Thursday, June 7, 2012

Ray of sunshine

Oh good, the bitmap shows.

I greatly appreciate DuckDuckGo, a fine and honorable search engine, using the above logo for the day after Ray Bradbury's death. It was a sweet show of respect.

Recently I re-read Something Wicked This Way Comes as part of a book club I belong to. It was great going back. That, The Martian Chronicles, and his many short stories are a deep natural resource we'll (hopefully) always have. See "Picasso Summer" and "Fever Dream" for two very different sides of his talent.

2 comments:

susan said...

I may start using duck myself soon simply to confound google. The funny thing was I just searched for Naked Capitalism (Yves Smith's blog) on it and found they eliminated the first word because it defaults to safe mode.

I loved Ray Bradbury when I was much younger but haven't read his work again lately. The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked come strongly to mind.

Margaret Atwood was interviewed about him in a recent Globe and Mail article and was asked about whether he should have been more respected as an author. This was her answer:

He ought to have treated as a serious writer by people who understood American romanticism. If you think of Hawthorne’s darker tales, if you think about Poe and Melville, you’ll understand who his American literary ancestors were. Poe was a major influence on his writing and so probably was Hawthorne.

Ben said...

That's a little frustrating about the defaults. I thought you could just change them but apparently it's not that simple. Of course I mostly use that search engine at work, which kind of limits what I'll be lookng up to begin with.

I looked up that interview with Margaret Atwood. She gets it right, I think. Seems to be a laconic speaker, at least in interviews. I wonder if that unnerved the reporter at all.