Ray Bradbury at 100: A Conversation Between Sam Weller and Dana Gioia | Hacker News Reader

Ray Bradbury at 100: A Conversation Between Sam Weller and Dana Gioia

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53 pointsandrewem9 comments

In the late 1970s Bradbury gave a talk in our town.

Discussing the risk of nuclear war, he said (and I paraphrase) that nuclear weapons were actually doing humanity a service, by telling us to “Just ... slow ... down”.

Wise words to a thermonuclear world.

I posted the link to this interview because it’s between two writers who were deeply influenced by Ray Bradbury and knew him very well. The interviewee is a poet and former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and as he describes was deeply influenced by reading Bradbury’s stories as a child. The interviewer wrote a biography of Bradbury in close collaboration with the subject.

What would Ray Bradbury think of the 1966 movie version of "Fahrenheit 451"?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060390/

Wikipedia has some comments from him about it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451_(1966_film)

Related to whether he was a Californian or Midwestern writer, I’ve always felt that wherever you went to high school was where you grew up/was home. I moved all over when I was a kid but because I went to high school in Seattle, even though I was only really there for those 4 years, when anyone asked me where I’m from that’s where I will always say.

While rest of the world wonders why Americans consider High School as the most important part of their lives.

It seems the Japanese at least share the obsession given how much anime and manga is set in high school. But it makes sense, really. It is both the end of childhood and the beginning of one's adult years, and therefore an important transitional event.

It can be a defining time of one's life without being the most important.

That’s an interesting observation.

I have the same issue, moved as a kid and as an adult and don’t know what to say when people ask me where I’m from.

I do usually say the place I spent 4 years of HS, but I think I only say that because my parents stopped moving at that point and still live there, so that’s where I “go home for the holidays.”

Ironically when I’m around that area and people ask, I usually tell them a different part of the country where I lived in elementary school. I think that’s because I don’t really know the HS area that well, haven’t kept in touch with people there outside of immediate family, so I don’t feel like a local at all.

Honestly the only place that feels like “home” to me is where I went to college. But that’s one of those cultural things, you can be “from” the place you went off to college. And now that I’m coming up on two decades post-graduation, that feeling of familiarity is fading, though the nostalgia and “homey-ness” remains.

Why does everyone care so much about “where you’re from” anyway, sheesh :)

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