Ray Bradbury, author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451, has passed away at the age of 91, reports io9. I’ll always remember the first time I read The Veldt (PDF), and being scared out of my adolescent mind.
Ray Bradbury Passes Away
Non Fiction Takes a Certain Vulnerability
We’ve recommended reading up on Jenny Zhang‘s Sour Heart before, this interview in Hazlitt is one of our favorites. “And maybe this is crude to talk about, it’s not even that I don’t want to write a memoir. Beyond that, do you understand how vulnerable it makes someone to call something nonfiction? Not just emotionally vulnerable but financially vulnerable, do you realize someone that makes $40,000 a year cannot be hit by a lawsuit by some angry ex who objected about a chapter about him? Some guy sees one line about him, missing thousands of lines not about him. That’s why celebrities are the ones who write memoirs.”
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It Was Nothing, Really
W.H. Auden lived a secret life, not as a man with a second family or an illicit habit but as, weirdly enough, a genuinely kind human being. He paid for a friend’s costly operation and camped outside the apartment of a woman who suffered from night terrors until she felt safe enough to sleep on her own again. So why did the poet want to hide his good deeds? He claimed he didn’t want to be admired for basic decency.
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Emily Dickinson, Harvard-Bound
Seth Perlow examines how Harvard claims the rights to Emily Dickinson's poems, a body of work that was unpublished when she died, more than 130 years ago.
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The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
Google is set to release a set of computerized glasses later this year. The glasses will come equipped with a camera that captures what you see, a projector that reflects data onto a screen between the lenses and your eyes, and a sensor that tracks the movement of your eyes which will in be the method for navigating the device. Basically, we’re all about to become Steve Mann, though according to the Toronto Star the world’s first cyborg has yet to offer any comment.
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I lucked out with those blurbs
An interview with Tom Bissell in which he drops this gem while talking about John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff Dyer: “I prefer to think of that kind of nonfiction as a voice whispering to you in the night. “
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Mister Orhanium’s Wonder Emporium
Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence (named after his most recent novel of the same name) will open this week in Istanbul’s Çukurcuma neighborhood. The museum consists of hundreds of objects “collected” by a fictional character in the eponymous book.
Motherless Brooklyn on Screen
Edward Norton has wanted to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn since it came out, but finding financing was almost as difficult as solving Frank Minna’s murder. Now, Brett Ratner has agreed to fund the film with Norton directing and starring as Lionel Essrog.
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Curiosities
David Foster Wallace stranded on a desert island.Another reason to love Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley: his refreshingly enthusiastic take on “slacker fiction” and All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen, who, admittedly, “scarcely qualifies as a slacker.”Paul Auster was a protesting, fence-tearing, rioting crazy ’68er, too, it turns out.The phenomenal Burkhard Bilger supplements his New Yorker piece on folk-music field recordings with some audio.Malcolm Gladwell’s seemingly endless string of public appearances continues. This one is, intriguingly, a public “book discussion” with the Washington, D.C. chief of police.With some speculating that CBS News is about to close up shop and that Katie Couric is on her way out, rumors are already swirling about the obligatory memoir.Jonathan Franzen answers the question “Do you regret your run-in with Oprah?” in a “Big Think” video. Aficionados of Franzen mannerisms may also enjoy the other fifteen or so Franzen videos that Big Think has available.
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THE VELDT got me too. And “Fahrenheit 451” is my shorthand for all the literary scariness these days.
“There Will Come Soft Rains” makes me even sadder now…
As he was for many people, Bradbury was one of the most important literary bridges from kid’s lit to adult fiction for me. (And I suppose Rachel Bloom put a new spin on Bradbury as “adult” fiction with her song.) It was an easy journey from things like “R is for Rocket” and “S is for Space” to “The Martian Chronicles” and then to more challenging work. For me, the book that kept me up at night was “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and who can forget his terrific treatment of bullying, “All Summer in a Day,” which yesterday’s transit of Venus made me think of. And I agree with Evelyn Walsh: “Fahrenheit 451” is a eerie echo of so many aspects of our culture . . . written sixty years ago.