Thursday, April 06, 2006

he loves dinosaurs

i saw ray bradbury speak last night. he said that life is about love. when you find the things you love you must take them and run, and apologize to no one. the world can be yours.

he said the internet talks too much.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was at the event, too! We should keep in touch. My name is Michael and my e-mail address is sardonical@yahoo.com

This is what I wrote about regarding the event:

Hollywood, CA -- Today I went to see world renown science-fiction author Ray Bradbury speak at the Barnsdall Art Center. The event was a superb success: the theater was completely full. Ray Bradbury spoke about what the early Los Angeles-based science fiction writers of the 1940s, including Robert A. Heinlein, who was the "dean of science fiction." Ray Bradbury admitted that he does not use a computer, stating that people use it to "talk too much." He said that if we do not go to the mars we are all doomed. He praised President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush for their support for a new mission to Mars, but he blasted Congress for not supporting the mission because there are no votes to be won from supporting such a mission. He encouraged his audience to focus on the thing that they love -- and to ignore everything else, including the "idiots" in our lives who would steer us in the wrong direction. (I always believed in following that philosophy: this is our life to live -- and there is no 'God damn reason"--as Bradbury would say--to follow what other people think we should do, especially when they are wrong).

Bradbury stated that he did not believe that aspiring authors could learn how to write in college. He himself did not go to college. Instead, Bradbury spent ten years in a library, reading works of literature and poetry, which gave him inspiration to write many of his novels, including Fahrenheight 452. (He said that the inspiration for the book Fahrenheight 452 occurred when he had learned that over five thousand years ago, all of the great works of literature housed in the Roman libraries were burned). In any case, after spending ten years in a library, "he graduated." (I'm sure he learned more than the average college student, too. After all, most of them could not point to Rome on a map).

Bradbury said that it does not matter whether someone is a creationism or a Darwinist. He said that all that matters is that we have an interesting story on how the world started. (He said why not just believe that the world has always existed as it did, and the reason for the existence of human beings was so that we could perceive and enjoy the greatness of the universe. This is almost a quasi-half religious and half-scientific argument). In Los Angeles, some of Bradbury's architectural influences are the Glendale Galleria and the Hollywood and Highland Center. Ray Bradbury has suggested that we have a monorail in Los Angeles, but none of the questioners raised any comments about this issue, unfortunately.