ANOTHER BLOG ON THE NEBULA SITE

2009-11-12T02:34:22Z

I have another blog about elements of science fiction up at the SFWA Nebulawards site:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/things_that_go_bump_in_the_dark/

Nebula Guest Blogs Update

2009-05-12T01:27:59Z

The latest one, "Old Man River," is up:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/old_man_river/

CLOWNS, DEAD DOGS AND THE UNIVERSE

2009-03-31T02:13:57Z

I have another blog up at the Nebula site:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/clowns_dead_dogs_and_the_universe/

Another Nebula -Site Blog

2008-11-24T17:07:34Z

I have another blog up that I wrote for the Nebula blog site. But not for long, so catch it while it's hot! (This makes number four. I didn't realize I had much to say until I started.)

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/the_persistence_of_the_numinous/

OF MYTH AND MEMORY

2008-06-30T06:14:27Z

At the Eaton Conference recently, I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. The conference had taken as its theme science fiction about the moon, and Bradbury was an honored guest. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work.

I wasn't disappointed. Bradbury's prose sings – it really is best when read aloud. Being introduced to Bradbury's work by a twelve-year-old boy long ago, I had fallen in love with the voice of these stories, saturating myself in his music. I realized, as I re-read of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it's not the story itself that grabs me. Most of the stories have tiny plots that would sound ho-hum when summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably never existed even in Bradbury's own childhood in Illinois. But that's not really the point.

The magic of these stories lies in their poetry. I'm not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn't name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:

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.”

Here's another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:

And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....”

A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when all the apples fall from the trees” for the second – and would've missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury's words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I re-read the book, recognizing the parts I'd admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless tunes of simple words.

And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet whose prose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas. I hadn't read Under Milk Wood, a play for voices, in a very long time, though I re-read Thomas's collected poems at least once a year. The date I'd inscribed on the inside front cover was the year I went to college, the year after Thomas died. I'd hated “modern poetry” while I was in high school – until I encountered Thomas and the poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept off my feet by the sheer emotional torrent of words, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. Like Bradbury, Thomas loved small towns, though his are in his native Wales:

...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.”

I've never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. The thing is, these aren't the places Bradbury and Thomas lived either; they're myths about those places, more real than bricks and stones. That to my mind is good writing; that's Art.

Ah, Miss Warner, dragon of high school English classes, you told us that sentences ought not to run away with the images they contain but cower timidly behind their periods and semicolons, and that words ought not to be strung together with “and” like beads on a chain. How lucky you didn't teach Ray Bradbury or Dylan Thomas!

Sheila's LiveJournal

ANOTHER BLOG ON THE NEBULA SITE

Nebula Guest Blogs Update

CLOWNS, DEAD DOGS AND THE UNIVERSE

Another Nebula -Site Blog

OF MYTH AND MEMORY