Where Does A Widow Walk?

In Ray Bradbury's screenplay for Moby Dick (1956), there are some elaborate camera "leaps" when the Pequod is setting sail. First mate Starbuck looks across the harbour, and then we take a series of jumps - just cuts really, but Bradbury describes them as "steps" - to get closer to Starbuck's wife.

First we see her as a figure standing on a "widow's walk". Then, closer, as a solitary figure dressed in black, her dress fluttering in the wind. Then, closer still, we are looking over her shoulder out to sea. In the far distance is Starbuck aboard the Pequod.

Then the camera reverses its series of steps, back to Starbuck's point-of-view.

The sequence helps to humanise Starbuck, which is part of Bradbury's grand plan for the screenplay. It serves to set him apart from the rest of the crew - whose wives, mothers and significant others hang around on the quayside. And it acts as an ill omen: she's dressed funereally,and stands on a widow's walk.

Director John Huston found no use for this sequence, and so in the finished film we just get a shot of Starbuck looking up and off, a cut to a distant shot of his wife and family, and then a cut back to Starbuck.

In fact, the shot is so brief - and the figures quite indistinct when viewed on DVD, and the shot slightly cluttered by the mast and rigging in the foreground - that I have never really registered what we are looking at.

It's only when reading Bradbury's screenplay that I realised that the strange fenced-off area we see sitting on top of that distant roof is a "widow's walk".  Apparently, they are a common feature of coastal architecture in North America, although the idea that they are primarily for looking out to sea maybe a myth: as John Ciardi reported on NPR in 2006, they were usually constructed around chimneys, and were more likely used to help put out chimney fires.

The widow's walk shown in Moby Dick doesn't seem to be built around a chimney, unless it's a tiny chimney. It looks as if it was added to a building specifically to give Mrs Starbuck and kids somewhere to stand while they wave daddy Starbuck off.

Even without using Bradbury's conception for this scene, Huston still managed to get a sense of foreboding and dread, by making the other wives look as miserable as sin:

Sometimes Ohio is not Mars

I've never been to Ohio, but I have a couple of mental images of what it must be like. One mental image is based on fragmentary images I have seen in film and TV, probably of Cleveland and Cincinatti. The other is from Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles - where our main glimpse of Ohio is a fantasy: made real by  Martians, out of memories of the crew of the third expedition to Mars.

Admittedly, that is going to be one very distorted image...

In the Cape Gazette, Denis Forney tells of his recent "Ray Bradbury ride across Ohio", a cycle journey through the heartland of the state. What he saw is a combination of stunning scenery and post-industrial landscape. He mentions that some of the buildings still evoke the old Bradbury image of the state, but the photographic evidence suggests that it has moved on somewhat - if indeed it ever did look anything like Bradbury's characters recalled.

You can read Forney's photo essay here.

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...

Bradburyesque... 2

Some current and forthcoming books with a touch of Bradbury about them:




Old Mars, edited by George R.R. Martin and Garner Dozois, is an anthology of new stories set on the old red planet. Not, Martin says, the pre-Mariner real Mars, but the pre-space age, science-fictional Mars. The book is released in October from Bantam... and a sequel, Old Venus is already in the works.

Contributors include Phyllis Eisenstein, Joe R. Lansdale, Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, Melinda Snodgrass and Howard Waldrop.

On her Facebook page, Melinda Snodgrass wrote "It's a very retro book. It's Mars as it was imagined by the pulp writers. Oddly, I ended up writing the Bradburyesque story." So there you have it: while some of the stories might be more aligned with Edgar Rice Burroughs or even H.G. Wells, at least one of them is officially Bradburyesque!

Another book with some Bradbury content is "50 Girls 50" and Other Stories from Fantagraphics. This collects a number of comic strips by Al Williamson, originally published in the old EC Comics. The contents include Williamson's adaptations of  Bradbury's “I, Rocket” and “A Sound of Thunder”. It's not the first time these have been published in book form, but it's good to see them being made available again.

Bradburyesque...

I recently saw the trailer for the forthcoming movie Gravity, directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón. All I know about the film is what I saw in the trailer and what I have read online. Two thoughts sprang immediately to mind as I watched the trailer:

1. "That's a Space Shuttle - so this film must be set in the past!"
2. Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope"

The trailer (below) shows a calamity in Earth orbit, resulting in space-suited astronauts being flung into empty space. The synopsis on Wikipedia specifically mentions the astronauts being "stranded, alone in suits".

So I say again: Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope"! This classic short story (and one-act play) features a crew of astronauts surviving the destruction of their spaceship, but being thrown in all different directions, so that each of them faces a slow, lonely and protracted death. Some look set to drift forever, while others find themselves being pulled by gravity towards a planet or the Sun.

I'm not saying that Gravity is based on the story, nor that it plagiarises the story - but it certainly seems Bradburyesque, for want of a better word. And nor would it be the first time that "Kaleidoscope" was echoed on screen: the low-budget space comedy Dark Star went there in 1974.

Bargain Price for BECOMING RAY BRADBURY

For a very limited time, Jon Eller's literary biography of Ray Bradbury - Becoming Ray Bradbury - is being offered in a special promotion from the publisher, Illinois University Press. In case you don't know, the book is a fascinating study of Bradbury's early writing career, and reveals the influences on Bradbury's developing authorship during the period when he was at his most creative and most prolific.

If you are an e-book user, you can get the full e-book version for a ridiculously cheap price of $2.99. Versions are available for Kindle, Nook and Kobo. The offer is good until the end of June. I don't know whether the offer is geographically limited.

Here's a direct link to the publisher's page. Scroll down to find the links for Becoming Ray Bradbury:

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=11910

Ray Bradbury: a Life in Photos

The Lake County News-Sun has started an archive photo series with "Ray Bradbury: a Life in Photos". The title is something of an exaggeration, since the photos all seem to date from 1984, when Bradbury made a return visit to his home town of Waukegan. But most of the photos are rarely seen, so it's still an interesting little collection.

You can view the mini-photo album here.

Searching for Ray Bradbury

I'm rather late in posting this, but Bradburymedia has suffered while I've been busy in recent weeks...

At the end of May, Steven Leiva celebrated two things: his own birthday, and the launch of his book of writings about Bradbury, Searching for Ray Bradbury. I still need to get round to writing a review of the book, but for now I'll just say that it's a convenient gathering together of Steven's articles which have appeared in a range of publications over the last few years.

Steven Leiva took a leaf out of Bradbury's book (so to speak) by choosing to celebrate his birthday in Glendale's Mystery and Imagination bookshop. Photos and an account of the event are on Steven's blog, here.

Unusual Use for Ray Bradbury TV Show

From the Palm Springs Art Museum: 


The Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert will screen episodes of the anthology series The Ray Bradbury Theater in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition Across Dimensions: Graphics and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection. Just as the artists in the gallery investigate concepts in two-dimensional and three dimensional artworks, beloved science-fiction author Ray Bradbury seized an opportunity to adapt some of his short stories to the small screen exploring new dimensions of storytelling.


Sounds like a slightly tenuous connection to me... Anyway, it gives Palm Springs residents and visitors an opportunity to see the episodes "A Sound of Thunder" and "A Touch of Petulance" on 27th June at 5pm. More details here.

Memorable Bradbury

On the anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death, Nancy Lambert wrote about five memorable Bradbury stories. The five - "There Will Come Soft Rains", "The Night", "The Fog Horn", "I Sing the Body Electric!" and "The Lake" - are all excellent choices, although it would be very easy to come up with twenty-five equally good ones. Read what Lambert has to say at Tor.com.

Speaking of memorable stories, there is a special 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, out now from Simon & Schuster. I know it's out there, because there have been sightings in the field (see the photo below from jkt). However, if you visit online bookstores such as Amazon you may struggle to find this exact edition - and even the publisher's web page gives you little reason to think there is anything special about the book, apart from the new cover art.

So what's so special about it? How about the new introduction by Neil Gaiman? How about nearly 20,000 words of historical essay from Jon Eller of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies? And how about the collection of articles and reviews from Kingsley Amis, Margaret Atwood, Gilbert Highet and Bertrand Russell?.

The cover art, incidentally, was chosen from a competition. The other contenders can still be viewed on the competition's Tumblr page.

This is a major new edition, but because the text of Fahrenheit 451 is identical to the previous printing, Simon & Schuster have omitted to flag up the significant additions to this volume. Fortunately, they do seem to be shipping them out to major bookstores (those few that remain...) such as Barnes & Noble.