Big fan of his refusal to drive, even in the absurdly spread-out SoCal landscape. We probably agree w/ some of his public transit ideas. (Jet-packs hell, where are the monorails?)
And good for him, we suppose, that he hit 91, although this chunk o' text we lift from one of our many sources for "Hollywood" is yet more indication that knowing when to check out, or at minimum when to get the hell off stage, can be as important as success in the first place.*
NB: Excellent advice, although one is not always advised as to the coffin's potential state. (One doesn't have to look, either.)If I asked him something new, the interview went nowhere. He had no new stories of any interest. He did have some political views he wanted to express but his daughter and others close to him asked me to, for God's sake, do what I could to steer him away from those topics.
They were...odd. And obviously the result of advanced age, medical problems and emotional responses to some personal tragedies. I suppose they would be called right-wing viewpoints, though every smart Conservative I know would race to distance themselves from Ray's views on, for example, how a woman should feel honored if a strange man came up and pinched her ass. There were others that were well into Glenn Beck territory...though Ray not only clearly believed what he said, he believed the mere fact that Ray Bradbury said it meant it had to be so. I took to telling friends, "If you wroteThe Martian Chronicles, you may be a redneck." It was one of those jokes you say to try and wring a smile out of a situation you find troubling. I finally had to beg off the interviewing job. I admired the man so much and felt such gratitude for past kindnesses that I couldn't bear to be around him in that condition. It was for the same reason that I won't attend a funeral with an open coffin.
*Or not. In the long run:
If you could erase the last decade or so from the record, as I suppose time will eventually do
5 comments:
I'd like to erase selected weeks and years from my historical record.
I'd be a contender, instead of a bum!
~
Education Editor:
We'd have to add a few things to contend, like graduating from an academic institution beyond the eighth grade. Or giving a shit.
As a young reader, I loved "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and as a Los Angeles resident, I enjoyed his descriptions of Venice in the '30s and '40s in "Death is a Lonely Business." But the rest of his work left me cold, and, really, even in those books it was more his evocative descriptions I liked than his characters and his stories.
Book Review Editor:
Wasn't introduced to Bradbury in our youth, which may explain why we never caught the bug.
May look for Death is ... next time we're in the library.
The Venice descriptions are pretty awesome, in a florid way (but I like florid). The ruins of the old roller coaster like the vertebrae of a dinosaur, etc. etc. etc.....
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