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I'll send my Birthday congrats to him over the 'damned internet' as he so frankly put it.
"I'll go to the mall and see if I can find a card with a dinosaur on it."
Because he is one?
Mr Bradbury,
Happy Birthday! In high school, some 35 years ago, I had a teacher whose class was inspired by you. It was an English elective, "Science Fiction", and Mr. Mussaro, my teacher, wrote you your very first fan letter. Out of respect for him and you, on behalf of his countless students, thank you, and happy birthday.
BTW, Cory-- think you can get your own CCTV?
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/115736/Sin-bins-for-worst-families
Dinosaurs? Read some Bradbury and you'll understand.
http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/dinotales.html
What a great opportunity. Almost makes me consider a journey to Glendale.
Is he going to be there? The flyer doesn't exactly make that clear.
#5: kpgraham:
"Dinosaurs? Read some Bradbury and you'll understand."
Let's see--
(on the internet) “this thing is bound to fail. napster’s out there, stealing everyone blind. they’re stealing people’s work. they should be put in jail. all of them. all this electronic stuff is remote, removed from you. the internet is just a big scam the computer companies cooked up to make you get a computer into every home.”
http://www.spaceshipnofuture.org/grueyorktimes/2000/09/hey_were_not_ar/
Yep, Bradbury read, "dinosaur" understood.
The dinosaur can be an ambivalent symbol; let's not be disrespectful to one who gave us so much.
Honor thy fathers and mothers.
Bradbury is a wonderfully entertaining, cranky old ball of contradictions.
He's a sci-fi writer and a luddite. He writes stories about man's intolerance toward other cultures but grumbles constantly about the things he doesn't like about his own. He dreams of travel by rocket ship but could never bring himself to learn how to drive a car. He absolutely hates television but has had his own work adapted into various movies and TV shows for over 50 years.
He's also brilliant at what he does, and will tell you so to your face.
Happy birthday, Ray. I'll toast the occasion with a glass of Dandelion wine.
Is the "on his actual birthday" an inside joke or something?
darren, your attitude is one i've seen endlessly since the days of Usenet. You too, are a dinosaur.
MDH: I'm going by definition #3 of "dinosaur" as listed here:
"One that is hopelessly outmoded or unwieldy: “The old, big-city teaching hospital is a dinosaur”"
http://www.answers.com/dinosaur
In reference to Bradbury's utter cluelessness in claiming that the internet-- one of the most important communications and education tools ever invented, is "worthless" and "just a passing fancy." I use the term (and only because Cory mentioned dinosaurs) because Bradbury's comments clearly show that the rest of the world has passed him by.
Which definition of "dinosaur" are you attributing to me? Surely you are not suggesting that mocking clueless "640k is good enough for everyone" attitudes is an outmoded way of thinking?
Ray is supposed to be there.
Happy birthday, Ray. Thanks for many great tales.
@ Darren: Nobody ever became a great artist by only saying things that were entirely uncontroversial to everyone. So he's old and said some overstated, cranky things about the internet? So what? It doesn't take anything away from his decades of luminous prose. If you choose to focus on that it's entirely your loss, but carry on if that's what brings you joy.
I've coincidentally just finished reading _Death is a Lonely Business_, and I enjoyed every sentence of it.
Happy birthday, Ray, and thanks for all the insight, beauty, and inspiration!
happy
He also really digs gorillas. Find him a card with that, and we can stop this dinosaur nonsense.
It is certainly true that a number of SF authors Bradbury's age and older (PJ Farmer, for one)stayed engaged and relevant much longer. I'm not aware of anything Bradbury's done in the last 30 years that is of any significance. But where I really lost respect for him was a few years ago when he started fulminating about Clinton in comparison to the war criminal Bush, for whom he expressed admiration. That just about manages to trash an entire reputation as far as I'm concerned.
#20 Kid Geezer:
"I'm not aware of anything Bradbury's done in the last 30 years that is of any significance."
Yes, most of the word-of-mouth Bradbury likely gets now is through SF fans communicating with each other on the internet. Its like rain, on your wedding day.
"But where I really lost respect for him was a few years ago when he started fulminating about Clinton in comparison to the war criminal Bush"
Don't forget this:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,653816,00.html
Even though:
http://512words.blogspot.com/2009/03/you-cant-copyright-title.html
(Using that particular link, of course, only because it happens to mention one of our Blog Overlords.)
I'm sending him a card for sure. Thanks for posting the address.
"The man behind the desk laughed. “You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!” The official stopped. “What’s wrong?”
I guess what's bothersome about the term "dinosaur" is the implied judgmental dismissal. Like Burgess Meredith in the Twilight Zone episode, he has been found obsolete. There he goes, with a condescending wave of the hand.
Can't a guy be an awesomely talented visionary AND a quirky throwback? Can't be just be wrong about a few things instead of being a dinosaur?
I love his work no less, and he has my permission to have funny ideas about the internet (as if he needs it).
@#21: Thanks for links. It is clear that over the decades he turned into a bigger ass than I had thought. The 30 years was to err on the generous side. 40+ is probably more accurate.
So, by all means, those so inclined should mail, fax or Internet their congratulations, keeping in mind that even at his best he was never Americas Greatest Writer. Hoo boy.
whatchew done, Kid?
That just about manages to trash an entire reputation as far as I'm concerned.
Don't forget that fucking Shakespeare, accepting the Queen's title...
Dissing Bradbury for acting cranky in his mid-eighties seems a bit pusillanimous.
How about dissing him for acting cranky in his early years? F451 was written because of tin-foil-hat beliefs that the existence of television would lead to the end of reading.
"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades."
But-- guess what? Books are still published in the many thousands of separate titles per year. And book censorship is the lowest that it has ever been. His facile, false dichotomy (you can have books, or you can have TV, but not both) failed. The predictions of F451 are just as silly and hyperbolic as flying cars, meals-in-a-pill, and lots of other stuff from Golden Age writing that has not aged well.
I've been a reader all my life. I have rooms full of books. DVDs full of text files. But I don't think the written word is the only valid form of fictional entertainment. I watch movies. I watch TV series. The genres, when done well, can be just as compelling and as meaningful as any words written on paper.
All fiction, whether on paper or acted out in some medium, is escapist fantasy-- sometimes the writer(s) attempt to teach you something, but just as often (or more often) it is just for entertainment purposes. Whether it is 30,000 years ago the family gathered around the hearth hearing about the time Uncle Og rode the wild horse, or 70 years ago the family gathered around the radio listening to how The Shadow knows what lies in the hearts of men or 50 years ago the family gathered around the TV watching to see if this is the night that Ralph finally decks Alice.
But Bradbury took the position that the only valid medium of fiction was the one that he loved, and everything else was The Fall of Civilization. But reading a book is entirely as passive an activity as watching television. Reading a book doesn't HAVE TO require you to think more than watching a TV. What is significant is the content, not the medium in which the content is presented-- and I'm sure the noise to signal ratio in the selection of books published at any given time is at least as high as that on TV, in theaters, or on the radio.
Oh yeah, Bradbury early on hated use of portable radios, too:
"But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."
(quotes from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury)
First Bradbury hates people who don't choose to walk around like he does (short story "The Pedestrian") and then he is "absolutely stunned" when he sees people that ARE walking, but one of them has the gall to want to listen to the radio while walking, the Philistine! Note the sneering contempt and judgment in his description. And the contempt that he shows for the watching of television at all. So, even when he was young(er) he was of the position that anyone who chose anything other than silent walks and books for any period of time was crass, crude, and inferior to Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury was a cranky old luddite all his life.
yeah, but he wrote.
O noes, sneering judgment! How dare that writer-man!
This is incorrect. The subjective qualities of either medium aside, reading books involves a lot more of your brain than looking at the moving picture shows. Reading is active, TV passive, etc. The medium is most definitely what's significant: just think of the work required to read a nineteenth-century novel versus that required to sit through even a lengthy film adaptation of the same.
You're also falling into the "predictive sci-fi" fallacy, but, hey, whatever.
In certain cultures other than our own, people are remembered for what they were when at their best, not what they became after running life's gauntlet.
Good luck.
@Darren Garrison #29:
And how exactly does Bradbury's overall crankiness invalidate his work as a writer? If we are to dismiss "Fahrenheit 451" because society didn't turn out that bad in real life then let's not forget Jack London ("The Iron Fist") Kurt Vonnegut ("Player Piano") and George Orwell ("Nineteen Eighty Four") among others.
I also agree with him about television. It's a nasty, nasty habit. I wouldn't consider that Luddism. Just highly appropriate cultural snobbery. Of course, the people who watch Jon & Kate Plus 8 would probably be reading Barbara Cartland if they didn't have television.
@#28 Antinous: There is cranky and there is cranky. I consider myself cranky and, frankly, quite a few regular contributors to BB come across as cranky on occasion. Perhaps prematurely senile would be preferable? Several SF luminaries,with to my mind far greater and more significant bodies of work to their credit, have passed away in the last year or so. And they were producing readable, relevant work right close to the end, not spewing right wing venom in defense of war criminals.
Fwiw, I revere a number of early Bradbury works such as The Pedestrian and Something Wicked This Way Comes, but as I said, not much to report for well over 30 years. I'm glad Jack Vance didn't take a break for 30 years, for one.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Bradbury. Something Wicked this Way Comes was a thrill. A true pleasure to read.
#31 Tdawwg:
"Reading is active, TV passive, etc."
I really think that you are splitting hairs in trying to define the choice to scan your eyes across a printed page to consume material being active and the choice to scan your eyes across moving images being passive. But the point I was making is that neither are INTERactive-- both involve consuming material created by someone else with no modification of that material being made by you. In that sense, reading a book is every bit as passive as watching television.
"You're also falling into the "predictive sci-fi" fallacy, but, hey, whatever."
You will note in an earlier post where Bradbury himself characterized F451 as his one book that he intended as predictive of the possible future of 40-50 years in the future.
But maybe we can all agree that these 1-star reviews by disgruntled middle-school students are pretty entertaining:
http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/dp/0345342968/
Death... is a lonely business.
Ray is a heck of a writer, and I agree with Johnny Cat about Something Wicked. Left me with chills when I was younger and Ray never failed to portray life through the eyes of a 10 year old in the 1930s.
I don't particularly care what he does when he's not crafting his next story.
I loved Ray Bradbury when I was a kid. Read his books, watched Ray Bradbury theater and the adaptation of 'something wicked'. But as I grew up, I adapted. I'm 40 now and me and my wife are both some of the most savvy 40 something's keeping up on technology, underground music, politics, etc.
I forget who said it but it's one of my favorite quotes: 'Progress is like a freight train: you can either hop aboard or get run over.' Mr Bradbury has chosen to throw himself under the tracks like a sabot but is just making a bloody mess of himself.
@38, not at all Mr. Brown, I for example, intend to take all of you with me.
@ Darren Garrison, err, some more corrections: I don't exactly "scan" when I read: I run my eyes down the middle of the page, and "photograph" what's on either side, and let my mind read the words. It's a faster way of reading. I'd only read word-by-word with my eyes if it's poetry or great literature or something: for information I read as quickly as comprehension allows.
One doesn't scan a TV set either: one tends to look at whatever catches one's interest.
That aside, I wish I had the cog. sci. chops to "prove" how much more work the brain does when reading and processing written language than when it's passively taking in a TV show. The work is there, but I can't cite anything definitive or short. You'll have to trust me on this one.
Reading is emphatically not passive: you have to actively take in the information, and then your brain actively interprets this. Every book "looks" and "feels" differently to its readers because our interactivity with the text is high: not the same with TV. Reading is interactive in ways that TV just can't be: even if you don't read carefully, storyboard the text in your mind, give voices to the speakers, etc., the bare minimum of interaction and co-creation that's necessary for mere comprehension dwarfs the interaction that's necessary to comprehend The Wire.
On the predictive fallacy, it's also a fallacy to accept author's comments re: their work as absolute or definitive. I read RB as saying "I tried to create a text that resonated with my then-current concerns about how society might turn out": this isn't really predictive so much as descriptive-analytical of the situation when he composed the book. Questions of memory, self-promotion, also present themselves: is this RB's criticism of his work, or just PR, or something else? So I'd reject his words much as I reject your predictive fallacy.
You are still missing my damn point (whether intentional or your "photographing the page" hurts your reading comprehension.)
My point is-- if you are watching a television or you are reading a book, either way you are PASSIVELY consuming the production of someone else-- and by PASSIVE I continue to mean, you are not creating or modifying the content. You can split hairs and pick nits until doomsday about how doing one taxes the brain in different ways than the other, but it is still irrelevant nitpicking. Both are PASSIVE consumption of prepackaged information. Writing is a creative act. Reading isn't. The only books that aren't entirely passive are those "choose your own adventure" books. Your trying so hard to distinguish one form of passive entertainment as being fundamentally different from and superior to another form of passive entertainment is just a form of "rooting for your team."
For every sneering reader mocking people who watch television when they can be reading a book, you can find a sneering adventurer or athlete mocking people who sit around reading stories made up about the adventures of others instead of going out and having adventures of your own. You say turn off the TV and pick up a book, they say put down the book and go scuba diving, or climb a mountain, or get laid.
Fiction readers sit around looking at paper when they could be doing things who mock fiction watchers who sit around looking at screens when they could be doing things are living in glass houses, and throwing stones.
(Writing this as a fiction reader, a fiction watcher, and a non-doer of things.)
if you are watching a television or you are reading a book, either way you are PASSIVELY consuming the production of someone else
That's.......semi-true. If I were to watch television, I would sit passively transfixed while images burned their way through my retina into my mind. If I read a book, I have to use my imagination (in the literal sense.) I read a few lines or a paragraph and then my mind wanders off, filling up the nooks and crannies of the book's universe. It's a much more active process than watching a movie or television.
Hopefully not through your retina, Antinous.... :D
Dunno, I have a lot of culture-snob friends who make a special point of arguing for The Wire as the pinnacle of the West, or claiming that TV ads are superior in content to most films.... but I've never seen anyone take on the (impossible [and false {because crazy}]) argument that TV watching is cognitively equivalent to reading. Darren Garrison, you've taken cultural relativism-solipsism to new heights AND lows! Congrats, of a kind: your nonsense is quite original and refreshing!
Tdawwg-- I'll beak it down into little bitty words and MAYBE you will be able to understand it, but it seems pretty doubtful by this point.
When you look at talky box, you not making something, you not doing something. You watching somebody else's ideas about something.
When you look at booky, you not making something, you not doing something. You reading somebody else's ideas about something.
Looking at talky box and looking at booky both are not real. Both are way to not be doing something yourself. Both are letting someone else tell you about doing something.
Both are you-not-thinky, both are you-watch/read-someone-else-thinky.
In other words, both are PASSIVE. For something to be non-passive, YOU HAVE TO BE CREATING SOMETHING NEW YOURSELF, OR ACTIVELY MODIFYING THE RESULTS OF WHAT YOU ARE EXPERIENCING.
Both reading and watching TV are passive.
Reiteration w/out logical expansion or development =/= argumentation. Reiteration w/out logical expansion or development PLUS trollish behavior = LULZ 4 Tdawwg.
The fact that reading is an active, interactive process stands, despite your desperate caviling.
Darren,
Compose yourself.
I half-recall an argument based on wired-brain data that argues for reading as a much more mentally involved activity than watching moving images on a screen — unless it's Jenna Jameson.
Darren, you ARE doing something when you read. You are interpreting words and constructing the images in your head, imagining the faces and voices of the characters, etc. The brain is engaged in an active pursuit, not just a passive receptive one.
For you, it seems, only remixing or (for example) playing a video game counts as active interaction with the entertainment. That's simply incorrect, from the standpoint of the brain.
Of course, there are no neat boxes labeled "active" and "passive" that contain all activities in which the brain may engage. My father's interaction with his football games was sufficiently "active" that sitting next to him on the sofa was physically unsafe, and sometimes "willing suspension of disbelief" becomes quite a workout. But generally, watching television is a much, much more passive pursuit than reading.
My brain works a lot harder reading, say, Nabokov, than it does watching The Wire, however much I admire the latter.
No one seems to have mentioned "A Sound of Thunder", which I'm sure is what Cory is referencing with his dinosaur card.
Now if you could spell the birthday card text using the revised timeline spelling...
Re: the Book v. TV/passive v. active argument....
There's no question that books are a more "active" form of art than television is, neurologically speaking, and perhaps that makes the one medium "better" than the other. What I find interesting, however, is that nobody is mentioning that plays, too, are less "active" than literature, neurologically. And yet I will bet you dollars to donuts that nobody here would say that Shakespeare's art is diminished by it. You know Shakespeare, right? That guy who wrote fiction that was intended to be watched by an audience, several hundred years before clueless middle school teachers started mistakenly teaching the texts as though they're exercises in foreign language translation?
There's a phrase for people who only watch television and never read: illiterate idiots. And there's a phrase for people who only read and think that television has nothing to offer: snobbish idiots.
Hello, Ray!
My wife and I will be driving from Stockton tomorrow to make sure we are there for your Saturday birthday celebration.
Thanks for 41 years of friendship and inspiration, not to mention all those good lunches in Beverly Hills in the late 60s and early 70s. I come to celebrate what Charlton Heston said about you, "your generosity of spirit." I know the same kindness you tendered towards me in letting me hang with you at your house and at various speeches was duplicated many times for other writers and artistic souls. This human quality is as important a legacy as your written words that will keep giving for many more generations of artistic people.
See ya Saturday at Mystery & Imagination book store in Glendale! Bless you now and forever!
Gene Beley
(Author of Ray Bradbury Uncensored! biography)