New podcast episode: Ray Bradbury on Stage!

It's been a while, but I'm back with a new series of Bradbury 100 podcast episodes.

I get things started with a look at Ray Bradbury as a playwright, tracing his career as a theatre writer from the 1950s to the 2010s. I cover both successes and failures, and discuss both "faithful" and "playful" adaptations of his own work.

I have touched on some of this before - see episode 12, where I talked about Colonial Radio Theatre's audio performances of Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, which both used Ray's plays (rather than his books).

And elsewhere on Bradburymedia you will find a review of a performance of Fahrenheit 451.

Coming up in future episodes of the podcast, I'll have more in the Chronological Bradbury strand, a look at some lesser-known Bradbury films, and some Bradbury fiction.

Here's the new episode - and, of course, you can also listen via any decent podcast app (see the bottom of the page for some of the options).

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - Episode 58 - Ray Bradbury on Stage

 

 

 

 

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Dandelion Wine - live talk now available in audio and video

You are now spoiled for choice:

If you'd like to ctch up with my live episode of Bradbury 100, which streamed on Facebook Live on Ray's 102nd birthday, you can find an audio-only version on the podcast feed, and an audiovisual version on Youtube.

For convenience, both are provided below. You're welcome!

Youtube: click here. 

 

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 32 - Dandelion Wine live talk

New Bradbury 100 Episode: Revealed at Last - The Lonely One!

Time for a new episode of my podcast Bradbury 100. With this episode, I'm starting on an occasional series of shorter episodes. The topic is one which has previously brought thousands of visitors to this website:

The Lonely One.

The Lonely One is a fictional character in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. I say "character", but he is really just a shadowy figure who never comes into focus, and never occupies the foreground.

But the Lonely One was also a real criminal in Ray's childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois. I exclusively revealed his true identity in 2009, and my blog post about him has had more "hits" than any other page on the whole of Bradburymedia. So I thought I would share my findings with the podcast audience.

Here's the podcast episode:

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 26 - Tracking Down THE LONELY ONE...

 

And to read my original 2009 blog post about the Lonely One - which includes a photo of this notorious petty criminal - click here.

Bradbury Centenary: Dandelion Wine live reading

The Ray Bradbury centenary/centennial year continues with various events taking place online instead of in the real world. Of course, we've lost some big events such as Comic-Con San Diego, which was due to celebrate Bradbury 100, but some previously localised events will now be accessible globally, such as...

Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine Arts & Music Festival - this event usually takes place in Ray's home town of Waukegan, in the city's Bowen Park. This year, it is going online. One of its centrepiece events will be a non-stop reading of the novel Dandelion Wine, starting at 10am CDT and projected to run through to 8pm CDT.

We are promised "celebrity Bradbury fans reading from around the galaxy". I'm not sure who else is in the cast list, but one of the readers will be me, so the event certainly has an intercontinental reach... I'm due to read the section of Dandelion Wine which ws originally published as the short story "The Night" (1946).

The Dandelion Wine reading will be streamed live on Facebook. If you'd like to dip in, you'll find further information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1124476531218342/ 

When I read through the story this morning to refresh my memory, I was reminded that this story refers to a number of streets and landmarks in "Green Town", the fictionalised version of Waukegan where Dandelion Wine is set. I blogged about the parallels between the fictional and real town some years ago, here: http://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2006/10/green-town-illinois.html

And "The Night" also plays on the town's fear of murderous criminal "the Lonely One". Although fictionalised by Bradbury, there really was a "Lonely One" in Waukegan. I researched him a few years ago, and exclusively revealed his true story here: https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2009/09/revealed-lonely-one.html

I hope you will be able to join us for the reading.

Lockdown Choices - Issue #8: Dandelion Wine

This is the eighth in a new series of posts, my Lockdown Choices, where I seek to entertain you while in coronavirus-isolation, and remind you of Bradbury's great works in this, his centenary year.

In these posts, I cover each of Ray Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories and adaptations.

Lockdown Choice #8: Dandelion Wine

First edition, Doubleday 1957. Cover design by Robert Vickrey.

 

The Book

Dandelion Wine was Ray Bradbury's first book for Doubleday in four years, the last being 1953's The Golden Apples of the Sun. In the interim, he had published a children's book through a specialist publisher and two books with Ballantine. Although it may look like he had gone away from Doubleday and then come back, in reality it was a case of Dandelion Wine being delayed because he was having trouble finishing it.

Bradbury's original concept for what became Dandelion Wine dates back to the mid-1940s. He drafted various brief outlines - often just a list of short story titles - called The Small Assassins, The Wind of Time, The Blue Remembered Hills and Summer Morning, Summer Night. The project evolved from being a set of stories about children and childhood, to including a conflict between children and the elderly. As with The Martian Chronicles, various short stories would be written and published first, as the book gradually came together as another of Bradbury's "composite novels" or "novelised story-cycles. (See my blog post on The Martian Chronicles for more on this concept.) The end result is a partly-biographical story of one summer in the life of young Douglas Spaulding.

By the 1950s, Bradbury had published a number of the short stories, but still had very little of the linking material that could tie everything together into anything resembling an overall narrative. We can only assume that, once again, he was being driven to create a "proper" novel either from his sense of what consititutes the true output of an author, or that he was being steered to the novel form by his editor. That editor, Walter Bradbury (no relation), was in fact convinced that Summer Morning, Summer Night would be a breakthrough book for Ray, his big opportunity to escape from the genre ghetto(es) that had both started and restricted his career.

Since the Dandelion Wine stories were mainly "realist" (rather than science fiction or fantasy), Bradbury was able to place them in all kinds of magazines. The short story called "Dandelion Wine" appeared first in this issue of Gourmet: the Magazine of Good Living!

Through all this time Bradbury referred to his novel-in-progress, with its fluctuating title, as "the Illinois novel", a shorthand reference to the setting of this semi-autobiographical work. The specific setting was, of course, the fictitious Green Town, a thinly disguised portrayal of Ray's real hometown of Waukegan.

By 1954, Ray had a mass of story material, with way too many characters and plot threads for a single novel. Where he been able to get away with this in The Martian Chronicles because of the enormous spatial and temporal dimensions of that book (it tells the story of two whole planets over a span of thirty years), it would just be confusing with only the small scale of Green Town and one summer as a setting.

Things began to focus in a New York meeting between Ray, Walter Bradbury, and Ray's agent Don Congdon. The three discussed various ways forward, with a proposed three-pronged assault on the overlong text: Ray should trim out some of the characters (and merge some others); he should make the book less episodic, by spreading some of the stories out throughout the book; and he should develop and enrich the secondary child characters, the ones who the central characters Tom and Doug interact with. But even with these three resolutions, Ray struggled to make the book work.

"Summer in the Air" first appeared in Saturday Evening Post in February 1956. Artwork by Amos Sewell.

Reader responses to "Summer in the Air". Bradbury's little story of buying new sneakers clearly struck a chord with Post readers.

The breakthrough came when both Bradburys - Ray and Walter - came to the realisation that there might actually be two books here. There was the beautifully developing narrative of Douglas Spaulding during the year that he realised "I'm alive!" - and there was a set of sketches of the town and the people of Green Town. Ray wasted no time in rearranging the contents, arriving quite rapidly at Dandelion Wine as we now know it, and the set of other stories which would many decades later finally emerge as Farewell Summer (2006).

Oh yes, when you see Farewell Summer advertised as a "sequel" to Dandelion Wine, you are being slightly misled. They genuinely were conceived as two parts of a single work.

Tracking the exact development of the contents of Dandelion Wine as it evolved is far too complex for me to attempt here. Fortunately, however, those super-scholars Eller and Touponce have already done it. In their 2004 book Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction they include the following table which shows three stages of development. And since Dandelion Wine is usually published without chapter titles or chapter numbers, this table is also a handy indicator of which parts were originally short stories and which parts were written as bridging material.

Three stages in Ray's development of Dandelion Wine, from Eller & Touponce's Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction, p. 231 (Kent State University Press, 2004). Click to embiggen.

Incidentally, there is a Bradbury book called Summer Morning, Summer Night - but this is one of those instances of Bradbury re-deploying a title. The 2008 book with that title is a rag-bag collection of left-overs from the Dandelion Wine/Farewell Summer project.

The Stories

Dandelion Wine is a bit tricky to navigate. Although the bulk of the content is made up of short stories which were originally published separately, there are no chapter headings. If I refer you to "Statues", could you find it in the book?

Unfortunately, there's no way to deal with this issue, so I'll have to leave you to find the stories within the book for yourself...





"Illumination" - OK, this is the easy one. It's the introductory passage. We are introduced to Douglas Spaulding, who introduces his world to us. In fact, he magics the world to life, or at least he thinks he does. Given that Doug is really Ray Bradbury fictionalised, it seems appropriate that Doug is able to awaken the town so that it can play out his story:

He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath and exhaled.

The street lights, like candles on a black cake, went out. He exhaled again and again and the stars began to vanish.

Douglas smiled. He pointed a finger.

There, and there. Now over here, and here . . .

Yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as houselights winked slowly on. A sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country.

"Everyone yawn. Everyone up."

"The Happiness Machine" - the one about Leo Auffman, inventor, who wants to make a machine that will bring, well, happiness. Eventually, he discovers that such a machine already exists. He takes Doug and Tom to the side of the house to look at the machine. It's nothing more nor less than - a window, through which he can see his family, going about their business. What I find curious about this story is that it represents one of the few moments in the book which has any resemblance at all to Ray's science fiction stories. Of course, here the story denies technology, relying instead on a shift of perspective, a dawning moment for Leo. But then again, isn't all of Bradbury's technology, in all of his stories, just a form of magic?

"The Happiness Machine", Saturday Evening Post, September 1957. Artwork by Fritz Willis.

"Statues" - the one about John Huff leaving town. The whole of Dandelion Wine is about change, discovery and learning - all during what we imagine to be one long, hot summer. One of the things I like about the book is how it captures that childhood feeling that everything goes on forever. Summer holidays did used to last forever, didn't they? But now that you're all grown up, they're over in the blink of an eye. When John Huff, Doug's friend, announces that his family are leaving town, it comes as a devastating blow to Doug, who declares, "You been here in Green Town all my life. You don't just pick up and leave!" I wouldn't exactly say that this is a plotted story - it's more a collection of moments, a series of emotional beats. But that's what makes it ring true.


"The Whole Town's Sleeping" - the one about The Lonely One and the Ravine. If one story sums up Bradbury's fictional Green Town, it's this one. We go with Lavinia Nebbs across town to the theatre, and we travel back with her as she takes a short cut aross the ravine. Which she knows she shouldn't do. And we know it, too. It's a classic tale of suspense. Even if you only ever read one story from Dandelion Wine, please make sure it's this one. Sure, the tone of the story is very different from much of the rest of the book, but it's the fear factor in this story that makes the sugary-sweetness of the rest of the book bearable.


"Good-by, Grandma" - spoiler alert: as the title suggests, this one is about the death of Doug's grandmother. The family can't let her go because, well, who will fix the roof next spring? Although grandma is "just" an old woman, she is clearly the centre of the family's life, depended on for everything. But she wants to go on her terms, not on anybody else's:

 "I don't want any Halloween parties here tomorrow. Don't want anyone saying anything sweet about me; I said it all in my time and my pride. I've tasted every victual and danced every dance; now there's one last tart I haven't bit on, one tune I haven't whistled. But I'm not afraid. I'm truly curious. Death won't get a crumb by my mouth I won't keep and savour. So don't you worry over me. Now, all of you go, and let me find my sleep..."

"Good-by, Grandma" in its first appearance. Saturday Evening Post, May 1957. Artwork by Peter Stevens.

 

The Adaptations

Dandelion Wine is the only one of Bradbury's "classic period" novels to remain unfilmed - in English, that is. There was a Russian adaptation in 1997 which, as far as I can tell as a non-Russian-speaker, looks like it was pretty good. Over the years, there have been several announcements about an English-language film, but nothing has ever come of them. I suspect that, like The Martian Chronicles, there isn't enough of an overarching story for the book to be directly filmable. Although, like Chronicles, it might be suitable for a TV miniseries.

Bradbury himself adapted Dandelion Wine for the stage, in a version which has been presented as straight drama and as a musical. But even he had to invent a whole new storyline to tie everything together: it centers on the mystery of Bill Forrester, a man who returns to Green Town after many years. Bradbury's theatrical script was used for the full-cast audio production of Dandelion Wine made by Colonial Radio Theatre.

A number of stories from the book have been adapted on their own. The out-and-out winner here has to be "The Whole Town's Sleeping", which pre-dates the book by nearly a decade. In fact, the very first public outing of the story was on radio, a good two years before the story ever saw print.

Back in 1948, Ray submitted the story to the radio series Suspense, where it was aired under the title "Summer Night". The story appeared in print in 1950 (in McCall's), then appeared on TV (Suspense, 1952, again as "Summer Night"), and then saw a whole series of repeat radio dramatisations on Suspense and ABC Radio Workshop. The story is also one of Bradbury's most anthologised stories, having appeared in dozens of books and textbooks.

For his TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater, Ray dramatised "The Happiness Machine", "Exorcism" and "The Whole Town's Sleeping".

Find Out More...

• Read about the Russian film of Dandelion Wine on my page for the film, here.
• Read about the real-life Lonely One, in my blog post about this petty criminal, here. 
• Compare the fictional Green Town to the real-life Waukegan in my blog post, here.
• Read about Ray's stage play version of Dandelion Wine, which was also the basis for the Colonial Radio Theatre audio production, in my review here.

 

Read...

You can read "Illumination" as it originally appeared in The Reporter, here.

And you can read "Summer in the Air" as it originally appeared in Saturday Evening Post, here.

 

Listen...

"The Whole Town's Sleeping" - the story of Lavinia Nebbs and her fearful crossing of the ravine alone at night - has been adapted for radio countless times. Listen to a version from Suspense, here.

Watch...

View the Russian film Vino iz oduvanchikov here. What's that? You don't understand Russian? Then just watch and try to figure out which stories are being adapted!

 

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's ninth book: A Medicine for Melancholy. Or should that be The Day it Rained Forever?

Dandelion Wine - on screen

RGI Productions has confirmed its intention to adapt Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine into a feature film.

Rodion Nahapetov is the author of the film's screenplay, and he will produce the film with Natasha Shliapnikoff, Agata Gotova and Albert Pocej. The screenplay was initially developed several years ago, and had Ray's blessing.

There is a Facebook page for the film, which currently includes some concept art, and photos of Rodion with Ray: www.facebook.com/dandelionwinemovie

There have been many announcements of Bradbury-based film projects in recent years. So far, nothing has resulted from the planned versions of Fahrenheit 451 or The Illustrated Man - and things have gone quiet on Something Wicked This Way Comes. But Rodion and Natasha are different: producers who had a close connection to Ray, and who have a strong commitment to Dandelion Wine. I think adapting Dandelion Wine could be really difficult, but I hope they manage to pull it off!

Bradburyesque... 3

The band in Heaven's album Caught in a Summer Swell, coming soon from Decades Records, shows a clear influence from Ray Bradbury... at least in the titles of the opening and closing tracks on the album.

The opening track is "Dandelion Wine", and the closer is "Farewell Summer". The former, of course, is named after Bradbury's 1957 novel. The latter is named after its 2006 sequel.

"Dandelion Wine" is out now, and has a video to accompany it, although it must be said that the imagery of the video owes more to the "summer of love" and pagan ritual (and maybe even The Wicker Man!) than it does to Bradbury. See for yourself...

Dandelion Wine movie update

I noticed that director Rodion Nahapetov has updated his Bradbury page, saying that he hopes the long-planned Dandelion Wine film will go into production in the summer of 2013. For more details on the background to this project, see my original post here.

Green Town Tribute

As I mentioned a while ago, Bradbury's home town of Waukegan Illinois - fictionalised as Green Town in his books Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer and Something Wicked This Way Comes - paid tribute to Ray on the day he died. TV news crews were in attendance, and so we have an opportunity to see a little of the event at the city's public library:





There is now gathering momentum for some kind of memorial to Bradbury in Waukegan, and the 1903 Carnegie Library (currently empty and disused) is naturally being looked at as a potential centre for honouring his memory. In his lifetime, Bradbury supported the campaign to save the Carnegie from demolition, and indicated that he would support some kind of Bradbury collection being deposited in the building, perhaps turning it into a museum or tourist attraction.

Though it may be sad to think that Bradbury's death would be the trigger for some action to finally be taken to restore the Carnegie Library to public life, it would be a fitting place to commemorate one of Waukegan's favourite sons.

There is more information about the preservation of the library at the website of the Carnegie Preservation Project. My thanks to Wayne Munn for the link.

Death, Maidens

Ray Bradbury has on more than occasion written about old ladies and their encounters with death. Sometimes he does it with humour, and sometimes with a serious tone. But always it is with a strong old lady, who is able to confront death and sometimes tell it who's boss.

A serious but quirky treatment is given in "Good-by Grandma", a short story first published in the Saturday Evening Post on 25 May 1957, and shortly afterwards incorporated into the novel Dandelion Wine. The Post version of the story was accompanied by Peter Stevens' paintings of the magnificently active grandmother (left).

This old lady passes away when she wants to. Bradbury treats her death not so much as an end as a return, a picking up of a thread:

A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much, when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born. And now? Now, let me see. She cast her mind back. Where was I? she thought.

In the earlier short story "There Was An Old Woman", first published in Weird Tales in July 1944, Bradbury gives us an old lady who resists death with all her might. It's not so much that she is scared of it; more a case of not having time for such nonsense:

"Why, it's just silly that people live a couple years and then are dropped like a wet seed in a hole and nothing sprouts but a smell. What good do they do that way? They lay there a million years, doing no good for nobody. Most of 'em fine, nice and neat people, or at least trying."

This story was illustrated by Boris Dolgov, who shows death as a cowed skeleton, chased off by Aunt Tildy. The story was collected in Bradbury's books Dark Carnival, The October Country and The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Bradbury also adapted it for The Ray Bradbury Theater.

A third classic Bradbury meeting between death and an old lady is "Death and the Maiden", which first appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction in March 1960, and later collected in The Machineries of Joy and Bradbury Stories.

This old lady, the 91-year-old Mam, is a bit like Aunt Tildy in her opposition to death:

“I see you. Death.” would cry Old Mam. “In the shape of a scissors-grinder! But the door is triple-locked and double-barred. I got flypaper on the cracks, tape on the keyholes, dust mops up the chimney, cobwebs in the shutters, and the electricity cut off so you can’t slide in with the juice! No telephones so you can call me to my doom at three in the dark morning. And I got my ears stuffed with cotton so I can’t hear your reply to what I say now. So, Death, get away!”

 But this time death is more subtle. It comes not as a skeleton but as a handsome young man, who brings Mam the promise of re-experiencing the freedom she hasn't allowed herself since the age of eighteen. She finally comes to believe in the man, and accepts the trade he offers. After years of living alone, locked away from the world and the risk of death, Old Mam steps out:

And they ran down the path out of sight, leaving dust on the air and leaving the front door of the house wide and the shutters open and the windows up so the light of the sun could flash in with the birds come to build nests, raise families, and so petals of lovely summer flowers could blow like bridal showers through the long halls in a carpet and into the rooms and over the empty-but-waiting bed. And summer, with the breeze, changed the air in all the great spaces of the house so it smelled like the Beginning or the first hour after the Beginning, when the world was new and nothing would ever change and no one would ever grow old.

Bradbury took the title of this story from an old legend, one which has inspired generations of artists. Read about the history of "death and the maiden" here.

Imported Wine

In these days of globalisation, it is easy to assume that British and American culture are in sync, and that they always have been. A book published in the States is often published simultaneously in the UK. It therefore always comes of something of a surprise to me to find British references to Bradbury from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s which seem out of step with American references.

I was reminded of this when I caught sight of a 1965 edition of New Worlds magazine. This used to be the UK's leading science fiction magazine, edited first by Ted Carnell and later by Michael Moorcock. The issue of December 1965 - a quite ordinary, run of the mill issue really - carries the name of Langdon Jones on the cover, because his short story "Transient" is contained within. But Jones makes a second appearance in this issue, as a reviewer of the first British paperback edition of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.

What surprised me here was that the first UK paperback edition took until 1965 to come into print... of a book first published (in the US) in 1957!

Jones' comments on the book are quite insightful, and he puts up a spirited defence of Bradbury. The book is sentimental, says Jones; it is nostalgic; it is escapist. But, he says, these are not bad things in themselves, and in case, he says, "the world of Green Town, Illinois, is not a place of smug sweetness. There is horror here too, the horror of the Lonely One [...]; the horror of losing touch with close friends; the horror of being old and of suddenly losing the whole of one's youth."

My favourite section, though, is where Jones clearly marks out who should and should not read this book:

There are, as I have discovered, some very, very literal people in this world. Those who would rather spend their time crabbily counting up the halfpennies of logic whilst ignoring the fluttering riches of meaning, I advise to keep well away from this book and this author. Those who would prefer the transparent but sweaty engineer working frantically on his logical machinery while blue-scaled Venusian lizards batter down the papier-mache door will not feel at home in Green Town with its solid, but distorted perspectives.

Langdon Jones seems to have retired from writing - his website tells us that he "used to be" a writer. He used to be a very good one, and I wish he wrote more.

Dandelion Wine

On Bradbury's 91st birthday (Monday of this week), it was officially announced that a deal has been completed for the production of a feature film adaptation of Bradbury's 1957 novel Dandelion Wine.

The producers of the new venture are Mike Medavoy, whose credits include Shutter Island and Black Swan, and Doug McKay.

Many times on this blog I have cautioned about getting too excited over announcements of film deals, since the vast majority of film projects (in Hollywood at least) end up going nowhere. In the case of Bradbury adaptations we have already seen announced versions of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man disappear from the radar.

What may make Dandelion Wine different is that the writer-director attached to the project is Rodion Nahapetov, who has a definite commitment to Bradbury's work. In fact, as a student in 1972 he directed a short film based around the Dandelion Wine character of Helen Bentley.

You can read more about the feature announcement here. Nahapetov's connection to Bradbury, and the development of the screenplay for Dandelion Wine is discussed on his website here.

And if you click here, you can view Nahapetov's Dandelion Wine short in its entirety. In Russian, of course!

I am indebted to Pavel for the Nahapetov links.

Waukegan Revisited

Chicago literature website New City Lit has a new article on a visit to Bradbury's hometown of Waukegan. A decent enough piece, with some welcome photos, it seems to conclude that Waukegan could do more to show its respect for its famous literary son.

While it's true that Waukegan has no statue of Bradbury, it does have a park named after him, and one of five stars on the 'walk of fame' is for Bradbury. Plus there are annual events named after Bradbury - storytelling festival, writing competitions - and another named after Dandelion Wine.

My own report from Waukegan from two years ago goes into a bit more detail, here.

Free Reads

Looking for some Ray Bradbury fiction to read for free? Look no further than Google Books, where you will find two issues of Boy's Life magazine that contain Bradbury stories!

From December 1961 is this Christmas number containing a reprint of the 1949 short story "The Man":



Then, from 1987, comes this reprint of 1955's "The Time Machine" - which may be familiar, because this story is also a chapter in Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine:

Electric Runabouts

For at some time or other during the evening, everyone visited here; the neighbors down the way, the people across the street; Miss Fern and Miss Roberta humming by in their electric runabout, giving Tom or Douglas a ride around the block and then coming up to sit down and fan away the fever in their cheeks.

That's the first appearance of the electric car that features in Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It is an odd device, as it triggers two contradictory thoughts about Green Town in the readers mind. First, it reminds us that Dandelion Wine is set in the past, where machines and vehicles were more primitive and somewhat more quaint than they are now. Second, though, it sets the stage for the idea that significant change is happening, both to the town and to the protagonist, Doug Spaulding. I always found it interesting that Bradbury didn't go for a conventional, petrol- (gas-) powered car, but went for something that seems more exotic and much more modern: an electric car.

What I hadn't appreciated was that, in the early days of the horseless carriage, electric cars genuinely vied with cars based on the internal combustion engine. This was simply because the early petrol-powered cars were quite inefficient and quite dirty. Lady drivers, in particular, were drawn to electric cars because of their cleanliness and their lesser need for maintenance. So it seems Miss Robert and Miss Fern were not nearly as far-sighted as I first thought; they were simply going with what was the norm for when Dandelion Wine is set. The image on the left, showing a Baker Electric Car, is typical advertising from the early twentieth century, with the female driver clearly being targeted.

There is more information on the marketing of Baker cars in this post from the Bobbins and Bombshells blog. And for more in depth discussion of the history of electric cars for ladies, there's this academic article.

Finally, here's Jay Leno with his own 1909 Baker electric car!

Found on the Web

The blog Panel Patter has an interesting short review of the comic book collection series Ray Bradbury Chronicles. These are largely re-collected and re-assembled adaptations of Bradbury stories from the Topps comics, which in turn were a mixture of new material from comic artists such as Richard Corben, and old material taken from the 1950s EC Comics.







The blog Book Aunt reviews the Leo & Diane Dillon-illustrated edition of Bradbury's Switch on the Night, along with other illustrated children's books that might be considered "thoughtful".




It's not often that I would bother to post a link to a religious website, but ironicschmozzer's weblog has an interesting sermon built around Dandelion Wine!



Bradbury is listed at number 3 in this top ten of writers who have published fiction in Playboy.



Finally, Canadian-Armenian actor Garen Boyajian, best known for a role in Ararat, has announced that he is developing a film based on Bradbury's Death is a Lonely Business.

Bradbury 13, Sherwood Anderson, F451, SWTWC

I was pleased to discover that there is another blogger out there who has an enthusiasm for Bradbury 13, the Mike McDonough-produced radio series from the 1980s which was first broadcast on National Public Radio.

The blog Such a Sew and Sew has a couple of posts about individual episodes, and looks set to review all thirteen shows. It also has welcome links for (legal) downloads of the shows and places to buy the (legal) CD version.

My own page about the show is here, and tells the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the series with exclusive photos from producer McDonough.



One of Bradbury's influences - revealing itself in both The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine - was Sherwood Anderson's novel Winesburg, Ohio. It seems that there is a new film adaptation of Winesburg coming soon, although the action is shifted to the city of Chicago, giving the film its title Chicago Heights. Read about the film here.



Creature Features has posted some images of Bradbury signing copies of the Laserdisc (yes, Laserdisc!) edition of Something Wicked This Way Comes from 1996. See the photos here. Before you chortle too much about Laserdisc, that antiquarian format, please remember that the Laserdisc of SWTWC carried audio commentaries - unlike the DVD edition, which comes with not a single extra feature!



Finally - and you may have already seen this one, as it is all over the blogosphere - some designer has come up with a marvellous fixture that every home should have. It seems to combine the best elements of a roaring fireplace and a convenient bookshelf. You, too, could have Fahrenheit 451 in your own living room. Details here, and a picture here:

Dandelion Wine Wedding

I've read Dandelion Wine. I've read its disappointing sequel Farewell Summer. I've read Summer Morning, Summer Night, the collection of Dandelion Wine leftovers.

I've read Dandelion Wine, the play; and heard the radio drama version.

I've seen (but didn't understand) the Russian TV miniseries based on Dandelion Wine.

But I've never heard of a Dandelion Wine wedding.

Until now.



And if that wasn't weird enough, here's a video for a song called "Bradbury", performed by an Argentinian band. Look out for Bradbury's face!

Green Town

I'm always amused to see bits from my website turn up elsewhere. The image on the left is a scan I took, but which has found its way onto other websites. So I have borrowed it back and reposted it here! (I can tell it's my scan by the spine/cover damage, in case you were wondering.)

I found the image attached to a perceptive review of Dandelion Wine on the 50 Books Project blog.

Speaking of Green Town... When I visited Waukegan in 2009, I didn't find time to locate the Green Town Tavern, a hostelry named after Bradbury's fictionalised version of Waukegan. Well, now I can experience it vicariously, thanks to this article in the Lake County News-Sun.

A couple of weeks ago I returned from my first ever visit to Ray Bradbury's home town of Waukegan, Illinois. From Bradbury's fictionalised version of Waukegan, as it appears in his books Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Halloween Tree and Farewell Summer, I felt I knew the place well - although I wasn't expecting an exact one-to-one correspondence between the fiction and the reality.

Because I knew I would only be in Waukegan for a very brief time (one working day, to be exact), I made detailed preparations. First, I made a list of all the locations I had read about in Bradbury's books and in the books by his various biographers. Then, I prepared a customised Google Map to help me plot a driving and/or walking route between the various places of interest.

My Google Map can be viewed here. I have included annotations describing each place on the map. Some of the locations I have marked are real landmarks, such as the historic Genesee Theatre. Others are more notional, such as intersections where significant carnivals came to Waukegan during Bradbury's formative years.

If you browse my map - and I would certainly encourage you to do so! - you may also find it useful to play with the Google "Street View" feature. You can access this easily, just by zooming right in on any spot on the map. You will find that Bradbury's childhood home, his grandparents' house, and the old Carnegie Library show up with remarkable clarity.

I have blogged previously on the close resemblance of the geography of Waukegan and the fictional Green Town. Now I have visited the place, I am even more taken with the resemblance. Take a walking tour of Bradbury's Waukegan, and you will get a clear sense of the scale of the world inhabited by Dandelion Wine's Douglas Spaulding.

Naturally, I toured Waukegan armed with a camera. You can view my photo album - complete with explanatory captions - by clicking here. (There's a pause button at the bottom of the screen if the slideshow is too fast.)

Highlights of my whistlestop tour of Waukegan included a behind-the-scenes tour of the Genesee Theatre, a rare visit to the hidden depths of the disused Carnegie Library, a chance to view some unique Bradbury materials in the library of the Waukegan Historical Society, and a strange hour spent alone in a graveyard, trying to find Bradbury's forebears. Thanks to the Historical Society and Union Cemetery, I have been able to make some updates and corrections to my Bradbury family tree.

Why did I bother to visit? Was I just being an obsessive fan, the ultimate geek?

Maybe.

However, Bradbury's work is all about transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar. Reworking the real into fantasy. Writing and re-writing. Adaptation. And if we think of Dandelion Wine et al as adaptations of Waukegan into Green Town, then visiting the real Waukegan is simply another attempt to get back to the source of Bradbury's writings.

I believe I have gained an insight into Bradbury's work from making this trip. Stories such as "Exchange", "The Night" and "The Utterly Perfect Murder" have not - as I feared - been rendered mundane by my experience of the real Waukegan. On the contrary, these stories are now much more grounded in realism for me: before, perhaps, they were "magical realism"; now, they are "magical realism".

For making my visit such a success, I owe a debt of gratitude to the remarkably hospitable people of Waukegan, especially Wayne Munn, who provided important personal contacts and was instrumental in getting me into some less obvious places. I am also especially indebted to Rena Morrow of the Genesee Theatre; David Motley, the city's P.R Director; Richard Lee of the Waukegan Public Library; and the remarkable archivist Beverly Millard who, from the slightest of clues, was able to track down gravesites, coroner's reports and much else.

In the coming weeks, I will be blogging more on my Waukegan discoveries, including:

• the TRUE STORY of "the Lonely One", the murderous presence that holds Green Town in fear in Dandelion Wine. Yes, there really was a "Lonely One" - and despite what you may have read in Sam Weller's biography of Ray, he was caught and imprisoned.
• the mysterious case of Lester Moberg, Bradbury's uncle who was murdered in the same year that Bradbury had his fateful encounter with Mr Electrico.

In the same US trip, I also visited the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies for the first time. I will blog about this soon.