Ray Bradbury - "At play in the fields of the Lord"

I ran across this interesting article on the life and philosophy of Ray Bradbury. He's an original.

Ray's best friend growing up was Ed Barrerra, who was once my landlord.  Ed was an orphan, taken in by the family of his future wife in Los Angeles. Ray and Ed sometimes skipped school and went to the lots in Hollywood and hung around on movie sets, or sneaked into the theater. Ed's wife, Clara, thought that Ray was "crazy" when they were young - when he had some of the wild ideas which were later developed in his science fiction books. He didn't have as much schooling as you might expect for a famous writer.

Both he and Ed were drafted during World War II and went to Europe. Ray stopped driving after the war. When he came to visit Ed at our little duplex in the barrio, it was with a chauffeur, in a big cream-colored limousine. He often wore white shorts and knee socks.

He was a faithful friend to Ed as Ed's health deteriorated from rheumatoid arthritis and Parkinson's disease. I saw him a few times, and he always seemed to have some new and different project in the works. I'm happy to hear that he's still around and still has a zest for life.

Speaking of "zest", we have some zesty and delicious summer fruits on now. Descriptions here.

Take a Break, Think about Home

From Sippican Cottage:

I was reading Essays In Idleness by Kenko. He was dead in 1350. . . .


. . . the personal essay is tie that binds us.


I hate the term: blog. It's ugly, and it's come to mean something even uglier than the sound of it. It's become the minor leagues of hate. I write personal essays here. Zuihitsu. It might not be noble, but a person has little to offer to others but knowledge of which they are sure. "I am an expert in the affairs of all men" is the banner of the professional politician and their toads. Not hardly.


Why am I wandering in the few moments between exhaustion and sleep in the dusty stacks of an alien culture dead and buried for seven hundred years? To find a kindred spirit. . .


I have never been in a hotel room as comfortable and pleasant as my own bedroom, and I have been in Presidential Suites before. Money can't fix the problem, and the availability of money without the governor of a framework of rules to expend it almost always makes things worse.


Our post-modern zeitgeist evangelizes that rules of any sort that govern personal behaviors or the appearance of our surroundings or entertainment are stultifying and worthy only of mindless opposition. The unthinking rejection of all tradition leads to a counterintuitive outcome: a set of rules, much more stringent than what they replaced, will replace the old ones, and they will consist of the worst possible alternative to what was there before.


. . . How else can I explain a Japanese man writing about my house, and the house you should be living in, in the fourteenth century?

From our own unfashionable but comfortable home and garden:

Interesting Tomatoes, both old and new varieties
Assorted garden gifts and a dog
BIG tomatoes
Ripe Green Tomatoes

And recipes for garden vegetables:
Skillet Lasagna with Zucchini
Grandma's Chili Sauce

Some thoughts on happy children and expectations

Confucius and Clarity of Language

Confucius said:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.

Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

The translation above makes me wonder how the end of a sentence is indicated in Chinese. That's some first sentence. We're really not used to long sentences these days. I put in a paragraph separation just to make the quote easier to get through.

The piece from which this quote was taken makes some over-broad statements about government spending. But it includes some really good points about how people have been misled about government money. Click on the link at the bottom of the page for comments from readers which reveal some of the ways government involvement tends to make everything more expensive while sometimes making stuff seem "free". David could tell many similar stories. Money from government allows corrupt or astonishingly inefficient systems - public or private - to survive much longer than they would if they had to earn their own money.

Dr. Helen has some interesting advice concerning how teachers can help their students think critically and clearly understand some of the ways propaganda works:

" . . . in my opinion, it is not your job to decide the politics of the students in your class, it is your job to expose them to the critical thinking skills that will help them make informed decisions and back them up in a reasoned way. This is what is sorely lacking in our present educational system."

Did you know that there was a Propaganda Game ? Some non-PC books for kids would also help provide some balance to the liberal mindset which filters down from our higher education system.

Remembering Tony Hillerman

There will never be another Tony Hillerman novel. My friend Keira introduced me to his books when she lived in Arizona, and I bought my first one in the Phoenix airport, which is decorated with Native American iconography. I just re-read "A Thief of Time" not too long ago. I really liked the insights Hillerman gave into the Southwest Native American cultures and the struggles between those cultures and the modern world.

I understood Navahos, in particular, a lot better because of his novels. I understood better why all the Navajos I knew growing up seemed so shy. And why missionaries on the Navajo reservation were called on so often to dress bodies for burial. The traditional Navajo ideas about the afterlife are very dark, and Navajos concentrate on the beauty of this life.

I also appreciate the way Hillerman made his characters into real people. Especially the Navajo Police officers whose lives we followed through several novels. New readers might want to start with the earliest books and move forward to the more complex later novels.

Several years ago, Mom, Marianne, Little David and I went on vacation through some of the territory in which Hillerman set his novels. We saw Indian ruins and canyons which were familiar when I read the books. Navajo names we read on the rodeo schedules were the same as those in his books. We battled little blackflies at Four Corners. I remember Mexican Hat and the trading post there. The motel owner told us the story of the artesian well under the river which was accidentally drilled while speculators were looking for something else (and which gave us water pressure in the little trailer-motel where we stayed).

I could relate to Officer Chee's surprise in one novel that his underwear didn't dry overnight in Los Angeles. Our clothes dried in minutes in Mexican Hat when we draped them over the caesalpinia bushes, one of the plants which sustains hummingbirds in the hottest, most arid parts of the Southwest. As an aside, once when I was visiting Keira and Wally in Phoenix, we revived a fledgling hummingbird which had ventured out on an extremely hot day and had fainted on the asphalt. Apple juice brought it back to life.

I once read in a Land's End catalog a Hillerman short story about a "skinwalker" (murderous Najavo witch) in the form of a wolf chasing a trucker on the highway to Mexican Hat, and haven't felt quite the same about that road since. His novels bring back memories of that trip and others - including the family campout at Capitol Reef.