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“Beware the autumn people…

For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life… For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir in their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eyes? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles- breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.” — Ray Bradbury

Cultural Offering

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  • Roy Lofquist September 23, 2019, 1:38 PM

    Ray Bradbury was a crazy good writer. He was also scary as Hell.

  • Klaus September 23, 2019, 2:00 PM

    Wow! That was…I don’t know,awesome?

  • Jewel September 23, 2019, 2:26 PM

    I am an Autumn People. But I don’t hang out with them others.

  • ghostsniper September 23, 2019, 5:20 PM

    My favorite season.
    Forever Autumn
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al-ESH-XfQc

  • Nori September 23, 2019, 9:05 PM

    Autumn 🍂 is my favorite season also,Ghost. It signals the end of searing desert heat. The Chinese Pistachio tree leaves are turning a coppery red.
    I have a Ballantine paperback book,cost fifty cents in 1965. It is a collection of 8 of his short stories,titled “The Autumn People”.
    It caused a bit of a stir then,because the stories were presented comic book style. Graphic novelly.
    The artist was Al Feldstein,who edited Mad Magazine from 1956-1985.

    Bradbury’s introduction to his book is interesting

    “I am a child of my time.
    What does that mean?
    It means I grew up on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. I still have my collections put away from the years 1928 on up through 1938. I knew and loved Cap Stubbs and Out Our Way (pure Americana!). I cut my teeth on Mandrake the Magician,and also pasted in books such sterling comics as Our Boarding House,Tailspin Tommy,Jungle Jim,Tim Tyler’s Luck,and Brick Bradford.
    Simultaneously,I was listening to Chandru the Magician,joining the Little Orphan Annie Secret Society on radio,and sending off for premiums from Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy.

    Without all this splendid mediocrity,this sublime and wondrous trash in my background,I don’t think I would be any sort of writer today.
    I have no patience with the literary snob who turns his back on his root-system,what he was,what he once loved with all his heart.
    Now that I am older I will not be a turncoat to my old and deepest affections. Part of me,buried away,still loves Major Hoople and Dale Arden.
    So it follows that having these comic adaptations of my stories reprinted in book form is a good and happy experience for me.
    Intellectual snobs will no doubt be shocked. Those with widespread,happy tastes will accept,as I accept,this new form-faithfully,and in many cases beautifully done-of some of my old stories.

    And,anyway,it appears we are vindicated. The Pop Art people come along,late in the day,to tell us about comic strips and characters. But we send them packing. Our answer is: we knew it all the time! Don’t tell about what we already have loved and loved well!

    Ray Bradbury
    Los Angeles,Calif.
    December 19,1964

  • Casey Klahn September 23, 2019, 10:19 PM

    Nori: I feel great having read that RB text. Thank you for that.

    Well, Autumn is nice and I guess you can count me as one whose bones wear the cold of Autumn. Where I was raised, no seasons were allowed. Only rain and I think terminal fall time.

    My feet are cold.

  • jack September 24, 2019, 8:18 AM

    I’ve lived all over but the Deep South is where my bones are supposed to be and I’m back there now, living on old family property where I grew as a child but still, and hopefully, a few seasons away from my last sunset. It’s not at all like it was when I was a kid but my bones know the place.

    This Deep South is a lot of things to a lot of people and like others I’m heavily influenced by the ambient climate and because the humidity here will nearly parboil you in your skin prudent oldsters like me aren’t much for waddling around in it during the Summer.

    But Fall is another story and I think God gives the Fall to non-Southerners as a blessed preamble to what He knows that Winter will bring. Likewise, He gives Fall to Southerners as a kind of reparation for what Summer has brought. Thankfully Winters in the Deep South are very tolerable and they are often a chillier extension of our Falls.

    I’m an outdoorsman, a hunter and fisherman, and I can scarcely tolerate the hype, the noise and up in your face mass hysteria of football and the legions of fans who live vicariously through athletic negros who offer nothing except “food” for their sports addictions so I spend a great deal of time out and about in the woods and the deeper and quieter they are, the more I am sucked into them. And if I’m not in the woods, I will most certainly be found at any time during the week on a lake or river that is nearly devoid of humanity. Fall has been, without any question, my favorite season of my life.

    I loved and still so love Hemingway and although he got a little car-cra and shoved the barrels of a lovely Scott double into his mouth to end is life, I still feel what he felt and what was written as his epitaph:

    ‘Best of all he loved the fall…the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams, and above the hills the high blue windless skies…Now he will be a part of them forever.”

  • Vanderleun September 24, 2019, 8:31 AM

    A great comment, Jack. Really great.

  • James ONeil September 24, 2019, 9:14 AM

    Cooked up a fresh caribou heart for supper last night, served it with high bush cranberry catsup.

    Autumn is a grand season up here on top of the world.