"Petting Zoo"

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 26 Mar 2002, 17:08 · from urth-v0203.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) "Petting Zoo"
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 09:08:46 -0800
Message-ID: <urth-v0203-459 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0203/459.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Though I haven't read "Petting Zoo" I can repsond to this. Mantis wrote:

> Hmm, Bradbury.  From my perspective, Bradbury stories about childhood are
> either nostalgic for a real (more authentic) past (Bradbury's childhood
> years) or dread for a nightmarish present/future from around 1960 onward
> ("The Playground," "The Little Assassin," eek, these two are quite
> Ballardian).

Ummmm... well, "The Small Assassin" was written _well_ before '60, and
(if I'm not mistaken) appeared in Bradbury's first collection, "Dark
Carnival." Indeed, a number of Bradbury's childhood stories are=20
exaggerations/portrayals of the very real dreads children feel - i.e.,
"Fever Dream."=20

The nostalgic element you mention (summed up in DANDELION WINE) is=20
neatly combined with the "childhood fears" element in at least two of
Bradbury's finest novels: SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (ignore the
movie) and THE HALLOWE'EN TREE.

--Dan'l

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net