{"id":3825,"date":"2012-06-17T11:44:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-17T11:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/2012\/06\/17\/required-reading-neil-gaimans-tribute-to-ray-bradbury\/"},"modified":"2012-06-17T11:44:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-17T11:44:00","slug":"required-reading-neil-gaimans-tribute-to-ray-bradbury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/2012\/06\/17\/required-reading-neil-gaimans-tribute-to-ray-bradbury\/","title":{"rendered":"Required Reading: Neil Gaiman\u2019s Tribute to Ray Bradbury"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s required reading is The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman<\/a>, an incredible and moving excerpt from an upcoming Bradbury tribute anthology, Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury<\/a>, which comes out July 10th. You can also hear him read it on Amanda’s SoundCloud account<\/a> or read his blog posts on the matter here<\/a> and here<\/a>, which are also beautiful.<\/p>\n

Ray Bradbury died on June 5th at the age of 91 as Venus was transiting the sun, mythic to the end. May his words reverberate through history forever. <\/p>\n

Here Neil Gaiman explains the background of his perfect eulogy, originally written as a birthday present to the author (may we all be so lucky to receive such a gift):<\/p>\n

I wanted to write about Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write about him in the way that he wrote about Poe in “Usher II” \u2014 a way that drove me to Poe.<\/p>\n

I was going to read something in an intimate theatre space, very late at night, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My wife, Amanda, and I were hosting a midnight show of songs and readings. I promised myself that I would finish it in time to read it to forty people seated on sofas and on cushions on the floor in a tiny, beautiful room that normally contained the Belt Up Theatre Company’s intimate plays.<\/p>\n

Very well, it would be a monologue, if I was going to read it.<\/p>\n

The inspiration came from forgetting a friend of mine. He died a decade ago. And I went to look in my head for his name, and it was gone. I knew everything else about him \u2014 the periodicals he had written for, his favourite brand of bourbon. I could have recited every conversation he and I had ever had, told you what we talked about. I could remember the names of the books he had written.<\/p>\n

But his name was gone. And it scared me. I waited for his name to return, promised myself I wouldn’t Google it, would just wait and remember. But nothing came. It was as if there was a hole in the universe the size of my friend. I would walk home at night trying to think of his name, running through names in alphabetical order. “Al? No. Bob? No. Charles? Chris? Not them . . .”<\/p>\n

And I thought, What if it were an author? What if it was everything he’d done? What if everyone else had forgotten him too?<\/p>\n

I wrote the story by hand. I finished it five minutes before we had to leave the house to go to the theatre. I was a mass of nerves \u2014 I’d never read something to an audience straight out of the pen.<\/p>\n

When I read it, I finished it with a recital of the whole alphabet.<\/p>\n

Then I typed it out and sent it to Ray for his ninety-first birthday.<\/p>\n

I was there at his seventieth birthday, in the Natural History Museum in London.<\/p>\n

It was, like everything else about the man and his work, unforgettable.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Neil Gaiman<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s required reading is The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman, an incredible and moving excerpt from an upcoming Bradbury tribute anthology, Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, which comes out July 10th. You can also hear him read it on Amanda’s SoundCloud account or read his blog posts on … Continue reading “Required Reading: Neil Gaiman\u2019s Tribute to Ray Bradbury”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[709,137,139,1230],"class_list":["post-3825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-authors","tag-eulogy","tag-r-i-p","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}