Ray Bradbury, the Martian chronicler, is gone

Ray Bradbury, one of the masters of science fiction, passed away Tuesday night, at the age of 91. The writer of The Martian Chronicles has gone on to his next adventure, and I  hope it's everything he imagined it would be.

When I call him a "master" of the genre, it's only because I can't think of a more superlative word.

Bradbury's style was different from most other scifi writers. The others delved into the machines, the technology of scifi, and often into the politics or the social implications. Bradbury, instead, climbed into the minds of the characters in his stories. The machines and everything else were there, but only as props for the real story, which was happening inside the heads and hearts of living, feeling human beings.

My favorite Bradbury short story was "All Summer in a Day," about a children's school in an earth colony on Venus, and a tragic event that happened there on the one day when the clouds parted for an hour so the sun shone through. "All Summer" was first published in 1954, republished in one of the many Bradbury anthologies in the 1970s, and is now available for free online.

I first read "All Summer" as a teenager. When, as a young father, I moved my family to Oregon, we experienced a sample of the weather Bradbury wrote about in "All Summer": nine continuous months every year of overcast skies, and day after day of endless rain. When the children were sitting inside one day, lamenting the rain that kept them from playing outside, I remembered "All Summer." I dug the anthology out of a box in the garage, looked up the story and read it to my children. It became a family favorite.

(My daughter took the book with her when she married, to read to her own children. I didn't mind a bit. Everybody should read Ray Bradbury to their children.)

Bradbury cited Edgar Rice Burroughs as one of his influences, telling the New Yorker magazine that he memorized all of Burroughs' Tarzan and John Carter stories when he was a boy. Yet Ray Bradbury himself was an influence on two — no, three —generations of writers, in both science fiction and other genres.

Stephen King once channeled Ray Bradbury beautifully. In his short story "The House on Maple Street," published in his collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King weaves the story of a dysfunctional family with an abusive stepfather and a house that is growing a spaceship in its innards. King insists that he was inspired by an illustration created by fantasy artist Chris Van Allsburg (in whose book, The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, the story is also published). But the voice in the story, the interactions between the characters, the exploration of their minds and their psyches, and the role played by the technology in the story, is clearly influenced by Ray Bradbury.

In a discreet homage to the master storyteller, King gives the children in the story the surname "Bradbury."

Dear Miss Cottrill

This happened to me in Grade 1 or Grade 2, at Ridgeview School, in Brampton, Ontario. I don't remember my Grade 1 teacher's name at this moment, but I do recall that Miss Cottrill was my Grade 2 teacher, so let's just say that it happened in Grade 2.

We were doing phonics, and we had just studied the "sw" sound. Our teacher gave everyone a sheet of unlined paper, and told us to fold it in quarters. Then we unfolded the sheet. In each of the four quarters, we were supposed to draw a picture of a word that started with "sw", and then write the word.

I don't remember the first three pictures I drew, but do remember that I had trouble thinking of a fourth word. Finally I thought of "swear." I took four colored crayons, and with each crayon I drew one letter of a four-letter word. Yes, thatkind of four-letter word. And I really was that naive and innocent. We didn't use those kinds of words in our family, but I knew what they were, and I didn't see any problem with using the word as an illustrative example in a cold and clinical environment like a school assignment.

I outlined each letter with a black crayon, wrote the word "swear" in the square, and submitted my finished assignment.

That afternoon, while we were quietly working on something else, Miss Cottrill took advantage of the slack time to review and grade our phonics assignments. I was rather proud of my artwork -- all of it, not just the "swear" illustration -- and I was hoping for a good grade.

Not that I was watching her or anything, but suddenly I heard Miss Cottrill gasp. It was more like a yelp - an audible and shrill intake of breath, anyway. I looked up from whatever I was doing to see her examining my paper, then I went back to my work.

The next day she handed back the graded assignments. I didn't get mine. Afterwards, I went to her desk and asked if I could have mine back. She said, "no." She wasn't mean about it, but she didn't give me an explanation.

I've always wondered what happened to that assignment. Did she burn it to ashes in a puritanical fervor? Did she show it to the principal and ask for his advice, and he told her not to worry about it? Did she post it on the bulletin board in the staff room, for the other teachers' amusement? Did she put it in her scrapbook of "crazy things that happened to me during my career as a public school teacher?" Did she talk to my parents about it? And were they scandalized, or did they laugh it off?

One of these days, I'll write about the time in 8th grade when I used a word that had a double-entendre I didn't even know about, and how it got me in trouble anyway.

On Keeping a Journal

I think that writing in a journal or a diary is becoming a lost art. It seems like the secrets we used to record on the pages of our diaries, the most intimate details of our lives, are now broadcast for all the world to see -- on blogs, on social networking pages, on tweets, and on chats. I'm not willing to bare my soul to that extent.

My own journal contains two entries for 2006, nothing for 2007, and three entries for 2008. This is because, in 2005, I made a conscious decision to stop writing in my journal and devote that energy to writing letters to my children instead, as my four grown-up offspring found themselves literally in the four corners of the world. I rationalized that my mails and emails contained enough information for a biographer to reconstruct my life, if anybody really wanted to.

I stubbornly ignored the fact that, while my family letters contained news and the occasional patriarchal expostulation, they concealed my feelings and some of the more private events in my life. In fact, the past six years have been a brain-rattling, roller-coaster sequence of ups and downs: financially, spiritually, and emotionally. I don't want to commit the ascending parts or the high points to paper, fearing that although the words will remain, the hopes and the joys will be replaced again by disappointment and discouragement. I don't want to record the descents or the low points because, honestly, there are some details about this journey that I do not want to remember.

My online persona is carefully edited and managed, so that the rest of the world does not see the roller-coaster trajectory of my life or the framework that it is built upon.

But it's time for me to write in my journal again. Call it a declaration of hope, if you will.

--

I have a friend who keeps his journal on his computer. He stores a backup copy of his journal online, somewhere in "the cloud." Good for him. I can't do that.

Corporations and government agencies have thousands, billions, of records, stored on old computer tapes in climate-controlled storage. As long as the climate control keeps working, those magnetic tapes will last for a long time. However, the machines to read those tapes wore out a decade ago, and nobody is making any new ones. For all the good it did to store those records so carefully, nobody will ever be able to read them.

Today, with our "modern" computers, we face other risks with anything we commit to the computer: power failure, battery failure, OS failure, hard disk failure, CD/DVD damage, and Internet shutdown.

On the other hand, another piece of the Codex Sinaiticus was recently discovered in the binding of an old book at the Monastery of St. Catherine, at the bottom of the Sinai peninsula. The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the oldest copies of the Bible, having been written between 325 and 360 A.D. It was written in ink on sheets of parchment. The largest portion of the Codex Siniaticus is in the British Library; however, the monks liked to reuse old parchment, and so pieces of it keep showing up in other old books. It's practically indestructible.

I have been observing this "ancient vs. modern" trend for several years now. Technologists keep trying to come up with new archival document formats, to replace ink on parchment, but so far they have not been very successful. Nothing has proven to last even one tenth as long as ink on parchment, except maybe ink on paper. Since parchment is rather scarce and expensive these days, I'm going to write my journal by hand, in ink, on paper.