Skip to main content

Why Ray Bradbury Loved A Christmas Carol

     On more than one occasion, Ray Bradbury was asked about his favorite books. While the answer varied, he consistently spoke of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. For those who know and love the writings of Ray Bradbury, it makes perfect sense this was a favorite of his. The theme of living is vibrant in many Bradbury works. So Bradbury spoke with great excitement about the scene in A Christmas Carol where the culminating visits of the ghosts moves Ebeneezer, when he realizes that he has another chance, declares, I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!  The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.
     As good as the many movie versions may be, there is a texture in the story that is simply missed in the visual interpretations. In this interview (toward the end) Ray Bradbury speaks about his love of this great Christmas story that is a call to live life. While Bradbury says that his own The Halloween Tree is an homage to A Christmas Carol, his short story The Gift is a nice Christmas season story.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Faith, Hope, and Love in a Culture of Death: Lois Lowry's The Giver as Film

Let's begin with the film's single greatest obstacle: the culture Philip Rieff described as "the death culture" is not likely to assemble en masse to pay for viewing a morality tale. A central message in this film is that we have become "shadows." Indeed, those immersed in our death culture do not likely have ears to hear and eyes to see the hollow selves we currently are. In a time such as ours, where very little if anything signifies, it is not probable this movie will be understood. At one key moment The Giver declares, "we are living a life of shadows, of echoes." This sentence captures the essence of the death culture. Add to that the following minor problem of our nearly national obsession with spectacle, as evidenced in news shows and recent popular YA movies such as The Hunger Games and Divergent . It is clear our current death culture is taken with the dystopian novel and dystopian movie version of said novel as long as it provides ...
Read more

How Twitter Killed Tolstoy or Why You Will Likely Not Finish this Blog

     My favorite fictional Professor, aptly described the end of learning. Faber, tells how his class went from Sven Birkerts The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Alan Jacobs Slow Reading in a Hurried Age David Mikics Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital Age Naimi S. Baron My own experience parallels that of Professor Faber. With declining Liberal Arts majors and distracted Great Books students.... Our lives have become as thin as the thinnest flat screen TV. There is a hollowness to our public discourses and our private conversations. It is not surprising how the tone, texture, and content of our verbal exchanges mimic posts on our dominate social media or the headline stories Of course, the title of this blog could have been any of the following: How Instagram Killed How Vine Killed How Facebook Killed How Google+ Killed How LinkedIn Killed
Read more

Observing the Loss of the University

     Unless it is dramatic, erosion usually goes unnoticed. Or, unless one leaves for some time and then returns to notice what is often subtle and slow. Cultural shifts are often much like erosion. This is true of the modern American university. Its once impressive place on the landscape as a positive force in shaping society has been in question for several years now. While some of the criticism comes from pragmatists arguing, "it just isn't practical" other critics observe how the university has dug its own grave.      One of the most impressive, insightful, and at times caustic analyses of the plight of the loss of the university is agrarian, Wendell Berry. His essay "The Loss of the University" can be found in his Home Economics and it was also recently released by the Trinity Forum  as a booklet. When I read it for the first time in 1991, I was struck by how much Berry understood some of the real enemies of the university. Enemies both ins...
Read more