Remembering Ray Bradbury

Clarisse: But why do you burn books?

Guy Montag: Books make people unhappy, they make them anti-social.

Clarisse: Do you think I'm anti-social?

Guy Montag: Why do you ask?

Clarisse: Well... I'm a teacher, not quite actually, I'm still on probation. I was called to the administration office today, and I don't think I said the right things. I'm not at all happy about my answers.

Ray Bradbury visited IVC the evening of January 28, 2009,  to be "in conversation" with writer and professor Marjorie Luesebrink, though as Rebel Girl remembers it, it was all Ray Bradbury all the time.

(This post is adapted from one Rebel Girl wrote then.)

The noted author died last night at age 91.  Rebel Girl's little guy, ten years old and already a fan, asked the obvious question: Why did he have to die?

Why indeed. Rebel Girl imagines how Bradbury would laugh at the little boy's question.

Just about everyone in the department of English has their own Ray Bradbury story. This is probably true for every department of English. One IVC professor went on her first date with hubby-to-be at a Ray Bradbury reading in San Diego. They reprised that first date when Bradbury visited.

Rebel Girl fell hard for Bradbury when she was young. The Martian Chronicles. Something Wicked this Way Comes. Dandelion Wine. The Illustrated Man. Fahrenheit 451. And the stories! "The Kilamanjaro Device." "The Garbage Collector." "The Sound of Summer Running."  Those $1.49 paperbacks.  Those sentences.

Bradbury was one of the ones who made her love words and imagination, one who taught her how they could transform the world. Rebel Girl's world then was in dire need of transformation.

Then, it must have been 1978 or '79, she won an award for high school writers and finally got the meet the man himself. It was at a gathering sposnored by the Southwest Manuscripters, the local writers group of the South Bay of Los Angeles  who had read her stories and given her prize money, money that would pay for rent, food, textbooks for El Camino College.

Bradbury talked about writing but he also spoke about how he rode the bus, how he used to feed coins into the rental typewriters at the downtown Los Angeles Library in order to compose his first stories. He talked, in other words, about being without.

It was a story he told often through the years.  Anyone who has heard Bradbury talk has heard some of these details.  (And boy could he talk! It seemed he said yes to every group who asked. He was everywhere, all the time, even putting in a cameo appearance in the early '70s at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley where Rebel Girl spends her summers. There's a black and white picture of him, smiling, at a party, holding, as someone else in the photo always attested, a joint.) But Bradbury's story is a good story, one that needs telling and hearing, one about hope and persistence, liberation.

Rebel Girl doesn't have the photograph of the famous writer and the high student that was taken that evening. The photo was lost like so much in those days. She lacked the kind of mother or family that provided that service - you know, putting things in scrapbooks or photo albums or special boxes. And she didn't know how to save things for herself.

But she did learn how to write, she thinks now. That's one way to save things and to retrieve what is lost. So, no photograph - but the memory and these words - enough.

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In the Los Angeles Times: Ray Bradbury dies at 91; author lifted fantasy to literary heights

In the New York Times: Ray Bradbury, Master of Science Fiction, Dies at 91

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