Great stuff in Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, which I just fin­ished read­ing a cou­ple weeks ago. Some choice passages:

I have learned, on my jour­neys, that if I let a day go by with­out writ­ing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I sus­pect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suf­fer­ing the flux in a wal­low. An hour’s writ­ing is tonic. I’m on my feet, run­ning in cir­cles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

_______________________________________

I won’t use the word “ther­apy,” it’s too clean, too ster­ile a word. I only say when death slows oth­ers, you must leap to set up your div­ing board and dive head first into your typewriter.

_____________________________________

The ther­apy com­ment is per­fect. I always find it annoy­ing when artists of any medium say they do what they do as a form of “ther­apy.” Robin Williams has used the ther­apy line to describe his com­edy. But ther­apy is too clean a word. Writing is more like the excre­tion of pain and neu­roses (do you like my trans­gres­sive approach? In your face, Burroughs! Eat a bowl of dicks, Bukowski! ).

More from Ray:

Every morn­ing I jump out of bed and step on a land­mine. The land­mine is me.

After the explo­sion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

__________________________________________

Here is a great pas­sage about writ­ing as “revenge” (empha­sis mine).

Wouldn’t it be won­der­ful, for instance, to throw down a copy of Harper’s Bazaar you hap­pened to be leaf­ing through at the dentist’s, and leap to your type­writer and ride off with hilar­i­ous anger, attack­ing their silly and some­times shock­ing snob­bish– ness? Years ago I did just that. I came across an issue where the Bazaar pho­tog­ra­phers, with their per­verted sense of equal­ity, once again uti­lized natives in a Puerto Rican back­street as props in front of which their starved-looking man­nikins pos­tured for the ben­e­fit of yet more ema­ci­ated half-women in the best salons in the coun­try. The pho­tographs so enraged me I ran, did not walk, to my machine and wrote “Sun and Shadow,” the story of an old Puerto Rican who ruins the Bazaar photographer’s after­noon by sneak­ing into each pic­ture and drop­ping his pants.

I dare say there are a few of you who would like to have done this job. I had the fun of doing it; the cleans­ing after effects of the hoot, the holler, and the great horse­laugh. Probably the edi­tors at theBazaar never heard. But a lot of read­ers did and cried, “Go it, Bazaar, go it, Bradbury!” I claim no vic­tory. But there was blood on my gloves when I hung them up.

I like this line too:

Tom Wolfe ate the world and vom­ited lava.

And one of Bradbury’s last mem­o­ries of his grand­fa­ther (empha­sis mine again):

Fire bal­loons.

You rarely see them these days, though in some coun­tries, I hear, they are still made and files with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath.

But in 1925 Illinois, we still had them, and one of the last mem­o­ries I have of my grand­fa­ther is the last hour of a Fourth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper bal­loon with hot air, and held the flick­er­ing bright-angel pres­ence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and moth­ers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mys­tery go out of our fin­gers up on the sum­mer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the starts, as frag­ile, as won­drous, as vul­ner­a­ble, as lovely as life itself.

I see my grand­fa­ther there look­ing up at that strange drift­ing light, think­ing his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

No one said any­thing. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathe out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn’t they? And that one was me.

The wine still waits in the cel­lars below.

My beloved fam­ily still sits on the porch in the dark.

The fire bal­loon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.

Why and How?

Because I say it is so.

Makes me think of my own grand­fa­ther. He used to get kind of wist­ful around the 4^th of July every year and would always say some­thing about the sum­mer going by so fast. He was always aware that each sum­mer might be his last.

— —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — –
— —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — –
— —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — –

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »

---