The Frontier Myth

 This is pulled out of an article called "The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury" by Gary K. Wolfe. You can get it in the Gale Lit Resource Center if you want to see the whole thing. It's pretty great.

"In an interview in 1961 Ray Bradbury described an unwritten story of his which was to be cast in the form of an American Indian legend. - "One night there was a smell on the wind, there was a sound coming from a great distance." Searching for the source of this portent, the Indian and his young grandson wander for days, finally coming to the edge of the sea and spotting a campfire in the distance. Beyond, in the water, are anchored three ships. Creeping closer, the Indians find that the fire is surrounded by strange-looking men who speak an unknown language, who "have huge sort of metal devices on their heads," and carry strange mechanical weapons. The Indians return to the wilderness, vaguely aware that some great event has happened and that the wilderness will never be the same, but not at all sure what the event is or exactly what it means.

This small unwritten fable of the coming of the first Europeans to North America is significant not only because parts of it appear in another context in the story "Ylla" in The Martian Chronicles (once selected by Bradbury as his favorite among his stories)--in which the Indians become Martians and the strange sense of foreboding becomes telepathy--but also for the way in which the story reveals a romantic, almost mystical, vision of historical experience, particularly the experience of the American wilderness."

--

This is cool, b/c I'm reading the Journals of Lewis and Clark right now. And L & C, as they travel up the Missouri River, just by passing through the "undiscovered" American West, effect this magical transformation of the country. They meet with Indians along the way, they show off their guns and tools, and they move on. They don't really do anything, or build anything, they just pass through and update the maps and shoot some buffalo. But the Indian nations that they pass through are fundamentally changed. They don't know exactly what is coming but they all know that a great change is upon them.

Night Meeting

In "Night Meeting" an earth man meets a martian. They look out over a martian city. The man sees a vast ruin..a city with no life, dead for thousands of years. The martian sees crowds and festival lights and a city very much alive. He says he slept there last night. The man and the martian exist in parallel worlds, out of sync in time, and they are unable to convince the other that what they are seeing isn't really there. They are each from the other's future. In the end, they decide that it really doesn't matter. Both of their realities are real enough for them.

"The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. "This can mean only one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!"

     "No, you are from the Past," said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now.

"You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the Past, who is from the Future? What year is it?"

     "Two thousand and one."

"What does that mean to me? It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C. It is nothing and more than nothing!"

And the Moon Be Still as Bright

"I've got what amounts to a religion, now.

It's learning how to breathe all over again."

Literature Databases - or - How To Sound Smart

Winchester residents, and anyone who comes to the library, have access to a few really great literature databases.

• Contemporary Literary Criticism Select
• Literature Resource Center
• Bloom's Literary Reference Online
• Books and Authors
• LitFinder

CLC Select and Lit. Resource Center can be a lot of fun and you can get in way over your head real quick. Some example articles from CLC and LRC:

• "Being Martian: spatiotemporal self in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles"
• "The Thematic Structure of 'The Martian Chronicles'"
• "The Body Eclectic: Sources of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles"
• "The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury"
• "Entering the Space Frontier: Quests Mundane, Profane, and Divine"

 

From "Being Martian..." regarding past present and future and how all 3 combine to form subjective experience:

"Perception of a melody demands, first, that there be present a "primal impression" which constitutes the tonal now, that is, the immediately sounding tone of the melody. Secondly, there is at the same time as the perceived tone, an existing peripheral tonal experience active in the constituted conscious act of perceived tonal now. This "fresh" or "primary memory" which holds near to the perceiving now the just-past tone in consciousness is known as retention. As such "when the tonal now, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention is itself again a now, an actual existent. While it itself is an actual (but not an actual sound), it is the retention of a sound that has been" 

Get into it here:  http://www.mln.lib.ma.us/electronic/win1.htm

Get into it here:  http://www.mln.lib.ma.us/electronic/win1.htm

Get into it here:  http://www.mln.lib.ma.us/electronic/win1.htm

-LB

Green Lights

Bradbury's colonizers become martians themselves as soon as time and distance start to work on their ties to Earth. Earth isn't "here" anymore. It's "there." They can barely see it or even remember it. There's a lot of this self/other stuff going on in the book.

One day the colonizers look back at Earth and all they see is a green light:

"It's so far away it's unbelievable. It's not here. You can't touch it. You can't even see it. All you see is a green light. Two billion people living on that light? Unbelievable! War? We don't hear the explosions."

It's simple for them to forget. They don't care what happens back there because they are here and now. It's a good lesson I think. All of those things that seem so important, seem like the only things that could ever be important...maybe they're not.

I don't know if I buy it though. Gatsby's green light was the key and it always made him think about Daisy. It was the essence of Daisy, that light.

"You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock..."

Why did Bradbury make the light green? Why not blue if he didn't want me to think about Gatsby? That green light just has to be a Gatsby reference so why doesn't it make those colonizers want to just jump back on their rockets and go home?

Vonnegut

From The Taxpayer...pg. 31 in my copy...this is very Vonnegutian

"He shook his fists at them and told that that he wanted to get away from Earth; anybody with any sense wanted to get away from Earth. There was going to be a big atomic war on Earth in about two years, and he didn't want to be here when it happened. He and thousands others like him, if they had any sense, would go to Mars. See if they wouldn't! ... Wait for me! he cried. Don't leave me here on this terrible world, I've got to get away; there's going to be an atom war! Don't leave me on Earth!"

Bradbury and Vonnegut were both writing in the 50's but Bradbury came first by 5 years or so. Plus, KV hated semicolons.

Power of Names

When you give something a name you fix it and define it and own it. The name influences the way a thing is thought of, treated, and remembered. The name is a handle and it will go into history books. A thing doesn't really exist until it has a name. There's renaming too. When you give something a new name you destroy it's past.

Naming in T.M.C...

•  An astronaut named Biggs discovers a canal. He drops glass bottles into it and with each one he says "I christen thee, I christen thee, I christen thee...Biggs Canal."

• Another says "We'll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont Sea, and there'll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities and it won't ever be right..."

•  Later there's this: "The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and buried sorcerers and towers and obelisks. And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with new names: IRON TOWN, STEEL TOWN, ALUMINUM CITY, ELECTRIC VILLAGE, CORN TOWN, GRAIN VILLA, DETROIT II."

>> It happens all the time.  Xfinity is just Comcast with a new name.

Excited to join!

I just joined and am excited to get rolling with the book!  Admittedly, I haven't read anything by Bradbury since Dandelion Wine in the sixth grade (which I don't think I liked or understood).  However, now older and hopefully wiser, I'm excited to give Bradbury another try.

~kn

TMC on TV and Film ~ For better or worse

People have tried...that's all I can say:


The Martian Chronicles TV Miniseries (1980) - A partnership between NBC and the BBC. Three episodes were produced and aired. You can get a nice sample on YouTube (see below). Also available on Netflix for your viewing pleasure.

The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985-1992) - 65 episodes aired on cable tv in the late 80s and early 90s. Episodes were written by Bradbury and based on his short stories and novels, including some chapters from Martian Chronicles. There is a Bradbury Theater collection available on Netflix but not all episodes are available. See the episode based on chapter 7: "And the Moon be Still as Bright" below.

Future Blockbuster? (????) - This news is a year old, but I can't find anything newer.


-Luke

Welcome! - Selection #1

Welcome to Winchester Public Library's Internet Book Club!

We're starting off with The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. First published in 1950, TMC is widely considered to be Bradbury's masterpiece (forget about 451). Bradbury has been called the "sci-fi writer who could write" and The Martian Chronicles approaches poetry at times. Besides, a book with this many covers can't be that bad.

"They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea..."