The Clarkstown Cemetery next to my house is one of the oldest in the U.S. and has had its share of spooks. My Dutch ancestors lived in the area granted to them by William of Orange back in the 17th century. They came here, as did many early Americans seeking religious freedom.

Although the Dutch settlers kept their own customs and even spoke a dialect of Dutch well into the 19th century, they could be very tolerant and some of them had a reputation for scholarship and freedom of thought.

Back in the 1700s, a prominent citizen of Clarkstown died. (Clarkstown was sometimes called Clarksville and later has become known as West Nyack.) This citizen was an atheist, but his family had a family plot and his ancestors had been buried in the church yard for over a century. The grave was dug, but there was some controversy as to whether or not he should be buried in sacred ground.

On the night before his funeral a white shape could be seen over the freshly dug grave. It seemed to leap out in the darkness from time to time as though it had taken over the grave and would prevent anyone from putting the atheist’s body into the churchyard ground.

In the morning the story got around and a group of people went to stop the funeral. The casket was brought from the church after the funeral, but the people would not let the pallbearers carry it to the grave. There was an argument where the story was told of the mysterious spirit that hovered over the open grave during the night.

Just as the argument turned to yelling there was a loud sound of an animal in distress and a white ewe jumped up from the grave trying to escape. It had fallen in the night before and could not get out. The spirit was the sheep that was trying to escape the grave.

The crowd was embarrassed that they had thought that the sheep was a ghost and did not prevent the burial.

True story.

I’ve finished reading Bradbury Books for a while. I read 11 books (I didn’t count Vintage Bradbury because it only has a couple of new stories).

Here are two books with intriguing titles published in the UK. The titles are different, but the The Silver Locusts is really Martian Chronicles and The Day it Rained Forever is The Illustrated Man without the extra story arc.

I bought The Silver Locusts in the old Werewolf Book Shop, back when I was in college and was very disappointed that I had spend a quarter for a book I already owned.

Bradbury’s stories were made into Comics, but they were so intense that they were banned. They were republished in the 60s.

This one was a gift and it was supposed to be autographed by Bradbury. It is not Bradbury’s signature (I have several authentic signed Bradbury books). I later heard from the Washington State District Attorney and the people were convicted of fraud.

Gracie uses the bathtub as a storage place for her mice. This handsome fellow met me the other morning.

I captured him in a washcloth and let him go outside. Sometimes Gracie’s catches are a little worse for the wear, but this one seemed unharmed and quite lively.

We don’t get trick-or-treaters. It is partly because we live next to one of the spookiest cemeteries in the county.

I went over and took some pictures just as the sun set. The flash pictures came out, but the long exposures are often blurry because I could not hold the camera still enough. I wound up setting the camera on a gravestone and using it for a tripod.

Graveyard Gallery

This is my favorite book. I’ve been reading it in October since I was 16. My edition is from 1967. I finished it for the forty-second time this morning.

The movie was dreadful, did not follow the original idea, and I think may have caused many people not to read the book. Please do not watch the movie.

The beauty of the book is in its language, something that no film can capture. It is the most poetic of Bradbury’s works. As I read it, I kept noting a paragraph here and there that I thought would be good to quote, but there were so many of them that I would have had to transcribe most of the book.

Here is one that I liked. Madam Tarot, the Dust Witch, flies in a balloon looking for Will and Jim. The boys wake up in the night and look out the windows in their neighboring houses. They both feel her coming for them. From page 104:

The Dust Witch.

The Witch who might draw skulls and bones in the dust, then sneeze it away. Jim looked to Will and Will to Jim; both read their lips: the Witch!

But why a wax crone flung out in a night balloon to search? thought Will, why none of the others, with their lizard-venom, wolf-fire, snake-pit eyes? Why send a crumbled statue with blind-newt lashes sewn tight with black-widow thread?

And then, looking up, they knew.

For the Witch, though peculiar wax, was peculiarly alive. Blind, yes, but she thrust down rust-splotched fingers which petted, stroked the sluices of air, which cut and splayed the wind, peeled layers of space, blinded stars, which hovered and danced, then fixed and pointed as did her nose.

And the boys knew even more.

They knew she was blind, but special blind. She could dip down her hands to feel the bumps of the world, touch house roofs, probe attic bins, reap dust, examine draughts that blew through halls and souls that blew through people, draughts vented from bellows to thump-wrist, to pound-temples, to pulse-throat, and back to bellows again. Just as they felt that balloon sift down like an autumn rain, so she could feel their souls disinhabit, reinhabit their tremulous nostrils. Each soul, a vast warm fingerprint, felt different, she could roil it in her hand like clay; smelled different, Will could hear her snuffing his life away; tasted different, she savored them with her raw-gummed mouth, her puff-adder tongue; sounded different, she stuffed their souls in one ear, tissued them out the other!

It gives me the shivers.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the best book that I have ever read. It tops all the others, and I have read many thousands of books.

Read it! Read it! Read it!

Robert Heinlein has to be one of the most quotable people since Shakespeare.

Here is what he said about Voting:

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for… but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against.

By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.

Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (Deluxe Edition) is nearly sold out. This has been voted one of the top 5 fantasy books of all time.

These last few copies are still available for $20 and are signed by Peter. The last 50 copies will be signed and include a handwritten story by Peter and will cost $75.

These would make a good addition to your SF collection and would only go up in value.

As much as I hate Unicorn stories, Peter S. Beagle’s book is the exception that proves the rule.

The T-Shirts are cool, too.

Conlan Press – THE LAST UNICORN

This morning a web article appeared in Delicious.com. Delicious is a social bookmarking site and appearance on their front page indicates a very popular link. I will not link the page because I totally disagree with it. The article lists 15 most important elements of web design.

I think that many are not very important. Some can hurt your page and the order is obscenely screwed up.

Here is the list and my reaction to each.

1. Good Visual Design

Good visual design is the goal of artistic leaning web designers. It has been shown over and over again that nifty graphics and slick design elements get in the way of the content. The best visual design is little or no design. The best visual design creates a memorable page with the minimum of baloney. I would change this to Minimal Visual Design and move it way down the list a ways.

2. Thoughtful User Interface

Just what does this mean? It is as though Thoughtless User Interface is an alternative. Of course, think about the user interface. Use tried and true simple links organized as logically as possible. This is a no-brainer and should not be on the list. Your page should look as much like a standard web page as possible. Users have learned how to use web pages from other sites. Your page should not be different from other site’s pages or the user will not know how to use it.

3. Primary Navigation Above The Fold

This is another weird idea. Users don’t read below the fold. All important content should be above the fold along with the main menu. There should be very little below the fold because 90% of your readers won’t go there. All pages should roughly fit in in one non-scrolling page. The stuff below the fold is for the occasional curious surfer who is looking for additional information. You might even think of having a link to an anchor for information below the page because so few users scroll down.

4. Repeat Navigation In The Footer

Yeah, of course, you must have more than one way for the surfer to get around. A good footer might help, that is if any of them ever went below the fold.

5. Meaningful Content

Duh!!!! Why isn’t this first? This is the one and only reason why a web page gets hits, is read, and then is read again. People come for content. Rules 1 to 99 – Get Good Content. All else is gilding the lily.

6. A Solid About Page

Who cares? The only people who click the about page are salesmen looking to convince you to buy something.

7. Contact Information

I removed my contact info from several sites last year and my traffic still increases. The very few requests that I get for more information are ones that I usually can’t fulfill. If I include a raw email address, I get spammed. If I include a contact form, I get inane requests for things I don’t have or can’t do. For every 500,00 web page hits, I get maybe ten contacts with only one or two being interesting to me.

8. Search

I include search boxes for my bigger sites. Less than one tenth of 1 percent of my surfers use it. Normally I get get new users from Google searches so they have already done the search by the time they arrive. If I took out the search boxes, my traffic would not change.

9. Sign-Up / Subscribe

I am in the process of taking out all my RSS feeds. I want surfers to come to my pages, see what I have to say and read the ads. On some sites I get nearly as much RSS feed traffic as page traffic. I think this is wasted bandwidth. Sure, people are reading my words, but if they are not on the page, they can’t get the full impact of the images and ads. If I get rid of the RSS readers, I lose no money, and I might gain normal readers.

I don’t ask casual users for email and I never spam. I never mail a newsletter that a user might think is spam. I hate sites that do this. If I receive a newsletter that I did not explicitly ask for, the site goes into my spam filter immediately. I have no way to sign up on my sites.

10. Sitemap

I uses sitemaps primarily for search engine optimization. Users hardly every land on them or use them.

11. Separate Design from Content

This is techno nerdy thing. It helps you write web pages, and I use this technique, but it has nothing to do with your user’s experience. I have a feeling that individually hand crafted pages give a richer user experience than rubber stamped pages created from a master template. I have too many pages to hand craft each one. I use server side includes to standardize some things and make it easy to changes headers, footers and navigation.

12. Valid XHTML / CSS

When you page displays correctly in IE and Firefox, it is done. It does not have to validate. The user doesn’t know and doesn’t care if you have a non-compliant page.

13. Cross Browser Compatibility

Can’t be done. Different browsers show slightly different versions of your page. Your page should look OK in IE and Firefox, not the same. Surfers arrive at your site with a variety of screen configurations, software and options. I use the windows large fonts option on my computer so I can more easily read a page. You would be surprised at how many web pages this breaks and the reason is that they are so fine tuned to show a consistent interface that the smallest thing will break them.

14. Web Optimized Images

Finally, one thing that I can agree with. Small images, well compressed. Fewer images when possible. Your web page should load quickly. Words count, Fewer images means more room for words.

While we are on the subject of optimization, eliminate unreasonably large JavaScript libraries and frameworks. Hand code JavaScript if possible. Get rid of slow database look ups on home pages. Home pages should be static. Most pages should be static and load as fast as possible. Dynamic web pages are traffic poison.

Get rid of all the JavaScript doodles, widgets, gewgaws and gimcracks on on your web pages. They just slow things down and divert interest to someone else’s content. They send traffic to other web sites.

NO FLASH! I will repeat. NO FLASH! Nothing good has ever come from flash.

15. Statistics, Tracking and Analytics

I see web pages with half a dozen tracking scripts on them. They slow down web pages, especially Google analytics, QuantCast and MyBlogLog. Pick a tracking script and use it. Get rid of the others. Better yet, learn to use your weblogs.

Now that I have trashed the list here is my own version:

1 Key Element All Top Web Sites Should Have

1. Good Content.

Nuff said.

I host an archive of email messages that go back to the early 1990s. They’re for the the Harp-L discussion group, a lively bunch of harp players that are still quite active.

I received a message today from a person who claims that his name occurs on some messages on the group, and he wants it removed. There area bunch of messages concerning the guy on Harp-L, and many of them aren’t pleasant. Some suggest that he is distributing viruses. Some by this person himself are inflammatory.

I can probably find the entries with this guy’s name on it and change them. It is several hours work and I would rather not.

These messages are mostly about  8 years old and have been on the internet for years.

What do you think I should do?

Fall is my favorite time of the year. I love the cool days and chilly nights. I love pies made from fresh picked apples and the smell of pumpkins. I love the fall foliage. Fall always ends when a series of windy wet storms come through knocking the last of the leaves off the trees and starting the cold nasty weather we associate with November. Officially fall continues until December 21, but those rules were made by the ancients living along the balmy Mediterranean Sea.

A cold wet storm came in last night and most of the trees have lost their colorful foliage leaving mounds of brown slick stuff all over the roads. It will snow overnight. By Halloween it may be a little warmer and dry, but the Fallness will be gone.

I took off yesterday in order to get many chores done. I drove Mom to the doctor and I spent a ton of money getting the front end on the truck fixed. I found time to sit on the bench in the yard with Gracie on my lap enjoying the last great fall day. It was sunny. I wore a nice thick wool sweater and sat in the sun for an hour.

The dark and depressing Winter months come after Fall . I am already getting for work in the dark and soon the time change will force me to drive home with the lights on. Any daylight that I see for the next five months will be through a dirty window looking out at a brick wall.

I can’t think about my retirement fund, but I wish there was a way that I could spend my time doing what is important to me. It is a waste to spend the day in a depressing cubicle writing the same sad code over and over again. In the last post I wrote that I first picked up The Martian Chronicles when I was about 12. Here it is more than 45 years later and inside my head I am still the same kid I was back then, hardly changed by the years. I am always surprised when I look in the mirror and see that old man looking back. That 45 years went like a flash and I feel the next twenty or thirty years speeding towards me. I hate to waste it.

Allegory: A figurative work in which a surface narrative carries a secondary, symbolic or metaphorical meaning.

The Martian Chronicles, the 11th book by Bradbury that I’ve read this month is not really a novel and is more than a collection of short stories.

It is not a novel because it does not have the plot of a novel or even a unifying theme. It is a collection of stories about an Allegorical planet Mars that have an overall chronology, but lack a single protagonist or consistent central idea.

Mars is never the planet Mars in these stories. Mars always represents Waukegan Illinois, or the western frontier, or the evolution of mankind, or a grand dream, but Mars is only Mars in the sense that it provides the allegorical element for a statement on the human condition. The Martians, when they appear are not aliens, but symbols of human ideas.

Viewed as allegory, The Martian Chronicles is a deep investigation into the human spirit using images, and memes that appeared in the pages of the science fiction pulps of the 1930s and 40s. Because of this transcendental treatment of such a tawdry literary form, The Martian Chronicles has become a great piece of literature quite by accident. Bradbury was known only as a writer that appeared on the pages of Planet Magazine and Weird Tales and would have been known as a better than average writer of odd stories until the Martian Chronicles was recognized as been much more than it should have been. After the Martian Chronicles, Bradbury was treated seriously as a great American writer.

The ideas in the Martian Chronicles are fragmented and do not always fit together. They were written and published separately and sold to SF magazines. They are pulled together with short interstitial chapters that set the stage or attempted to unify the themes of the book. Separately the stories are each an interesting story, if one understands them to be fantasy and not scientific. Bradbury surely knew that Mars was cold, dead and airless. He chose to make his Mars closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom than a scientifically accurate reality. Reading the stories can jar you back and forth from one idea to another. If you try to force the variety of ideas, themes and images into a an overall unity, it distracts from the enjoyment of the book.

I now read the Martian Chronicles as separate stories. Some are good, some not so. I find it difficult to see the book as a novel, though. One of the stories, There Will Come Soft Rains, I find annoying as it doesn’t fit the rest of the book. It has no characters and is just a vignette, yet it is one of Bradbury’s most often anthologized pieces, because it does contain some of his most powerful imagery.

The copy of The Martian Chronicles that I have was published in 1962 and it is quite probably that I read it first when I was eleven or twelve years old. I read it a few more times, but I can remember being frustrated with the book because so many of the stories were so obviously not anything like Science Fiction. I found some of them implausible, and I was not able to suspend disbelief. Now, I see the stories for what they are and what they are meant to be. Once you get the idea that Mars is never really Mars the book is a much better read.

The construction plates on the bridge made me late for the first half of the week and then they moved the barrier so that the morning traffic had 5 lanes going east and only two lanes going west. I feel sorry for the people trying to cross the bridge going west in the morning.

Here are some pictures of the plates that caused all the trouble.

Here is the view looking south from the bridge. You can see New York City in the haze. That’s the Empire State Building that you can barely see. I watched the twin towers turn into a pillar of smoke from this spot 7 years ago.

Since I am reading The Martian Chronicles I thought that listening to the sounds of the Phoenix Lander as it passes on its way to the surface of Mars would be appropriate.

I have to figure out the right way to embed movies in blogger.

Mars Express – Listen to Phoenix descend

There are only three stories in The Vintage Bradbury (1965) that were not in the previous anthologies. The Vintage Bradbury is the first (of many) Bradbury greatest hits collections. This one dates from 1965 and I remember being disappointed that there were only a few new stories. The stories are not really new, just not previously anthologized.

My favorite is the story The Illustrated Man. The collection called The Illustrated Man does not contain a story called the Illustrated Man, which in my opinion is a strange thing. The story is an expansion of the idea that appear as the interstitial material in the collection and is pretty good. I like the last view of the Illustrated man’s final illustration as it appeals to my math sensibilities.

There is a Martian story called Night Meeting which is better than many of the Mars stories in or out of The Martian Chronicles. It is about a meeting between a Man and a Martian across millions of years. There is also a Mexican story And the Rock Cried Out. I am not a big fan of Bradbury’s Mexican stories, but this one has a very good premise. What would happen if Americans suddenly become the world’s illegal aliens without the mighty US government to protect our interests? I liked it.

The rest of the stories, Bradbury’s Greatest Hits, are diminished by the fact that they appeared everywhere. Each of the stories has been anthologized and adapted to radio or TV many times and I’ve read them enough that they have lost their appeal to me. Rather than read the Vintage Bradbury, I would suggest reading Some of the previously discussed anthologies or jump right into Martian Chronicles or Dandelion Wine.

There is an Introduction by Gilbert Highet that contains nothing new or interesting and can be skipped.

I am counting this as Book #10 in my October is Bradbury Month series, even if it only had three new stories. These three stories are worth seeking out the Vintage Bradbury. I don’t think that they can be found in other collections.

I have been making less than $2 a day on the Kontera context links and page views have gone down since I put them on the page. I will wait a few more weeks (until I get $100) and then pull them. I have already taken them off the blog. In the mean time I am randomizing so that they appear on about 1/3 of the pages.

I found the Kontera context links to be distracting and I think that users may have been put off by them. Anything that gets between the content and the reader is not good.

Leigh Brackett, know as the Queen of Outer Space, was writing space opera stories for lurid pulps like Planet Stories in the 1940s. She wrote a hard boiled detective novel in 1944 and when William Faulkner was having trouble with the screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks told his secretary to call “this Brackett Guy” to help out.

Bracket was married to SF writer Edmond Hamilton and they lived near Ray Bradbury. They were friends and drinking buddies of Ray. When Brackett had to stop writing SF to work on The Big Sleep, one of the best detective movies ever made, Bradbury must have talked her into letting him finish Lorelei of the Red Mist.

The first time that I read this, I wondered how much of the novella was written by Leigh Bracket and how much was written by Bradbury. On the bus this morning I read the story after a gap of at least 30 years. It was very obvious how much was Bradbury’s and how much was Brackett’s.

Brackett at this time was still writing in a very over-the-top pulp style. The rugged athletic men were mostly naked and the beautiful women did not wear anything above their waists and had “flat hips”. There is a race of sea people who can be distinguished because their women have green nipples. The story is absurd and concerns an earth man who’s mind is placed in a Venusian warrior’s body who is in the middle of a war being lead by a beautiful (but never fully clothed) sorceress against noble human types.

About 10,000 words through the story, Bradbury picks up with smoother language, longer sentences and some actual description of scenery, people and feelings (in addition to lust). Brackett was supposedly unhappy with Bradbury’s treatment of the female characters and wrote another version of the novella.

Although the story is great fun and at about 25,000 words, a good quick read, it is hardly anything other than a tossed away story which would have been long forgotten if Brackett and Bradbury had not gone on to do better things. Brackett would prove that a woman can write better SF than most men and Bradbury would recreate SF and the weird tale as literature.

I read Lorelei of the Red Mist in a collection called Three Times Infinity, which also includes novellas by Theodore Sturgeon and Robert A. Heinlein. The Sturgeon story The Golden Helix is one of his best and has been anthologized extensively. The Heinlein novella Destination Moon, is not Heinlein’s best, but is notable because it was written from Heinlein’s screenplay of the movie Destination Moon. Destination Moon is not in any of the early Heinlein anthologies and Three Times Infinity was the only place where you could read it for a long time. Lorelei is, by far, the weakest of the three.

I have been trying to buy old Planet story issues from the 1940s where Bradbury cut his teeth on SF, but they always go for $40 or $50 each and this is too much to spend on an old magazine, not matter how many half naked women are on the cover.

This is a math geek’s dream site. All the polls are statistically massaged based on age, sample size and historical accuracy. The data is expressed in hundreds of interesting scenarios.

For example:
The odds that Obama loses OH/FL but wins election=59.84%
The odds that McCain wins popular vote=11.6%
The odds that Obama wins FL and Loses OH=37.37%

Wild stuff.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right

The Machineries of Joy is the 8th Bradbury book that I’ve read this month. I have handed out five Bradbury books to friends and I have received nothing in return. I hope at least one of my readers is actually reading Bradbury along with me. I have only a few more days of reading left in October and I expect that I will have read 11 or 12 Bradbury books by Halloween.

The Machineries of Joy was published in 1964 and most of the stories date from the early 1960s. Bradbury’s writing is deeper, more philosophical and more complex. The simple image based stories have been replaced with complicated idea based stories. This is perhaps one of the last great collections by Bradbury. After Machineries of Joy comes I sing the Body Electric in 1969, which I will read soon. After that, Bradbury’s output is more predictable and nostalgic. He revisits themes and makes new collections of old stories, but never reaches these heights again.

I bought Machineries of Joy when I was either 14 or 15. I can tell because it has the clear plastic covering that put on my “regular books”. I never went anywhere without a book in back pocket. I bought a roll of clear con-tact and covered about 20 books. I chose my favorites like Tolkien, Heinlein and Bradbury.

I think my favorite story is A Miracle of Rare Device. The title comes from a line from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. A couple of near-do-well drifters discover a mirage in the Arizona Desert, put up a fence and charge admission to see it. The mirage disappears when a competitor cheats them out of their cash cow. It turns out that you have to believe in the miracle to be able to see it. It must have been a difficult story to write, yet Bradbury pulls us through with interesting characters, an interesting plot and a very satisfying ending. I like to think that I could have written some of the early Bradbury stories, but Miracle is so far into the rarefied realm of genius that all I can do is read it with awe.

Not all the stories are that good. Some, I felt, Bradbury knocked off in one hung over session, but most of these are great stories, if not as accessible as some of his earlier works. Ray seems intent on making us think out way through the idea before he gives us his wonderful emotional kick in the butt.

It was a brisk cool late October day so Erica and I took off upstate to Red Hook, NY about 80 miles up the Hudson. It was a little late for good October tree color and there were more leaves on the ground than in the trees.

I have a picasa album at with all 28 photos (link fixed now):

October in Apple Country

They were having the Wool and Sheep show at the Dutchess County Fair Grounds so we spent lots of time in back roads trying to get around the traffic. We found this Charles Addams “Addams Family” house on a back street in the town of Rhinebeck.

We stop at salvage store called The Barn looking of treasures, but didn’t find any, even in the free bucket.

I managed to find some autumn color in Red Hook.

There was a picture of Willie in the camera, so rather than let it go to waste, here it is.

I bought some wine at the Farmer’s Market and we connected with a nice person in one of the shops who collects the same Lucy Dolls that mother collects.

It is time now for warm Apple Pie and ice cream.

A Medicine For Melancholy is the seventh book by Ray Bradbury that I’ve read in my Read A Book By Bradbury series. It is quite possibly my favorite Bradbury collection.

The copy that I have a is much battered second edition of the Bantam Paperback from 1963. I am watching eBay for a first edition of the hardcover for my collection, but for now I have to be careful. This copy is 45 years old and it is shedding chips of yellowed paper every time I turn a page. I bought this new so I was reading it when I was 12 or 13 years old. The inside cover has my youthful signature – a style that I have not used in 40 years. I paid 50 cents for this when I was making about $2.52 a week delivering newspapers in Nyack. It was 20% of my weekly income (I never received an allowance. I asked for one once and my father just laughed at me.) I used to go to a corner store with an old fashioned soda fountain counter where I bought comic books or pulp magazines and vanilla ice cream soda. Once or twice a month I would walk downtown to the old Pickwick Book Shoppe where I bought this book.

A Medicine for Melancholy is Bradbury’s best. It has my two favorite Bradbury stories: A Medicine for Melancholy and The Gift. The collection is from 1959, and most of the stories date from the late 50s. Bradbury is more mature, but has not yet lost his Lovecraftian sense of the eerie mood. He has not yet surrendered to his nostalgic obsessions and even his more maudlin stories all have a bite.

I found Medicine and The Gift in my high school English textbooks in the 1960s and they were like old friends. I was happy and proud that I was a Bradbury fan and that the class seemed to enjoy the stories as much as I had the first time I read them. I can’t imagine these stories being in a textbook now. In fact, it seems from the general ignoramus tone coming out of school boards, that many would like to burn Bradbury’s books never realizing how ironic that would be.

Only a few of the stories in A Medicine for Melancholy are Spec-Fic. Most are just good stories. There are a few nice Weird Tales like the wonderful story The Dragon, about two knights in the year 900 waiting on a moor for a fire dragon. When the dragon comes, it is a train with a steam engine that travels back in time every night when it passes through the heavy mists. Fever Dream is about a boy who has scarlet fever, but it is really an invading alien disease that takes over his body one small piece at a time. These are great stories.

In a Season of Calm Weather is the story of an art lover who meets Picasso on a beach. The artist draws a mural in the sand and for a brief moment the art lover owns a real masterpiece, and then the tide comes in.

I can’t write a synopsis of each story, but I truly love this collection.

I almost missed my stop to get off the bus yesterday, because I was so lost in this book.

I write code all day for a living. This YouTube vid of the song Code Monkey hit the mark for me. I am a Code Monkey…

Since October is Ray Bradbury month…

There are some cast photos out from the next Star Trek movie, currently in production.

Bradbury’s stories appeared in a 1950s radio show called Dimension X Radio Drama. For some reason these radio plays are not covered by copyright and are in the public domain. Since they are derivative works, I somehow doubt this. On the other hand, the audio from these radio dramas are so wide spread and available free from so many sources that they have entered the public domain.

Here are some Bradbury stories. Listen to these on your computer or download them to your iPod or iPhone and listen on your way to work.

The Fog Horn
Kaleidoscope
Marionettes, Inc
And the Moon be Still as Bright
Dwellers In Silence
The Earthmen
Mars is Heaven
There Will Come Soft Rain
The Veldt
Zero Hour

The Illustrated Man is the sixth book in my Read Bradbury in October series.

The Illustrated Man is one Bradbury book where I am sure of the time that I first read it. The book cover at left is from the Bantam Pathfinder edition of 1965. I know that I bought this one new in late 1965, when I was 14, to replace the one that I had lost at Bard College. (The image is the best I could find on the Internet – I don’t scan these.) I took an earlier copy with me to Bard, where I spent two weeks on the campus. It was a camp run by the Episcopal Church and the price was right so my mother sent me off. The kids spent the day swimming, playing ping pong and pool and there were events every night. We spent some classes in the morning learning about religion, but nothing too intense. Episcopalians are about as far from the religious right as you can get. I remember discussing the big bang theory and evolution with a very cool Episcopal monk, late into the warm August nights.

The Illustrated Man was my Bible in 1965, in spite of the priests who had long philosophical discussions with me. I remember feeling mild stirrings of religion then, but I managed to throw it off soon enough. I still have fond memories of Evensong, a service that was held every night around 8 just as it started to get dark. It was sung using the Old English version of the prayer book and was very beautiful. I like the Episcopal Church and on those odd days when I feel there might actually be a loving God, I count myself an Episcopalian. If you have kids, send them to the Episcopal Sunday school and they will learn about religion without being brain-washed.

I remember that I lost my copy of The Illustrated Man at Bard that summer of 1965. I say “lost”, but I am sure one of those God-loving, holier than thou, died in the wool Christian brats stole it from me, may they burn in hell. I covered my new copy with clear plastic “contac” because I carried it around in my back pocket and wanted it to last longer than the last one had.

I must have read the stories in the Illustrated Man a dozen times, and then I put it away. I am not sure why, but I haven’t read most of these stories in 40 years. I fondly remembered all of the stories, but there were a few that I did not recognize right off the bat, and didn’t recall until I had read a few pages. This is Bradbury’s second anthology, published in 1951 when Ray was about 31 years old. These are mostly stories from before Bradbury was famous and many reflect the influence of Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Poe and Ambrose Bierce. There are a scattering of Science Fiction stories, but these would hardly be called “hard science”.

There is a wrapper story that links all the stories in The Illustrated Man. A man meets the illustrated man in the woods of Michigan. The illustrated man has pictures all over his body that portray stories and each story in the book is a picture from the Illustrated Man’s body. There is an amorphous area on his back that begins to take form. This area, if watched long enough, will show the fate of the person who looks on it.

There are several Mars stories in The Illustrated Man, and I am guessing that these are ones that didn’t fit into The Martian Chronicles, which had been published a few years before. There are two excellent SF stories. The Rocket Man is about a family where the husband goes into space for months at a time and how his wife and child cope with his absence. Kaleidoscope is the story of an accident in space and the astronauts who survive briefly. Both are marred by bad science (as are many of Ray’s SF stories), but the images and characters are so intense that the stories makes up for it.

The Highway is a flash story that gives a nice emotional smack in the head. Marionettes, Inc. is a very modern robot story that would not be out of place in a magazine today.

I liked most of the stories and only a few, like The Long Rain, didn’t work for me. I have read the Veldt so many times (it was done on the TV series Bradbury Theater, too), that I don’t really care for it. It is a proto-virtual reality story, but since it was written, VR stories are now classed with “I woke up and realized it was all a dream” stories.

Like October Country, the Illustrated Man is quintessential Bradbury. His later stories are less eerie, but still well crafted. I will be reading R is For Rocket, The Machineries of Joy, and A Medicine for Melancholy soon. These anthologies may represent more of a middle period in Bradbury’s writing career. Since I haven’t read any of these collections in decades it will be interesting to see how they compare to these early stories.

A few months ago I added twitter to my Morning “open in tabs” group. I am followed by 7 people and I follow 15 people. I find this addictive.

Twitterers (tweeters?) can be divided into several different types. There are those that tweet a line every time that have a thought, pass gas, have a cigarette or change their socks. I am slowly weeding these out. There are those that announce things they’ve written, read or accomplished – much more interesting. There are those that use twitter as an advertising tool for their web sites – I am eliminating these if they tweet too often (I am in this group). There are those that ignore twitter and you keep on your list just in case they have something to say.

The last type is limited to a single tweeter, PauDirac. He states: I was born as a physicist, I grew as a pythonist and I’m learning harmonica. He tweets in Spanish, mostly, but every so often he has a tweet in English that should not be missed. He is a harmonica player/physicist/pythonist (flavor of programming) so I keep him on. I try to puzzle out some of his tweets and use google to translate some.

I received my second spam twitter follower. These are tweeters who make one entry linking to a spam or porn site and then join the world, hoping the world will follow them. Twitter is good about getting rid of these people.

My twitter profile is at http://twitter.com/kpgraham.

This is the fifth Bradbury Book that I’ve read this October.

Bradbury’s first collection of stories, Dark Carnival, was published by August Derleths’ Arkham House. Derleth was a good writer of horror and weird tales in his own right and is famous for publishing H.P. Lovecraft’s works. Dark Carnival’s only printing was only 3,000 copies and it is the only early Bradbury book that I have not been able to collect. Dark Carnival is currently available on alibris.com starting around $700 for a poor copy and going on up to $8500 for a signed copy. When I started looking for Dark Carnival I could have bought it for about $50, but that was outrageously expensive 40 years ago.

Bradbury took Dark Carnival, did some edits on 15 of the stories and added 4 more stories. These were published as The October Country in 1955. (Dark Carnival would not be reprinted until 2001.) October Country is either Bradbury’s first of fourth anthology, depending how you count Dark Carnival.

October Country has some of the master’s complex, dark and compelling stories. These are the early works when he was targeting Weird Tales and still heavily under the influence of Lovecraft. These are not the lighter stories that he later sold to the Saturday Evening Post, although a couple of the October Country stories were published in Mademoiselle after Ray became famous.

My copy of October Country is dated 1964. At the time that I bought this I might have been 14 or 15 years old and this would be the year that I was reading a lot. My friend Phillip and I would cut classes go down to New York City where I prowled the used book stores looking for science fiction. That year I tried to average a book a day. I know that I had over 800 books in boxes in my room that I had read. I had a place in the woods where I made a hammock in the branches of a maple tree and I would hide there and read whenever I had a chance.

Re-reading the stories some 40 years later, I realize how much a part of me they are. I will have to read as many Bradbury stories as I can because I realize that there is a danger that my subconscious will cause me to write a story that Bradbury wrote, but my conscious mind has forgotten. My stories are often Bradbury stories in form and style. I, of course, do not have his mastery of the language. My stories are all more clumsy, plain, unadorned and direct. Nest of Flames, which is in the current Tales of the Talisman magazine is a good example. It is a concept story, with the plot devised to provide the impact of the vision that caused me to write the story.

Bradbury starts with an image in all of these stories. It is a moment, a feeling, or a idea which must have come to him fully formed. He then wraps a story about it. For example, the story The Wind is about the idea that the hurricanes and tornados grab the souls of those that they kill. The howling of the wind is the howling of the souls that have died by the action of the winds. Bradbury wraps a narrative around this, creating a character that has discovered the deadly nature of wind and another who is skeptical. He creates a plot that slowly convinces us of the validity of his image and then snaps the trap shut with a haunting ending.

These are “hard” stories to write. The books opening story has the image of a dwarf who likes to view himself in a mirror that makes him look tall. How do you wrap a plot about that? You naturally need more characters and they have to interact in some way and lead to a satisfying (if disturbing) ending. This is the craft part of writing. It is the part of writing that is hard to do.

Bradbury takes molten images and shapes them into driving short stories that all end with the characteristic Bradbury release of emotion. The poetic imagery is always delivered in a professional wrapper. Bradbury has the unique ability to drive his lesson home along with the intense mind pictures.

In contrast to his later stories, October Country is scary and eerie. He produces weird tales, in the sense that they would have appeared in the old incarnations of Weird Tales Magazine. I loved the story called The Cistern. The image is two dead bodies floating in the sewers. When it rains they float about, meeting in the phosphorescent corridors beneath the streets. The currents of flowing water press them together and they make love until the water flows out and they wait to meet again. It is a frightening and weird image. Bradbury does much more than deliver the image, though. He wraps a story around it of a lonely girl who dreams of the lovers in the cistern, imagining how pure and unselfish the love can be. One night, as the heavy rains fill the underground drains, she disappears and the last sound heard is the clanging of the manhole cover as it closes over her.

Another favorite of mine is There Was an Old Woman. It is the story about a woman who decides that death is a cheat. It is not fair that we live our allotted time and then die. She decides to live forever. Death, however, comes in the form of a young man who cheats her out of life with a kiss. She is so outraged that she goes to the funeral home to get her body back. It is eerie, but fun. I have known many feisty old ladies and the story seems to be very much in character with what I have learned about them.

If you read only one Bradbury collection, October Country should be the one you try. You’ll be hooked. The other collections all have their moments. Nearly all of the early Bradbury is worth reading. I think, though, that October Country contains the stories that I most identify with Ray Bradbury. All of the stories were written before his 26th birthday and all of them are true masterpieces.

Erica and I drove up to Orange County, NY in search of apple pie and autumn leaves. I took 53 pictures and most of them are interesting. Check out the picassa web albumn to see all of the pictures. On the way back I had a flat tire on the thruway and had a lot of trouble changing it. I am very tired. We found no apple pie.

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

From October Leaves, Apples, Pumpkins and Corn Maze

I found this auction on eBay.

The cover for Sixth Column is by Edd Cartier whose art I am collecting.

I thought that $1500 might be a little much for books, but I did some research and it is not that far off. The juveniles had a large printing and most are available on alibris.com for under $100 each, and all are very cheap if you are willing to go ex-libris. Sixth Column is only the dust jacket, but it may be the rarest of the six and most valuable. You can’t find any Door Into Summer first editions, so that might be valuable.

I will watch this auction. If these books do well, at least I’ll know I can sell some of my library and be able to buy cat food. (My retirement portfolio is down around $19,000 for the day at this moment.)

I have the same editions of 4 out of these 6, but only two of mine have dust jackets. I own The Star Beast, The Rolling Stones, The Green Hills of Earth, and and Rocket Ship Galileo, but only have a DJ for Rolling Stones and Green Hills of Earth. I bought all at flea markets for about $1 each.

This morning it took me two and a half hours to travel 15 miles. Nyack was repainting the lines on the road and rerouted the buses in an odd pattern and the construction plates on the bridge were installed incorrectly and caused a series of tire blowouts. They had to close two lanes on the bridge to repair the plates. By the time I got there the plates were all screwed up again and there were disabled cars that we had to get around. Luckily there was nothing happening this morning at work. I have to make up for coming in late by leaving early. (Why doesn’t my boss laugh when I say this?)