bf3363c5289105>.
1 In the concluding pages of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Guy Montag is served a hot cup of coffee (more nourishment or comfort than he ever received in his fully automated house) by hoboes camped alongside abandoned railway tracks. Though not politically active, the hoboes are constructive, preserving forbidden books for use in what they hope will be a better future. Bradbury's tramps are heroes-"bums on the outside, libraries on the inside" (153).
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"All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay." (155)
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"Changing size doesn't change the brain. If I made you twenty-five tomorrow, Jim, your thoughts would still be boy thoughts, and it'd show! Or if they turned me into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty and that boy would act funnier and older and weirder than any boy ever." (40.15)
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"Dad? Am I a good person?" "I think so. I know so, yes." "Will - will that help when things get really rough?" "It'll help." (28.4-28.7)
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"Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder." (51)
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"Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don't know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little bit about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know." (39.22)
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"Heck." Jim sniffed north, Jim sniffed south. "Where's that storm?" [...] Will let the wind ruffle and refit his clothes, his skin, his hair. Then he said faintly, "It'll be here. By morning." "Who says?" "The huckleberries all down my arms. They say." (2.47-2.50)
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"How have we used machines so far, to make people cry? Yes! Every time man and machine look like they will get on all right --boom! Someone adds a cog, airplanes drop bombs on us, cars run us off cliffs. So it the boy wrong to ask? No! No..." (33)
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"I dub thee...asses and foolssss...I dub...thee...Mr. Sickly...and...Mr. Pale...!" (24.66)
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"I haven't smelled that in years," said Mr. Crosetti. Jim snorted. "It's around." "Yes, but who notices? When? No, my nose tells me, breathe! And I'm crying. Why? Because I remember how a long time ago, boys ate that stuff. Why haven't I stopped to think and smell the last thirty years?" (4.29-4.31)
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"I told them, if you want a picture of me, use the one taken back in 1853. Let them remember me that way. Keep the lid down, in the name of the good Lord, during the service." (148)
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"If you had your way you'd pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you'd leave yourself nothing to do between the big jobs and you'd have a devil of a time thinking up things to do so you wouldn't go crazy. Instead of that, why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life, son." (50)
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"In a few days I will be dead. No." She put up her hand. "I don't want you to say a thing. I'm not afraid. When you live as long as I've lived you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I'd never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can't say I'm greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don't fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it." (150)
Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine. New York: Bantam, 1976. Print.
"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer." (1)
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"It won't work," Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. "No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen." (75)
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"Like I say, you stick around and don't let nothing happen." "You can depend on me," said Tom. "It's not you I worry about," said Douglas. "It's the way God runs the world." Tom thought about this for a moment. "He's all right, Doug," said Tom. "He tries." (112)
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"Look around come April, and say, 'Who'd like to fix the roof?' And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas. Because up there on that roof you can see the whole town going toward the country and the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining, and the morning lake, and birds on the trees down under you, and the best of the wind all around above. Any one of those should be enough to make a person climb a weather vane some spring sunrise. It's a powerful hour, if you give it half a chance..." (182)
A8
"Most science-fiction writers are moral revolutionaries on some level or another, instructing us for our own good"
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"Mr. Jonas looked deep in the big old wagon and shook his head. Now, in the sunlight, his face looked tired and he was beginning to perspire. Then he peered into the mounds of vases and peeling lamp shades and marble nymphs and satyrs made of greening copper. He sighed." (217)
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"Never going to have any," said Jim. "You just say that." "I know it. I know everything." [Jim's mother] waited a moment. "What do you know?" "No use making more people. People die." His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad. (9.15-9.20)
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"No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade. That's my answer to anyone asks big questions!" (183)
A9
"Ray Bradbury is the greatest living American writer of science fiction. His singular achievement in this genre is rooted in the imaginative originality of his works, his gift for language, his insights into the human condition, and his commitment to the freedom of the individual."
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"Some people turn sad awfully young," he said. "No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them." (220)
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"Together? You two feet taller and going around feeling your leg-and-arm-bones? You looking down at me, Jim, and what'd we talk about, me with my pockets full of kite-string and marbles and frog-eyes, and you with clean nice and empty pockets and making fun, is that what we'd talk, and you able to run faster and ditch me - " (26.31)
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"Tom, if this year's gone like this, what will next year be, better or worse?" "Don't ask me." Tom blew a tune on a dandelion stem. "I didn't make the world." He thought about it. "Though some days I feel like I did." He spat happily. (235)
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"Tom," whispered Douglas. "I got to travel all those ways. See what I can see. But most of all I got to visit Colonel Freeleigh once, twice, three times a week. He's better than all the other machines. He talks, you listen. And the more he talks the more he gets you to peering around and noticing things. He tells you you're riding a very special train, by gosh, and sure enough, it's true. He's been down the tracks, and knows. And now here we come, you and me, along the same track, but further on, and so much looking and snuffling and handling things to do, you need old Colonel Freeleigh to shove and say look alive so you remember every second! Every darn thing there is to remember! So when kids come around when you're real old, you can do for them what the colonel once did for you. That's the way it is, Tom, I got to spend a lot of time visiting him and listening so I can go far-traveling with him as often as he can." (89)
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"Well, consider then, boy. Any man saves fingernail clippings is a fool. You ever see a snake bother to keep his peeled skin? That's about all you got here today in this bed is fingernails and snake skin. One good breath would send me up in flakes. Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count." (183)
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"Yesterday Ching Ling Soo died. Yesterday the Civil War ended right here in this town forever. Yesterday Mr. Lincoln died right here and so did General Lee and General Grant and a hundred thousand others facing north and south. And yesterday afternoon, at Colonel Freeleigh's house, a herd of buffalo-bison as big as all Green Town, Illinois, went off the cliff into nothing at all. Yesterday a whole lot of dust settled for good. And I didn't even appreciate it at the time. It's awful, Tom, it's awful! What we going to do without all those soldiers and Generals Lee and Grant and honest Abe; what we going to do without Ching Ling Soo? I never dreamed so many people could die so fast, Tom. But they did. They sure did!" (136)
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"You know what I hate most of all, Will? Not being able to run anymore, like you." (27.14)
A7
"most of the newer critics of science fiction and fantasy have been preoccupied with finding their way through the uncharted genealogical jungle, limiting themselves, when not openly hostile, to noting that Bradbury's special preserve is an extreme of elegiac sentiment and gentle fantasy, touched with the eerie and uncanny"
A7
"the entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one with out the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: no possible solutions" (26)
A2 Dominianni, Robert. "Ray Bradbury's 2026: A Year with Current Value." The English Journal 73.7 (1984): 49-51. JSTOR. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/817806?ref=search-gateway:7c270c9cd3d0ea6033c954d2dd86895b>.
1 Students tend to generalize on what they see as Bradbury's "Negative attitude"
A1 Bender, Ernest. "The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress. Vol. 26, No. 2, April 1969." Journal of the American Oriental Society 90.2 (1970): 68-69. JSTOR. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/598235?ref=search-gateway:3960331d63520d0e3678a0ea01740601>.
1 Three problems thus are solved by Art on wall: The tiger, mammoth, fire, the one, the all. So these first science fictions circled thought And then strode forth and all the real facts sought, And then on wall new science fictions drew, That run through history and end with . . . you.
A3 Mengeling, Marvin E. "Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine": Themes, Sources, and Style." The English Journal 60.7 (1971): 877-87. JSTOR. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/813204?ref=search-gateway:7e2e47a2fba2d035f2fb203517c4a78e>.
1 Truly, as GIlbert Highet remarked, Ray Bradbury has been underestimated...will begin to make Bradbury more understood, and perhaps through better understanding will come the higher estimation his work so much deserves.
A8
1971: "Whenever most new, modern, American novels come out, I go read Rumpelstiltskin again, because I think the modern American novel is bankrupt of imagination, wit, style, idea on any level
A4 pg. 1310
2 ...the carnival world can be thought of as a clearinghouse for Bradbury's imagina- tion-the place where he goes for his symbols when he is writing a tale of horror, nostalgia, fantasy, or some com- bination of the three.
A3 pg 883
2 DANDELION WINE contains allu- sions to many authors. Among others, there are references to Plato, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Whittier, and Poe. Of these, Melville (especially Moby Dick) is the most pervasive in terms of influencing Bradbury's imagery and philosophy.
A4 pg. 1310
3 But of Bradbury's tales at this time more were horror than fantasy. Perhaps he would regard an attempt to distinguish between horror and fantasy in his works as mere semantic quibbling. The differ- ence, it seems to me, can almost be de- scribed as a matter of levity. In the hor- ror tales, he was completely serious and trying his best to achieve a shock effect upon his readers. In the best of these, he probably succeeded because he also achieved, in the writing process, a shock effect upon himself. He was trying to exorcise something in himself as he wrote.
A3 pg. 883
3 THERE is a misconception that many readers have after finishing this book: the belief that Ray Bradbury is a senti- mentalist about the past. This miscon- ception most probably stems from the fact that Bradbury, mainly through his rich imagery, can so powerfully create a sense of the past
A3 pg. 884
4 B RADBURY, however, uses a struc- tural device in addition to the Whit- manesque journey motif, a device to give balance and symmetry to what might otherwise seem a rather loose-leafed jaunt indeed. Just as Nathaniel Haw- thorne used three scaffold scenes in The Scarlet Letter to give balance and sym- metry to the whole, Bradbury uses his three scenes of wine making to impose an additional structural element.
A4 pg. 1312
4 Through the eyes of the boys, Bradbury allows his imagination to create an eerie nightmarish mood which he sustains throughout the book. Through Mr. Halloway, he expresses his own philoso- phy. Although the story takes place in the same town which is the setting for the nostalgic Dandelion Wine, and in- volves two adolescent boys, there the resemblance stops
A3 pg. 885
5 Gilbert Highet writes that his style is "a curious mixture of poetry and colloquialism."9 Robert O. Bowen talks of his "clean colloquial rhythms and rich metaphor."10 Undoubtedly it is his images and meta- phors, and the way they are combined, which function as the outstanding single feature of his style.
A4 pg. 1313
5 The theme running through the book is that Evil is a shadow: Good is a real- ity. Evil cannot exist except in the vacuum left when people let their Good become not an active form, not a pump- ing in their veins, but just a memory, an intention. As Bradbury has indicated in other stories and articles, he feels that the potential for evil exists like cancer germs, dormant in all of us, and unless we keep our Good in fit condition by actively using it, it will lose its power to fight off the poisons in our system.
A3 pg. 886
6 F INALLY to be noted is that Brad- bury mixes both minor and major metaphors. For example, there is the major metaphor of the ravine as some deadly, evilly ravenous jungle beast. There is the metaphor of Colonel Free- leigh as a human time machine
A4 pg. 1314
6 Love is the best humanizing force man possesses, Bradbury seems to be saying in this book. He expresses the same idea in a long article he wrote in Life magazine the same year, 1962: Above all, humanity is an Idea, a concept, a way of doing, a motion toward light or dark, a selection between the will to destroy and the will to save. The more times such selection tends toward the Good, the more human we say that thing is becoming. We must seek ways to know and encourage the Good in ourselves, the will toward light. . ..7 7. Ray Bradbury, "Cry the Cosmos," Life (September 14, 1962) 90.
A3 pg. 886
7 Bradbury's Style is a curious mixture... For example, although the book is nar- rated from the third person omniscient point of view, and although the imagery is generally of a brilliant and stylized nature, there is inter-spliced within its fabric the youthful hyperboles and em- phatic repetitions that one would expect if the story were coming from the first person point of view of an unsophisti- cated, twelve-year-old boy. The refer- ence to "ten thousand chickens" in the quote above is a typical example of much hyperbole that appears in the book. And to describe a night as "dark dark dark" (p. 27), or the ravine as "black and black, black" (p. 131), is typical of the kind of repetition for emphasis that we ordi- narily hear from children, or from adults with much of their childhood still in them
A4 pg. 1314
7 He did not cease to be a teacher when he stopped writing science fiction, but he did place a mora- torium upon the more evangelistic kind of moralizing which he was practicing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Now, at last, his own sense of values seems to have become completely at one with his art.
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A bad thing happened at sunset. Jim vanished. (16.1-16.2)
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And Charles Halloway took the next step into the maze. Ahead flowed sluices of silver light, deep slabs of shadow, polished, wiped, rinsed with images of themselves and others whose souls, passing, scoured the glass with their agony, curried the cold ice with their narcissism, or sweated the angles and flats with their fear. (48.42-48.43)
A11
And Great Grandmother, ninety years on the beach, is moved back down the shore by the sea. And the ravine will always be dark and deep. But what can be done with the last breath finality of death; what can be done with the inescapable fact that we really don't want Douglas Spaulding to ever die? What happens, as far as Bradbury's living mind can take us is this: "One day you discover you are alive. Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight! You laugh, you dance around, you shout. But not long after, the sun goes out Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.
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Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more (Prologue.5-6)
A8
Bradbury admired films and wanted to be a playwright. It is not widely known that Bradbury has been engaged as a script writer throughout his career. He regards himself as a very good and successful playwright. Even so, he has achieved great popularity and respect only for his short fiction
A11
Bradbury asserts that fantasy is a way of dealing with the monster death, driving a cedar stake through a werewolf's heart, killing it, vomiting it out. Art allows for this steam valve relief, this laughing, crying, vomiting, when one needs to be happy, sad, or sick. It removes the alien pressures within so that we can survive.
A8 Pfeiffer, John R. "RAY BRADBURY'S BERNARD SHAW." Shaw 17.SHAW AND SCIENCE FICTION (1997): 119-31. JSTOR. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/40681468?ref=search-gateway:5bc9a6ed19becc5996023607b14bd2b0>.
Bradbury describes a similar ap- prenticeship in his article "How, Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated from Libraries
A7
Bradbury has never written science fiction and that his strength "lies in the fact that he writes about the things that are really important to us?not the things we pretend we are interested in?science, marriage, sports, politics, crime? but the fundamental prerational fears and longings and desires: the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings, the fear of things that are not self ..
A8
Bradbury have invested enormous energy in self- advertisement, especially in claiming that their messages and meaning are radical, even inciting to revolution from agendas that, upon examination, are essentially "enlightened conservative"
A11
Bradbury proves his fantasy by this reaching through the senses, this creating of real life. We believe, really believe, only that which is proven artistically, employing both the aesthetic criticism of the intellect and the senses. Only the latter is nearly infallible, as the virgin innocence of sensual intuition or trustingly incorporates the devil deceptions of illusion's mists.
A6
Bradbury stories have been adapted by other writers for radio, television, the screen, and the stage; Bradbury has adapted the work of others as well as his own
A7
Bradbury's stories stand out for their "consistent quality and variety" as he manages to play with "the ambiguity of the relationships between the invader and the invaded" (15)
A8
Bradbury's being sexually innocent (but not genderless), pre-adolescent, male, middle American, and precipitantly narcissistic
A6 M., R. D. "Review: Nietzschean Analysis and Theatrical Concern." Science Fiction Studies 18.1 (1991): 149-50. JSTOR. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/4240049?ref=search-gateway:fe4cea7aed9d41e319b37b10675d1f1f>.
Bradbury's esthetic of fantasy, as set forth by Professor Touponce, resembles, if it does not derive from, the Nietszchean asthetic of tragedy, so that Bradburian fantasy "fulfills the same roles and saving functions [as tragedy in Nietzschean theory]
A6
Bradbury's fiction is hardly so difficult, or his philosphy so complex, as to need detailed explication.
A10
Bradbury's reliance on the images and elements of carnival and his strong interest in the ways that carnival subverts authority is strongly enough suffused through his major work to allow for close readings to bring out these influences. Likewise, Bradbury's interest in the workings of the subconscious mind permeates much of his work.
A7
But I enjoy reading Bradbury, once each, and have no case against him. He writes popular fiction, like John Grisham and Michael Crichton, though his mode differs from theirs. At a time when all literary and aesthetic standards are col lapsing, one urges a little perspective upon readers
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But Jim said nothing. After a long time he clapped his hand to the back of his neck. "It really does!" he cried, in soft amaze. "What does?" "Hair! I read it all my life. In scary movies, it stands on end. Mine's doing it - now!" "Gosh, Jim so's mine!" They stood entranced with the delicious cold bumps on their necks and the suddenly stiffened small hairs quilled up over their scalps. (15.45-15.48)
A11
Dandelion Wine is fantasy, in the most boundless sense of the word. It is the fantasy which is always at hand, known to us all ? not the thirty-five cents a copy world of escapism and plasticity, but the unrigid, free, real world of the mind's expectations.
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Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element for element. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with no sound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serene vapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks were brass and gold, rooftops were paved with bronze. The high-tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threat above the unslept houses. The cicadas sang louder and yet louder. The sun did not rise, it overflowed. In his room, his face a bubbled mass of perspiration, Douglas melted on his bed. (211)
A10 Taormina, Agatha. "Review: Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction." Utopian Studies 16.3 (2005): 475-78. JSTOR. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20718773?ref=search-gateway:c9151017d97c0026a96ee2ffe8d831e1>.
Eller and Touponce claim that Bradbury's use of carnivalization demonstrates and at the same time critiques "a preoccupation with desire and the unconscious (Freud) as well as the modern crisis of values (Nietzsche)"
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Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess... continue reading..
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First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month, school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. (Prologue.1)
A7
For Diskin, his children "share the events of human life with the adults in their families and communities [but] their sharing differs in quality from that of their parents and townspeople. Their fix on the phenomena comprising day-to-day existence is charged with meanings which they construe from lore and legend, from myth and imagination"
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For it was no longer the street of the apples or plums or apricots, it was the one house with a window at the side and this window, Jim said, was a stage, with a curtain - the shade, that is - up. And in that room, on that strange stage, were the actors, who spoke mysteries, mouthed wild things, laughed, sighed, murmured so much; so much of it was whispers Will did not understand. (6.10)
A8
For the mass audience of science fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, Bradbury is far and away the best-known writer
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Framed through the hall door Will saw the only theater he cared for now, the familiar stage where sat his father [...] holding a book but reading the empty spaces. In a chair by the fire mother knitted and hummed like a tea-kettle. (8.3)
A11
From the instant of birth, the slap of cold on once warm comfort, life becomes a process of acquiring motion, of moving from place to place, choosing along the way things to pick up and keep. But we lose things, we lose love, friends, possessions, knowledge, and life. Safe and secure in the womb, there is nowhere to go, nothing to gain, and, most important, nothing to lose; death is non-existent.
A7
Gary K. Wolfe's 1980 article "The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury" speculates that "the surge in popularity of science fiction in the last century may be partly attributed not only to the increasing impact of technology on daily life but also to the closing of the available frontiers which had provided settings for much adventure fiction until that time"
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He lifted one bottle into the light. "'GREEN DUSK FOR DREAMING BRAND PURE NORTHERN AIR,'" he read."' Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April,1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one days in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.'" (220)
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He shut his eyes. June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear.... So thinking, he slept. And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928. (239)
Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 1997.
He wanted to be near and not near them, he saw them close, he saw them far. Suddenly they were awfully small in too large a room in too big a town and much too huge a world. In this unlocked place they seemed at the mercy of anything that might break in from the night. Including me, Will thought, including me. (8.4-8.5)
A9
His scope of reading broadened as he took in other models, such as Thomas Wolfe, Henry James, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson, whose books he sought out in the main library - his "university," as he termed it. Bradbury was now turning out "overwritten prose," which he later called "baroque."
A8
I am a language person. I've loved poetry all my life and my favorite people, whom I visit at the library again and again, are William Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton and Loren Eiseley. People with ideas. People with images. People with language. People who romance me with death, and excitement, and make me want to go on living
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If Will didn't hurry, those legions from Time Future, all the alarms of coming life, so mean, raw, and true you couldn't deny that's how Dad'd look tomorrow, next day, the day after the day after that, that cattle run of possible years might sweep Dad under! (49.3)
A11
In analyzing Bradbury's "style" one must carefully avoid scholastically rigid interpretations, if only for the sake of greater enjoyment. The beauty of his work, the personality of his written words, can best be appreciated by the innocent ears of readers who are not aware of archetypes and genres and styles. If one looks for contrived style in Bradbury's works, he is likely to sacrifice the full satisfaction of the experience.
A9
In high school, ambitious and eager to write publishable tales, Bradbury began by imitating those of Conan Doyle, Poe, and P. G. Wodehouse (SW 81). Light humor and satire proved to be part of Bradbury's methods and skills, which also comprised many other elements and approaches
A7
In short, Ray Bradbury does not offer much new in any sense. Physically, it is a compilation of previously published materials whose contribution to the reassessment of Bradbury's work is extremely limited, given the publication date of most of them. Intellectually, it proves that a reputed name does not suffice to validate the consistence of a work.
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Inside, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom saw him tinkering, making a minor adjustment here, eliminate friction there, busy among all those warm, wonderful, infinitely delicate, forever mysterious, and ever-moving parts. (63)
A10
Ironically, Bradbury's youthful encounter at a local carnival with Mr. Electro, the seminal event that not only put Bradbury on the path to being a writer but also provides an explanation for his lifelong fascination with carnival, is at first only alluded to. Readers must wait for Bradbury's afterword to learn the details of this incident.
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It seemed when the first stroke of nine banged from the big courthouse clock all the lights were on and business humming in the shops. But by the time the last stroke of nine shook everyone's fillings in his teeth, the barbers had yanked off the sheets, powdered the customers, trotted them forth; the druggists fount had stopped fizzing like a nest of snakes, the insect neons everywhere had ceased buzzing, and the vast glittering acreage of the dime store with its ten billion metal, glass, and paper oddments waiting to be fished over, suddenly blacked out. (4.2)
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It was always a surprise - that old man, his work, his name. That's Charles William Halloway, thought Will, not grandfather, not far-wandering, ancient uncle, as some might think, but...my father. (2.20-2.21)
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It was like that time years ago in Chicago when they had visited a big place where the carved marble figures were, and his walking around them in the silence. So here was John Huff with grass stains on his knees and the seat of his pants, and cutes on his fingers and scabs on his elbows. Here was John Huff with the quiet tennis shoes, his feet sheathed in silence. There was the mouth that had chewed many an apricot pie come summer, and said many a quiet thing or two about life and the lay of the land. And there were the eyes, not blind like statues' eyes, but filled with molten green-gold. And there the dark hair blowing now north now south or any direction with all the town on them, dirt from roads and bark-slivers from trees, the fingers that smelled of hemp and vine and green apple, old coins or pickle-green frogs. There were the ears with the sunlight shining through them like bright warm peach wax and here, invisible, his spearmint-breath upon the air. (109)
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It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust. (17)
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Jim gazed up with that funny warm look of breathless anticipation he often had nights in summer at the shadow-window Theater in that house a few streets over. (26.8)
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Jim was at the window now, looking out across the town to the far black tents and the calliope that played by the turning of the world in the night. "Is it bad?" he asked. "Bad?" cried Will, angrily. "Bad! You ask that?" "Calmly," said Will's father. "A good question. Part of that show looks just great. But the old saying really applies: you can't get something for nothing." (39.23-39.26)
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Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats.... continue reading..
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Midnight then and the town clocks chiming on toward one and two and then three in the deep morning and the peals of the great clocks shaking dust off old toys in high attics and shedding silver off old mirrors in yet higher attics stirring up dreams about clocks in all the beds where children slept. (11.1)
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Mr. Cooger's face was melting like pink wax. His hands were becoming doll's hands. His bones sank away beneath his clothes; his clothes then shrank down to fit his dwindling frame. His face flickered going, and each time around he melted more. (18.96-18.99)
A11
Neitzche has said: "We have art that we don't perish in the truth." Or perhaps it can be said that we have art/imag ination that the truth does not perish. We confront the truth of life and death by fantasizing, by creating a world in which we expand the smallness of our immediate vision, separating image and mind, experiencing the sensation of "hurtling down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere," feeling every mile, every inch, every touch of the journey. We can do it; we can survive.
A9 Pollin, Burton. "Poe and Ray Bradbury: A Persistent Influence and Interest." The Edgar Allan Poe Review 6.2 (2005): 31-38. JSTOR. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/41506233?ref=search-gateway:6ffa3c40adf3b506ea38ec916347a38d>.
Nevertheless, the theme of Poe 's place in Bradbury's development has been touched upon during a career lasting over sixty years
A8
Noteworthy here is that Bradbury also used the portentous arrival of a circus train to set the scene for his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. The points of embarkation and destination of this run of the Orient Express are not named. Bradbury's ride with the great authors is what is important
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Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. (14.20)
A7
Parents in Bradbury's stories "have lost the capacity to attend to and follow their sensations. Habit and workday concerns have dulled them to the imaginative dimensions they once frequented as children"
A7 Gallardo-Torrano, Pere. "Review: Ray Bradbury." Utopian Studies 12.1 (2001): 147-49. JSTOR. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20718246?ref=search-gateway:302b268cf689e868e32307dc92f2f934>.
Perhaps Hartman read Bradbury in French translation, since Bradbury, like Poe, improves in translation
A9
S. He charmingly explains the germ, motif, and circumstance that "seized upon me, [...] compelling me [...] to put [the tales] down on paper before they went away. [...] I persisted - the need to write, to create, coursed like blood through my body, and still does. [...] I always dreamed of someday going into a library and looking up and seeing a book of mine leaning against the shoulder of L. Frank Baum [...] and down below my other heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. And my wild love for them [...] kept me invigorated with passion"
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SO IF TROLLEYS AND RUNABOUTS AND FRIENDS AND NEAR FRIENDS CAN GO AWAY FOR A WHILE OR GO AWAY FOREVER, OR RUST, OR FALL APART OR DIE, AND IF PEOPLE CAN BE MURDERED, AND IF SOMEONE LIKE GREAT-GRANDMA, WHO WAS GOING TO LIVE FOREVER, CAN DIE... IF ALL OF THIS IS TRUE... THEN... I, DOUGLAS, SPAULDING, SOME DAY... MUST... (186)
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Secretly, Dark gathered a pinch of flesh on his wrist, the illustration of a black-nun blind woman, which he bit with his fingernails. (46.37)
A11
Some Day, I, Douglas Spaulding, Must Die . . ." What can fantasizing do to soften the blue steel edge of pain and aging and decay? Can one merely accept death as an inexplicable force, a cellophane haze of gradual dying lasting as long as life? And can the mythology of religion, of art, of Dandelion Wine satisfy us, explain to us perhaps, the mystery of death with the same force it uses in portraying the wonder of life?
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Stolen? No. Jim take it down? Yes. Why? For the shucks of it. Smiling, he had climbed to scuttle the iron, dare any storm to strike his house! Afraid? No. Fear was a new electric-power suit Jim must try on for size. (29.5)
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The Illustrated Man nodded toward the library. "The janitor's clock. Stop it." The witch, mouth wide, savoring doom, wandered off into the marble quarry. (43.76-43.78)
A10
The authors also note that carnivalization in Bradbury's fiction goes far beyond overt references to such facets of carnival as its medieval roots in festivals that undermine authority, its reliance on masks and masked figures such as the clown, and its "celebration of the grotesque body" (4)
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The courthouse clock struck nine and it was getting late and it was really night on this small street in a small town in a big state on a large continent on a planet earth hurtling down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere and Tom feeling every mile of the long drop. (37)
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The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time-the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes-and the clock... continue reading..
A11 Bradford, Tom. "Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury." JSTOR. Chicago Review, Jan.-Feb. 1971. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25294523>.
The ravine was indeed the place where you came to look at the two things of life, the ways of man and the ways of the natural world. Evolving from the mossy undergrowth beneath the gutted log the grass becomes green and stiff like plastic, the circuits of electricity are accepted as God grown, and the town and its summer give birth.
A10
The thematic sections are no less problematic. The discussions that draw on Bakhtin's ideas of carnival, Freud's perception of the working of the unconscious, and the philosophy of Nietzsche are often difficult to follow. The connection of Bradbury's themes to Nietzsche's ideas seems forced, especially since Bradbury himself claims never to have read Nietzsche. Even Bradbury scholar William F. Nolan's introduction to this volume laments this reliance on Nietzschean interpretation while acknowledging the authors' right to read Bradbury as they see fit (xiii).
A7
The use of irony as a personal defining trait in literary criticism is certainly dangerous as it may trigger among readers exactly the same response and therefore invalidate the analysis of the work in question.
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They prowled on but found no mysterious midnight spheres of evil gas tied by mysterious Oriental knots to daggers plunged in dark earth, no maniac ticket takers bent on terrible revenges. The calliope by the ticket booth neither screamed deaths nor hummed idiot songs to itself. (15.20)
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Where the colored rain touched the floor, a pair of dusty small shoes poked out. Just beyond the downpour the evil boy loitered. Evil? Will blinked. Why evil? Because. "Because" was reason enough. A boy, yes, and evil. (19.51)
A10
Though revelatory of Bradbury's writing habits and of the vagaries of publishing, the textual-history sections are often tediously detailed. How and when Bradbury tinkered with text overwhelms any discussion of why he did so. The connection between Bradbury's constant textual revisions and reworkings of the content of story collections and his thematic concerns is not always clearly and persuasively drawn except insofar as it demonstrates that in making textual changes Bradbury's goal was always to be thought of and treated as a mainstream author.
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Three in the morning, thought Charles Halloway, seated on the edge of his bed. Why did the train come at that hour? For, he thought, it's a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. [...] Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying. (14.11-14.12)
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Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension: By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. (37.27-37.28)
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Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. (3.1)
A7
Wayne L. Johnson's 1978 article "The Invasion Stories of Ray Bradbury" ana lyses the ways in which Bradbury has tackled the theme of invasion. He groups his stories into "those that involve the invasion of Earth by aliens, and those that involve the invasion of Mars by Earthmen" (10). J
A11
What can threaten this sensual stage which Bradbury sets? His worlds of fantasy, his circus balloon journeys up and out, incorporate in their very nature a fastening line to the ground, a kinship with the realistic, cold visioned animal appraisal of life and death. And, to be sure, Douglas reflects off his first glimpse of death's impersonal reality, and looks forward to winter's harvestings of the dandelion wine.
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What was there about the boys that made him believe the simplest word they whispered up through the grille? Fear itself was proof here, and he had seen enough fear in his life to know it, like the smell from a butcher's shop in summer twilight. (37.19)
A11
When Bradbury sets his stage, much like a theatre director, an animated world appears in which the facts of the imagination become as acceptable as the facts of reality. One need only close his eyes.. .
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Will heard it. Muffled away in the prairie lands, the chuffing of an engine, the slow-following dragon-glide of a train. Will sat up in bed. Across the way, like a mirror image, Jim sat up, too. (11.2-11.5)
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Will paused in his desperate push and relaxation, push and relaxation, trying to shape Jim back to life, unafraid of the watchers in the dark, no time for that! Even if there were time, these freaks, he sensed, were breathing the night as if they had not been fed on such rare fine air in years! (53.6)
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Will slapped, Jim slapped, Dad slapped the semaphore signal base at the same instant. Exultant, they banged a trio of shouts down the wind. (54.147-54.148)
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Yet this train's whistle! The wails of a lifetime were gathered in it from other nights in other slumbering years; the howl of moon-dreamed dogs, the seep of river-cold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand fire sirens weeping or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighs, burst over the earth! (12.16-12.17)
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[Charles Halloway]: "All the meanness we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They're a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people's sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn't care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That's the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds." (39.36)
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[Charles Halloway]: "It's late. Must be midnight straight up." Obediently, the City Hall clock, the Baptist church clock, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Catholic church, all the clocks, struck twelve. The wind was seeded with Time. (54.137-54.138)
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[Charles Halloway]: "They, that Dark fellow and his friends don't hold all the cards, I could tell that today, at the cigar store. I'm afraid of him but, I could see, he was afraid of me. So there's fear on both sides." (39.6)
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[Charles Halloway]: "You don't have to stay foolish and you don't have to be wrong, evil, sinful, whatever you want to call it. There's more than three or four choices." (39.6)
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[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here... continue reading..
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[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not... continue reading..
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[Tom Fury]: "Nightshade. That's quite a name." "And only fitting," said Will Halloway. "I was born one minute before midnight, October thirtieth. Jim was born one minute after midnight, which makes it October thirty-first." (1.17-1.18)
A8
all Bradbury characters sound like Bradbury. His fiction and playscripts talk with his voice. It is frequently that of a terribly vulnerable and then surprisingly persistent whimsy that has enchanted a vast readership
A7
childhood is Bradbury's one subject" (8) and laments that in modifying his original interests, Bradbury has renounced "the one thing that made him worth reading"
A11
ded street of a stranger one can never forget and always love. It has the drug color vividness of black and white photography, giving the honest shade and contrast of face stories at moments removed from motion, from time, from definition. But, in the same breath, it has a prescribed structure, with Douglas, his brother Tom, his friends, his senses, all acting under the assumed reality which the freedom of fantasy offers.
A6
it has the same constant awareness of chaos with the will to form beautiful illusions in the interests of life
