The Only Voices Worth Listening For

There are a lot of voices out there -- some of them our own, in our own heads -- telling us lies about our lives, ourselves. Making promises that won't be kept, because the voices don't care about promises; they want us to be miserable.

It's important to listen to the voices, and they can be hard to hear, that offer encouragement, hope, resilience, and love.

Those are the only voices worth listening for.

Together: Knee!

As we've been reading in First Corinthians about unity and becoming one in the body of Christ, I kept it all in the back of my head as I looked for real-world examples.

Because unity is hard. It sounds and looks great on paper, but to put it into action requires a surrender of the self, or at least of selfish interests. It requires risk.

And being selfless and being selfless in taking risks isn't something we like to do much anymore. I'm seeing this play out in the battle over Ammon's metered water. Those who are fighting against higher water prices basically want the old system back where they could use as much of a resource as they wanted and still not pay a penny more than those who were more conservative in their use.

Then I read Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes," and found two such examples -- and powerful ones.

The book has two climactic scenes that demonstrate how disparate people, working together for even the silliest of causes, can bring in the unity needed to accomplish a task.

First we see Charles Halloway taking on Mr. Dark and the Dust Witch during the amazing bullet trick, where only the baddies and Mr. Halloway, among everyone at the mysterious carnival, knows his only goal there is not to take part in a conjuring trick but to literally save the lives of his son Will and will's best friend Jim.

He's onstage, nursing a hand freshly-broken by Mr. Dark, listening to a hear pump, one that was nearly stilled by the Dust Witch, as his son and his friend lay somewhere in mortal peril. Mr. Dark himself points out the fact that with a broken hand, Mr. Halloway can't possibly hold the gun to do his part of the trick.

So:

"Boy!" shouted Charles Halloway.

Mr. Dark stiffened.

"I need a boy volunteer to help me hold the rifle!" shouted Charles Halloway.

"Someone! Anyone!" he shouted.

A few boys in the crowd shifted around on their toes.

"Boy!" shouted Charles Halloway. "Hold on. My son's out there. He'll volunteer, won't you, Will?"

The Witch flung one hand up to feel the shape of this audacity which came off the fifty-four-year-old man like a fever. Mr. Dark was spun around as if hit by a fast-traveling gunshot.

"Will!" called his father.

In the Wax Museum, Will sat motionless.

"Will!" called his father. "Come on, boy!"

The crowd looked left, looked right, looked back.

No answer.

Will sat in the Wax Museum.

Mr. Dark observed all of this with some respect, some degree of admiration, some concern; he seemed to be waiting, just as was Will's father.

"Will, come help your old man!" Mr. Halloway cried, jovially.

Will sat in the Wax Museum.

Mr. Dark smiled.

"Will! Willy! Come here!"

No answer.

"Willy! Don't you hear your old man?"

Mr. Dark stopped smiling.

For this last was the voice of a gentleman in the crowd, speaking up.

The crowd laughed.

"Will!" called a woman.

"Willy!" called another.

"Yoohoo!" A gentleman in a beard.

"Come on, William!" A boy.

The crowd laughed more, jostled elbows.

Charles Halloway called. They called. Charles Halloway called to the hills. They called to the hills.

"Will! Willy! William!"

A shadow shuttled and wove in the mirrors.

The Witch broke out in chandeliers of sweat.

"There!" The crowd stopped calling.

As did Charles Halloway, choked on the name of his son now, and silent.

For Will stood at the entrance of the Maze, like the wax figure that he almost was.

Charles Halloway had no idea what we was going to do to fight the evil of the carnival to win back his son. He'd assembled what he called a puny collection of weapons, including a broken cigarette lighter, a penknife, and a harmonica -- the contents of his pockets.

But here we see the power of unity.

For amusement, for laughter, for amazement, the crowd wanted to see the amazing bullet trick. And for that, Charles Halloway needed his son. So, unified, they called for him, calling him out of the Mirror Maze, his tomb.

Later we see something similar, more intimate, as Will and Mr. Halloway work their silly spell to bring Jim back to life, Jim stunned by a trip on the merry-go-round, half-grounded in reality, half in the empty world promised him by Mr. Dark.

Jim lies "as cold as spaded Earth, and Mr. Halloway is trying his best to help Will see that laughter, lightheartendess, might be the only thing to bring him back. Only when they whoop and holler together does Jim recover:

The harmonica tried a bad "Swanee River."

"Dad." Will shuffled, shaking his head, immensely tired. "Silly . . .!"

"Sure! We want that! Silly damn fool old man! Silly harmonica! Bad off-key tune!"

Dad whooped. He circled like a dancing crane. He was not in the silliness yet. He wanted to crack through. He had to break the moment!

"Will: louder, funnier, as the man said! Oh, hell, don't let them drink your tears and want more! Will! Don't let them take your crying, turn it upside down and use it for their own smile! I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags. Don't feed them one damn thing. Willy, loosen your bones! Breathe! Blow!"

He seized Will's hair, shook him.

"Nothing. . . funny . . ."

"Sure there is! Me! You! Jim! All of us! The whole shooting works! Look!

And Charles Halloway pulled faces, popped his eyes, mashed his nose, winked, cavorted like a chimpanzee-ape, waltzed with the wind, top-dance the dust, threw back his head to bay at the moon, dragging Will with him.

"Death's funny, God damn it! Bend, two, three,Will. Soft-shoe. Way down up on the Swanee River -- what's next Will? . . . Far far away! Will, your God-awful voice! Damn girl soprano! Sparrow in a tin can! Jump, boy!"

Will went up, came down, cheeks hotter, a wincing like lemons in his throat. He felt balloons grow in his chest.

Dad sucked the silver harmonica.

"That's where the old folks--" Will spoke.

"Stay!" bellowed his father.

Shuffle, tap, bounce, jog.

Where was Jim! Jim was forgotten.

Dad jabbed his ribs, tickling.

"De Camptown ladies sing this song!"

"Doo-dah!?" yelled Will. "Doo-dah!" he sang it now, with a tune. The balloon grew. His throat tickled.

"Camptown race track, five miles long!"

"Oh, doo-dah day!"

Man and boy did a minuet.

And in midstep, it happened.

Will felt the balloon grow huge within him.

He smiled.

"What?" Dad was surprised by those teeth.

Will snorted. Will giggled.

"What say?" asked Dad.

The force of the exploding warm balloon alone shoved Will's teeth apart, kicked his head back.

"Dad! Dad!"

They go on to sing, to dance, to cavort, and Jim comes around. They pull him up into the mad melee, and soon all three are dancing and laughing and they know -- for the moment -- they are happy and safe,

And unified. Which is what we should strive for. Before we ask if the new proprietors of the next carnival are already here.

Evil is Not Banal

If any man ever understood the nature of evil, it’s Ray Bradbury.

This, from “Something Wicked This Way Comes:”

We got to help her, Jim. Who else would believe? If she tells anyone, ‘I’m Miss Foley!’ ‘Get away!’ they’d say, ‘Miss Foley’s left town, disappeared! Go on, little girl!’ Oh, Jim, I bet she’s pounded a dozen doors this morning, wanting help, scared people with her screaming and yelling, then run off, gave up, and hid under that tree. Police are probably looking for her now, but so what? It’s just a wild girl crying and they’ll lock her away and she’ll go crazy. That carnival, boy, shake you up and change you so no one ever knows you again and let you run free, it’s okay, go ahead, talk, ‘cause folks are too scared of you to listen. Only we hear, Jim, only you and me, and right now I feel like I just ate a cold snail raw.

Eerie, that. “That carnival, boy, shake you up and change you so no one ever knows you again and let you run free, it’s okay, go ahead, talk, ‘cause folks are too scared of you to listen.”

Evil sees us. Evil uses us. And once our utility is gone, evil abandons us, and it doesn’t care in what form we’re left.

So we have to listen. We have to be not too scared to listen. We have to be like Charles Halloway, father to the boy speaking in this passage:

"Now look [he says to his son Will] since when did you think being good meant being happy?”

“Since always.”

“Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love son, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit out appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn’t just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.

“Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it’s hard, right? With the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you lie awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need to tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and way off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minute, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that’s what the clock ticks, that’s what it says in the ticks. Run swim, or stay hot, run eat or lie hungry. So you stay, but once stayed, Will, you know the secret, don’t you? Don’t think of the river again. Or the cake. Because if you do, you’ll go crazy. Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it’s a lot missed out on. But then you console yourself, thinking, the more times in, the more times possibly drowned, or choked on lemon frosting. But then, through plain dumb cowardice, I guess, maybe you hold off from too much, wait, play it safe.

“Look at me: married at thirty-nine, Will, thirty-nine! But I was so busy wrestling myself tow falls out of three, I figured I couldn’t marry until I had licked myself good and forever, Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. So at last I looked up from my great self-wrestling match one night when your mother came to the library for a book, and got me, instead. And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That’s you, Will, for my money. And the strange thing is, no, and sad, too, though you’re always racing out there on the rim of the lawn, and me on the roof using books for shingles, comparing life to libraries, I soon saw you were wise, sooner and better, than I will ever be. . . “

Dad’s pipe was dead. He paused to tap it out and reload it.

“No, sir,” Will said.

“Yes,” said his father. “I’d be a fool not to know I’m a fool. My one wisdom is: you’re wise.”

Those who are good don’t leave themselves alone, or those who struggle with them alone either. They see – eventually, as Charles Halloway sees, that together we make perfection, and not just in children. The sooner we learn and re-learn and apply that lesson, the better.

Authors Fight Back!

Sounds like authors can (and should) fight back against the Twitter mobs.

Blood Heir, first in a debut trilogy from author Amelie Wen Zhao, is back on track to being published in November after a – and how do I tread carefully here? – mob of Twitter young adult literature enthusiasts got the book shut down before it was published because some felt it was . . . icky.

Some felt the story was “an offensive likeness of American slavery and black oppression,” though it was set in a fictional world and though the author stated she was writing about contemporary human trafficking in a fantasy setting, per Slate.

Past life experiences intruding on present times, or so it seems, if I were a Ghostbuster.

Here’s what Slate says:

In hindsight, [Amelie Wen] Zhao’s handling of the episode is a master class in turning an online backlash into a boon. The move allowed her to make a public gesture toward taking her critics seriously, while also winning sympathy and support from the many people who view the YA community’s self-appointed representation police with distaste. Although the withdrawal looked like a defeat at the time, it also boosted Zhao’s profile significantly. The announcement of the book’s return was granted flattering coverage in the Times. And the novel itself will be published less than six months later than originally scheduled. The return of Blood Heir is a reminder that for all the agita about free speech and “Twitter mobs,” so-called cancellation isn’t always permanent in the wider world.

They’ve also got a pretty good run-down of other authors who have fallen into the Twitter machine, including one whose book was unpublished even after he was one who heaped scorn upon Zhao. I write a little bit about the situation here.

James Lileks – again – writes something on a similar vein, as he writes about modern cartoonists frowning on the then-countercultural work of cartoonist R. Crumb (I don’t much like his stuff, though I can see the place for it):

But don’t worry! Just because the culture deemed something anti-social, then made space for it to exist on its own terms, then deemed it anti-social again by the new standards that arose from the lifting of societal restraintsm - well, that doesn’t mean that could happen to you!

Just to make sure it doesn’t, though, create your art with an eye towards every possible objection from people whose identity status means they have absolute moral authority to cancel you and your work. 

If you don’t, you are abetting future violence. Hell, you’re practically committing future violence.

Let's see what sort of art comes out of this. Let's see how brave that world will be.

It’s fun and games to crap on the creations of others until it’s your creation getting crapped on by the bandwagoners of today.

The Moon and Sixpence

Thing is, it’s hard to tell.

It’s hard to tell, watching this, whether the government Montag and Beatty represent is an oppressively conservative government looking to destroy books, or an oppressively liberal one looking to destroy books.

Neither conservative nor liberal can say they have clean hands when it comes to suppressing thought. History books, when they are written, are written by the victors.

Is the man who yanks the book from his little boy’s hands – what kind of thought is he protecting his son from?

The book he tosses, “The Moon and Sixpence,” is at best ambiguous. Does the government wish to protect the boy from the tale of a man pursuing his dream of becoming an artist, or to protect the boy from a ribald tale that shows a father abandoning a good job, wife, and family, for the hedonism of an artist’s life in Paris?

Is it, as the critic says, society is so busy “yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet,” or is society “charged with always want[ing] something else?”

I am an English major; I can go on for hours coming up with absurd interpretations.

Arguments can be made either way, I suppose.

But I like the ambiguity. It makes me more watchful.

The Liar

Bradbury, he is the liar.

Bradbury, the worst of them all.

But he does tell one truth, mind. He does warn us: Don’t become a rocket man.

“Don’t become a rocket man.”

People visited Dugout Dick. They listened to his corn pone songs and bought the little widgets he made. But none of them stayed. None of them stayed, even early on when there was no siren song of technology to keep from digging holes in the side of a mountain and shoring the cave up with timbers and doors from battered Volkswagens. They liked the myth of Dugout Dick.

But they did not want to live like him.

Because he smelled.

Because his songs were terrible, and the widgets useless.

Because he was a liar.

Like Bradbury.

Like Bradbury.

Oh, that I had not listened. That I had not traveled, become a rocket man, traveled on that rocket with Fiorello Bodoni.

But, alas, here I am.

“Leave, then,” Nixon said.

“Leave. Yes, you left. But did you actually leave?”

Nixon kicked at the waxy dirt with his Oxford.

“No, you did not leave. You’re still there. You’re in the class of the liars.”

“But not a crook.”

“No, not a crook.”

He beguiled us. Told us of collecting the loam, the dust, the fluff of comets and the sand of Mars and the gases of Jupiter and the powder of the moon. Then he took us to Venus and killed us with rain and with thunderstorm monsters, to Mars where he killed us with hags and memories. To wherever he wanted to take us, to kill us with our own madness.

He killed the rocket man. Burned him in the sun. Had his wife and child eating lunch at 3 am and sleeping with the green blinds drawn tight, going out during the day only when the clouds poured their rain upon the earth. So they would not see the sun.

The sun the men on Venus missed so much.

“That sets me to thinking,” Nixon said. “I think, perhaps, you’re seeing it wrong.”

I listened. A bead of sweat dripped off the ski-jump nose. He brushed a bit of Iapetus dust off his left shoulder.

“Continue.”

“You are not happy here,” he said at last.

“Ah, I see why the Vulcans believe only Nixon could go to China,” I said with a sneer.

He continued, ignoring my outburst. “The men on Venus, they were not happy in the rain. They wanted the sun. The rocket man was not happy at home whenever he looked up and saw the stars. Fiorello Bodoni was not happy providing for his family, but rather wanted to provide something too far out of his reach, too far out of necessity.”

“I know what it is like” he said, swallowing hard, Adam’s apple bouncing against the Windsor knot of his necktie, “not to be happy where you are. And when you arrive, you find that happiness. And the realization that it is fleeting.”

“Bradbury does not lie,” he said, staring up at the blaze of stars in the black sky. “Bradbury tells the truth. We are rarely happy where we are, unless in our minds we are in that unattainable place where happiness always resides.”

“He would tell you you are a crook,” I spat.

“Yes,” Nixon said. “And he would be telling the truth. For he is not a liar. Like you and I.”

Hating the Trees

Saturn may be in one quadrant of the sky when I emerge from my refuge in the Carcassonne Montes, or in another when I march across the region with the music of Brahms echoing among the stars. But from wherever I stand, Saturn does not grow smaller or larger. Nor, if I stood still in one place for a year, would it ever wander the sky.

Because of the sun, Saturn waxes and wanes. It enlarges from the sliver of God’s thumbnail with its ring illuminated as a jabbing spear to an oblate spheroid, visibly flattened at the poles, as the sunshine reflects off its cloudtops to its moon Iapetus, locked in synchronous rotation, always showing one face, and one face only, to the planet it hates.

Yes, Iapetus hates Saturn, just as the moon hates the usurper Earth, forever locked with its man in the moon staring down on the blue-white planet, always doomed to dance as the junior partner.

Yes, Iapetus hates Saturn, thus turns its back on the ringed wonder and stares alternately into the heart of the solar system with its warm, rocky worlds, or into the void past the empty bubbles of Neptune and Uranus to the spiky, rubble-filled chasm beyond the shattering cluster that is Pluto.

It is a place perfect for a hermit, always turning his back to the world, to the universe, to God and Mammon. Betimes I stare towards the sun – one of the few allowed to stare at our own sun and not be blinded or suffer the indignity of staring at it through a pinhole lens. Betimes I stare into the void and wonder at the emptiness of Pluto, and how, a thousand years into the future, I might get there when Iapetus becomes too crowded.

That is my fear. That is why I hate Saturn with a passion that would stun Iapetus with its vehemence and violence.

Saturn draws them, it draws them out from the heart of the warm solar system to the cold fringes where the glory of the ringed one hangs in the sky, beckoning them with fantasies only the likes of Bradbury or Clarke could create for them. And because the other moons, in their boredom, cling to the gravitational plane of the planet, thus denying a view of those rings, those damned rings, that damned set of rings that make Tolkein’s rings of power mere playthings in the hearts of man’s imagination, they will come to Iapetus.

And I cannot stop them.

Some may go to Titan. The engineers, the terraformers, the financiers and businessmen. They will see the raw materials lying before them, shrouded in clouds, fit to feed the commerce of the universe, and there they will go.

But the artists and dreamers, the geologists and explorers, those nitwits who wander the earth in the exact paths of Lewis and Clark and say “It does not matter that others have gone on before, I care only that my feet trod here for I, too, am an explorer,” they will come. And though I turn my back on them, though I rotate synchronously with my desire to be alone, my desire to hide my face so as not to stare clown-like down at the planet of my birth like the piteous moon, they will come to see my face. My face. And what will they see? They will see a reflection of the stars. A reflection of Saturn in its ringed glory, if we stand just so. And in the darkness, if, perchance we are in the shadow of a mountain or an outcropping, they may stare into my face and see a reflection of their own and be satisfied that they, too, are hermits of Iapetus.

Hermits. Hermits.

One word that deserves the company of no plural.

So I begin to hate the letter S and the company it promises to bring.

I walked some of the paths of Lewis and Clark. At Astoria, Oregon, I wandered among the sitka spruce and imagined following the explorers as they walked the paths in the forest, knowing they had seen the great ocean, knowing that when winter ended they had a choice.

I saw their fort – the replica built years later. The bunks, the chairs, the cramped spaces and the palisade wall spoke to the hermit within.

They said, quietly, with sadness, knowing they would not be obeyed. They said: Go away.

The trees, pointing toward heaven, roots entangling the undergrowth and dirt and rocks and each other, clinging as if the force of gravity were weak, pointed toward the sky and told me to leave. At night the treetops clawed at the moon and stars like ragged teeth, like the seeking arms of sea stars hunting for clams to devour with their extruding stomachs. If you flee, they said, pointing towards the stars, you will not be devoured. You will survive.

So I begin to hate the trees that willed me to leave.

Hating the trees, turning my back on the color green, letting the green paint I had foolishly painted on the walls of some of my refuges flake away until Iapetus’ natural, beautiful, greys and blues and reds came out in striations, soothed my soul. Turning my back on the color green once and for all severed my unbilical to the warm heart of the system, the tie to that cold blue-green planet until I could turn my back on it and not feel pangs of remorse or regret.

That is when I truly became a hermit, when the touch of earth or grass on my bare feet caused me to break out in hives. I had to go or die.

Still, fools send me green. They hear of the Hermit of Iapetus, stranded a billion miles away on that black-and-white world of frozen swirls of dust and ice and ash, and insist I must miss the green green grass of home.
The crueler ones, when they realize they will not trap me with thoughts of green and trees and color and the useless prancing of fawns and baby rabbits through the forests of a billion miles from where they stand to where I stand and stare not at them but at the stars, send me songs.

Deep in December, the damnable man sings, it’s nice to remember the fire of September that made us mellow. Deep in December, our hearts should remember.

And follow.

Follow.

Follow.

When I am dead, a skeleton whose empty eyes stare through the glass of my helmet – I will not die indoors, but only basking in the eternal darkness of the star-spangled skies of Iapetus – when the dust of ages obscures my view of the view of stars and, perhaps, micrometeors pock the glass and scratch it and my flesh lies as dust in my boots, I still will hear that song, its rhymes and meters.

So I hate the senders of songs more than I hate the letter S. More than I hate the color green.

It is Bradbury’s Warning, and Bradbury’s Curse.

He writes of hermits. All in the guise of explorers or astronauts or children cruel in their wish to see mommy and daddy eaten by the lions or mesmerized by the invading aliens. They are his hermits. But he warns his hermits: Danger lies not on the planets or moons or times you visit, but with what you bring in your head. Mars was heaven because the astronaut-hermits wished it so, and thus went to their doom and lie now, buried under the dry martian sands by ancient machinery built and dedicated aeons before they were born to defend the soil against the intrusion of memory.

Songs are the subtle traps that bring memory out of the black holes where it has been thrust, damaging the brain with massive bolts of furious radiation that cripples even the staunchest of hermits. It is no wonder we turn our backs on the world and keep turning as the world tries to capture once again the surprised clown-faces we possess.

You Don't Stay for Nothing

There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

--Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury stayed as long as he could.

He went from writing crappy short stories for the pulp science fiction magazines to writing Fahrenheit 451 which stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as books that scream out against the tyranny of stupidity.

I can call some of his first stories crappy and he probably would not disagree with me. I’ve read them. I think I’ve read them all; Bradbury is one of my favorite authors, one I’ll always remember as “that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all,” as he once described himself.

Bradbury poured himself into his writing. If he had a fear, a notion, an anxiety, a solution, a rant, he wrote it down.

He told us things. Like this:



And this:



A magician’s toy shop indeed.


I remember watching this one as a kid. What a creepy tale – mankind finding what he wanted on a distant planet, mankind bringing with him the ghosts of the past even as he yearned to touch the future. That is the essence of Bradbury for me. Always running but never escaping.

And that rooster calling. That rooster, the first sign of a Mars the astronauts did not expect. The birds chirping and flitting in the trees. The little details sucked out of the mind of a man and poured onto the page, flowing from the mind of a man who never left behind the childlike attributes of childhood and brought the past of Waukegan, Illinois, into the future. It is the tyranny of the small town writ large and then destroyed as tyranny.

I don’t hear a rooster calling without thinking of this story and of those doomed astronauts, wandering the backwaters of their minds as they went to their deaths.

Website I09 has a nice tribute to him here.

Where was Mr. Bradbury’s mind wandering in the hours before his death, I wonder.

He wrote every day. Even after a stroke, he wrote every day. He wrote, he said years ago, to get the bad stuff out so the good stuff could come along. That’s something I tell my English students all the time. Want to be a better writer? Write every blessed day.

I don’t follow my own advice. But I should. I should follow the advice he gives in the introduction of The Illustrated Man (thanks, I09):

My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M.

So as not to be dead.

Mr. Bradbury reached immortality a bit before the rest of us. I hope he finds heaven to his liking. If not, I’m sure he’ll write himself a new one.

UPDATE: A fitting, snarky tribute from Slate, which rarely disappoints unless it's one of their feminist writers dumping on the authors of The Berenstain Bears.

The Bradbury Test, Revisited

UPDATE: So I find out this book of Harrison’s isn’t one of his earlier ones, but came mid-career, and is meant as a parody of the “space opera” genre in which he ordinarily excels. Dumbass me. Still, the points I bring up are valid, even on a parody: Eeew. Bad writing demons, OUT!

I’ve written some on this blog about the so-called Bradbury Test, taken from a statement said by fantasy author Ray Bradbury, going something like this: Most of what we write is crap. You have to get the bad stuff out for the good stuff to follow.

I believe this test to be true.

I have evidence:

Right now I’m reading “Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers,” one of Harry Harrison’s earlier sci-fi works. It fits easily into what I call the “boobs and boots” niche of sci-fi and fantasy, in which nearly every quiet moment in the story is filled with the aforementioned articles. I may not finish the story due to the B&B quotient being high. But on top of that, this book feels written. It has a writerly stain about it; the same kind of writerly stain I notice about my own books at the moment. Harrison knows what he wants to write, but as he’s writing this story, he’s getting the bad stuff out of the way. The good stuff comes – witness his Stainless Steel Rat series – but the bad stuff had to come out first.

Same with another of my favorite authors – Terry Pratchett. I know among some circles it’s blasphemy to say he wrote anything that could be considered bad. But you know what? His early books, even the one that introduces my favorite character, Rincewind, is terribly written. It, too, falls into the B&B niche and feels written. Only in his later novels do we feel him capture his voice and become completely him, not some facsimile of previously-published authors that he emulated.

I’m not saying emulation is a bad thing – it can help any aspiring writer get the bad stuff out. Personally, I’m looking forward to that epiphanic moment when I, too, shed the Lloyd Alexanderisms and Aviisms that constrain my writing style and I come into my own. I imagine in the future, aspiring novelists will look at my early stuff and say, “Wow, that sucked. But he got better.” At least that’s the hope. The getting better part.

Writing as Melville

So, here’s proof of what we’ve expected all along: Good authors don’t let pesky things like symbolism get in the way of a good story.

As I understand it, then sixteen-year-old Bruce McAllister sent a survey to 150 well-known authors asking if they intentionally placed symbolism in their work. He figured, as Sarah Bunke Butler writes, that by conducting the survey, he could “settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.” Really. If he could catch authors saying there’s no overt symbolism in their work, he could singlehandedly bring the world of English commentary to its knees.

He got back some pretty interesting responses.

My favorite, from the immortal Ray Bradbury. In response to the question “Do you have anything to remark concerning the subject under study, or anything you believe pertinent to such a study?” he wrote:

Not much to say, except to warn you not to get too serious about all this, if you want to become a writer of fiction in the future. If you intend becoming a critic, that is a whale of another color. Still, your own opinion, finally, when you have read and re-read is what you must earch for. When I wrote the screenplay of MOBY DICK for John Huston, I asked him if he wanted me to read all the critical studies of Melville. Huston wisely cried “NO! I want YOUR creative re-creation of the Whale! To hell with the critics!!! Pretend you are Melville and write me the Whale into screenplay form!” . . . which is what I did.

Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story. . . humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels, etc., etc. Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing. . . and just as unobtrusive.

Also, an interesting tidbit from Ayn Rand, in response to the question “Do you consciously, intentionally plan and place aymbolism in your writing? If both yes and no, according to instances, please give an example of each. If yes, please state your method for doing so”:

Yes – I have no method; there is no method in writing fiction; you don’t seem to understand.

I kinda like that approach.

So here’s another’s interpretation of Moby Dick, via a Tom and Jerry cartoon. No symbolism here. Just a good story told by someone who understands both Bradbury and Rand: Gene Deitch.

 

NaNoWriMo Forums: Terrible Advice for Writers

The best writing advice I’ve ever heard comes from science fictionist Ray Bradbury, who basically said that you’ve got to write a lot of crap for the good stuff to finally make it out.

If I’m ever a famous writer, I’ll pass this advice along, but add what I call the Nefario Principle: It’s got to be good crap.

Here’s what the Nefario Principle means: You’ve got to be trying hard to write the good stuff even when you’re writing the crap, or else all you’ll ever be able to produce is crap.

Point in favor of the Nefario Principle: Much of the advice given in the NaNoWriMo forums, most particularly those focusing on the magical 50,000-word count necessary to “win” the contest. I learned a lot more about writing a novel churning out 120,000-plus words which I took seriously in “Considering How to Run” than I ever would learn using the language-inflation tricks proposed even tongue-in-cheek by those in the NaNoWriMo forums. Here’s a sampling:

I know you have them, what are your down and dirty tricks (without cheating) to reach 50k. Last year I wrote out the full names for EVERYTHING.

A persons name. Instead of Dr. Pascal, It would be Doctor Pascal Jonathan Himes
+3 words

I had a company named Shilo but the full name was Shilo Helping Hands Psychiatric Care and Rehabilitation Facility. Ridiculous to write each time, but I did.
+7 words

It got annoying but my main character worked in the hospital so the name was mentioned oftened and he ran into a TON of people so it was + two or three words all the time.

No, no, and no. I know the ethic here is “edit later,” but I’m kind of in the Richard Rhodes/”How to Write” camp when it comes to thinking why should I purposely load my writing with crap I know I’ll have to edit out later to meet some artificial word count total when I should instead concentrate on making my writing better, economizing on time in the process?

Do I have such tricks? Yes. I’ll do a little Virginia Woolf repletion once and a while – but it’s for effect – I hope – rather than word-count padding. Or word – count padding, I should say, increasing the word count in that phrase from two to four in the process.

Then there’s this, which is even worse:

Over complicate everything: "And he did then, with much gusto, verily grip his fingers around the weisswurst, a german sausage made from the meat of veal, otherwise known as baby cows or calves."

(This isn't mine, but a firend of mine's) Complain: "I hate so and so. She ticks me off so much. She's always telling me that I have to edit instead of rewriting everthing. I don't want to edit. I want to rewrite it. And who is she to tell me to edit? She's not an editor."

Flower language: make a character that sort of rambles on and on "Her hair was every color imaginable--blue, purple, red, green, black, brown et cetera (always two words--it's proper and boosts your word count), et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, amen."

This leaps right over John Steinbeck’s desire for occasional hooptedoodle right into the poodle factory where you’ll find yourself concentrating too much on mundane details and forgetting that your reader wants your characters to tell the story – and even tell them what they look like through action rather than description. A good writer gets out of the way of his or her characters. This kind of writing just puts the writer in the way, like my kids in front of the TV when I’m trying to watch.

I know the joke here is that the word count is an illusion, but they can’t track stats on NaNoWriMo if they’re saying “At the end of the month, have written a good book.” No. That’s too subjective. It’s easier to build little bar charts focusing on word count rather than on quality – though they can tout that “Water for Elephants” was a NaNoWriMo originee, so quality is there! Meh, I say. I’m only doing NaNoWriMo this year for fun anyway. The word count is secondary. I’m a lot more worried about getting my characters to the final destination than I am about how many words I can use to get them there.

A Chronicler of Boys

NOTE: I'm using Ray Bradbury as one of my anchor writers as I plot my own course into the writing wilderness. Analyzing a bit tonight, trying to get inside his head so I can get inside my own.

It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry grass and dead flowers now that autumn was here. And full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and a large ravine to tumble in and yell across. And the town was full of . . .

Boys.

And it was the afternoon of Halloween.

And as much as people like to say Ray Bradbury was a chronicler of science fiction and fantasy, it’s closer to the truth that he was a chronicler of youth. A chronicler of boys, because boys – whether they are Tom Skelton in “The Halloween Tree” or Jim nightshade in “Something Wicked this Way Comes” or the grown-up boys panting in the thin air in “The Martian Chronicles” – are what Bradbury knows best.

These three opening paragraphs to “The Halloween Tree” is a boy’s chronicle.

So, too, is the opening to “Something Wicked this Way Comes”:

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. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything’s smoky-smelling and the sky’s orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe’en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

It’s more than boys and Halloween that make these boys chronicles. Therein lies the desire for what will be, the nostalgia for what was and what may never be again, but most of all, the desire to live now and make now last forever and make the pain we feel now dim because of the better now that’s likely just around the corner, flapping along with the bedsheets.

Only to boys could a boring, staid town – a small town, always a small town; boys cannot prosper in the city – be the fresh, cat-footed, whispering dump of a place where the extraordinary has to happen to shove the ordinary back into the corners.

The now about to come calls like the ravine in The Halloween Tree: “There was a long tunnel down there under the earth in which poisoned waters dripped and the echoes never ceased calling Come Come Come and if you do you’ll stay forever, forever, drip, forever, rustle, run, rush, whisper, and never go, never go go go . . .”

Boyhood. The tunnel of adulthood that whispers, that now about to come, that now about to be. Boyhood is about being above all else, being strong, being in charge, being in control, being all that right now, right now.

And fearing nothing. Not even fear itself. Because fear always stops the now that is to come from coming.

Fear did not stop the astronauts on Mars from running in the thin atmosphere to the old front porches they knew could not be theirs. But the now that was to come did not cease to call, and there, they chose to stay forever, though the town faded from their memories leaving them only in the cold grave, the now that came.

And Jim Nightshade. And Will Halloway. One born on All Hallows Eve. The other on All Hallows Day. Each chasing the other, each reaching for the now that is just around the corner, the now that is to come. And Mr. Halloway, the taciturn janitor of the town library. He fell into that ravine where the poisoned waters dripped and in the run rustle rush whisper never went, never went, went, went. Until the boys, those wonderful Bradbury boys, reminded him, racing to the railroad turnstile like kites, of the now about to come. Then his heart was light and his burdens were easy.

“When I was a child,” Paul wrote in First Corinthians chapter 13, verse 11, “I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” The now about to be is not childish. It is putting away the dark glass. It is seeing clearly. It is loyalty and loving and charity all wrapped into a package that wants to run in the twilight and smell the air filled with good wood-smoke and to crunch the dead leaves underfoot. Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway are not children. Because

[O]ne strange wild dark long year, Hallowe’en came early.

One year Hallowe’en came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. 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 . . .

Those who see the now about to be are the ones who grew up overnight. They may be young in years, but not young in seeing the world for what it is. They do not fall into the carnival traps, the snares that life sets, those who anticipate the now about to come.

And that is what Bradbury chronicles. Boys on the cusp of the nows about to be.

The Always Pivotal Ray Bradbury

"People are afraid of fantasy," says Ray Bradbury in an article by Penelope Mesic (a Bradburian character name if I ever read one) at raybradbury.com. "A lot of intellectuals think science fiction is trivial. And it's pivotal! People are walking around the streets with phones to their heads talking to someone ten feet away. We've killed two million people with automobiles. We're surrounded by technology and the problems created by technology, and science fiction isn't important?"

Science fiction is certainly important; without it, I never would have voyaged to Saturn with the likes of Arthur C. Clarke's Duncan Makenzie or Robert Kleinman, plumbed the depths of the sea with Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, or saved the galaxy with Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat (I'd still love to see someone make a movie out of one of his books, though maybe not; it'd probably get thrashed).

But Bradbury. Quintessentially American and -- unlike Clarke -- willing to focus on the philosophical implications of technology rather than zero-gravity sex which Clarke obsesses over for some odd reason. He's still active. Still writing. Still seeking the "monsters and angels" that make up the stories he writes. This is the kind of writerly life I aspire to. I need to keep on writing, and keep writing, and then when I'm worn out, write some more.

Of his novels, the one that grabs my mind every time I read it is "Something Wicked This Way Comes." Of his short stories, it's "The Man," in which an intrepid crew of spacefarers arrives on a planet populated with human beings only to discover that they just barely missed the coming of Jesus Christ, and thus their visit is made unremarkable. They spend the rest of their time rocketing after the messiah. I think this story is among the root tales that have inspired me to write my novel -- though I'm light years from being as good as Bradbury.

The best writers' advice I ever heard comes from Bradbury. He said, basically, that 95 percent of the stuff we write is nonsense, but you have to get it out of your brain in order for the good stuff to come. Thus the explanation for the stuff I write. I'm still getting rid of the clogs.

Mars Beckons

Whenever I see something like this, I can hear Ray Bradbury shouting for joy. The sight of those dust devils swirling around on the surface of Mars? Gave me chills. Of COURSE I say, Mars is a changing, dynamic planet. It has an atmosphere. It has geology. It has gravity. With those three, but not those three alone, there is dynamism.

I want to go to Mars before I die. Is that too much to ask of our space program? Alas, back to the forecastle of the Pequod.

To Mars

This thought struck me today, as I sat in my gray little cubicle in the dumpy little trailer way out in the middle of the Lost River Desert, buried in snow and hoping for a glimpse through the copier room window of the rabbits that live underneath our trailer:

I want to go to Mars.

I've been to Mars, of course, thanks to Ray Bradbury and a little thing he calls R is for Rocket. First read the book years ago and was most struck by "The Rocket," a story Bradbury wrote of another man's longing to walk on the surface of the Red Planet. Unable to afford tickets to Mars, (mankind first landed on the planet 70 years before) he builds is own rocket ship from a mockup rocket and takes his children on a trip:

"Listen, keep your ears clean [says the father, Fiorello Bodoni]. Smell the smells of a rocket. Feel. Remember. So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives."

"Yes, Papa."

The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The airlock hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. 'Ready?" he called.

"Ready!" all replied.

"Blast-off!" He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. "We're moving! We're off! Look!"

"Here comes the Moon!"

The Moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. "There's Earth!" "There's Mars!"

The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.

"Good," whispered Bodoni, alone.

He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

No. Bodoni smiled.

All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.

Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic cream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

Maria stood in the kitchen window.

He waved to her and smiled.

He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

The sun was rising.

Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion of the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars some up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

He awoke.

Red Mars floated near the rocket.

"Papa!" The children thrashed to be free.

Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

"We are home," said Bodoni.

They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, fi they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.

"I have ham and eggs for all of you," said Maria, at the kitchen door.

"Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!"

"Yes," she said.

At bedtime, the children gathered before Bodoni. "We want to thank you, Papa."

"It was nothing."

"We will remember it for always, papa. We will never forget."

Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. "What's this?" he cried.

"You're the best father in the world," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Now I see," she said. "Now I understand."

She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. "Is it a very lovely journey?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Perhaps," she said, "perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?"

"Just a little one, perhaps," he said.

"Thank you," she said. "Good night."

"Good night," said Fiorello Bodoni.

Yes, a sham. But not a sham. The family of Fiorello Bodoni believed they flew to Mars. Thus, they flew to Mars.

I want to go to Mars. I want to walk on the surface of that distant red planet, crawl down into the bowl of a crater, pick up handfuls of Martian sand. The dream is not dead. The technology is not outside our grasp. There are those who wonder why bother sending a man to Mars, when robots can go and be safer, less expensive. I say, the Bodoni children went to Mars. I want to go, too.

Where can I take my children, how can I take them on trips they will never forget? They're growing up so quickly. I haven't taken them to Mars yet. We need to go. It's not too late. I need to build a rocket ship. And I need to take my wife, too.