What's in a Name?
A mid-month mash up with a quote from Ray Bradbury
Welcome!
In this bite-shaped sampler I’m dropping choice morsels and then sending you on your way. Read on for a quick grab-bag of quotation, think-fast commentary Q & A, and word on the pond, (that is, news and teasers for all things Shelf of Crocodiles).
If you’re like most of my readers—curious book-lovers with well-thumbed Bibles, fat C.S. Lewis volumes… and bristling disdain for the totalitarian dress rehearsals taking place around the world and in American cities—you’ll get a puff of wind in your sails.
Unlike my longform, end-of-the-month essay, this here’s a short read.
Pinky swear.
Ray Bradbury teeing off
For an Angeleno who never owned a driver’s license, yarn spinner Ray Bradbury was no couch potato. While his fictional settings vary from from Mars to small town America to unexplored worlds, his love for Los Angeles is more than evident.
Lucky for Bradbury, he passed a few years before his city reached the tertiary stage of what it is right now—a eerie pour over of good weather, glitterati, Mad Max, the Mumbai slums, and as far as second class citizenship is trending, 1930’s Berlin.
Thumbing through Fahrenheit 451, a book I taught to sophomores for a couple of years, I came across an author’s postscript.
In an early response to the same, screeching voices that have reduced tinsel town, mainstream news, publishing, comedy, school boards and everything else into groveling, woke echo chambers, Bradbury paints a familiar scene:
“About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in Space Mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I ‘do them over?’”
With some slick parallel structure he takes aim at school anthology editors looking to neuter classic American stories and cram them into one volume.
“Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarcify, melt, render down and destroy… Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Doestoevsky read like—in the finale—Edward Guest.
Do you begin to see the damned and incredible picture?”
And when Bradbury erupts, he clears the sinuses:
“How did I react to all of the above?
By ‘firing’ the whole lot.
By sending out rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish/Italian, Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Women’s Lib/Republican feels the will, the right, and the duty to douse the kerosene and light the fuse.”
There’s a scalding truth here. Even when it’s asymmetrical, a censorship and shadow banning arms race spreads in both directions.
Leaping from there to a heavy finish, and landing close to home for brave contrarians who have been flung from their jobs for declining an experimental mRNA vaccine, or those in countries where saying or writing what you really think can be a death sentence, Bradbury tees off like Tiger.
“Do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works… I will not go quietly onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All of you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try. And no one can help me, not even you.”
Preach it, Ray.
Question: what’s with the name ‘Shelf of Crocodiles?’
I’ve got this one a few times already, so it’s a good kickoff.
‘Shelf of Crocodiles’ is my own playful spin on ‘Street of Crocodiles,’ a fantastical, episodic blend of fiction and memoir by Bruno Schulz, a little known Polish author, school teacher, and Third Reich victim. I came across book and author in a University of London drama class, and the title does justice to my eclectic reading habits.
More to come on the book itself.
If you’ve got a question, a recommendation or a pointed word for the Crocodile that you’d like to see written up here, send it my way by comment or email.
Word on the pond
At the end of this month, we’re dialing Appalachia for an interview with woodsman-lumberjack Ian Duncan, author of the Cordyceps Trilogy and the gutsy, prodigal-son styled memoir On Cove Mountain.
Ian’s volunteered to be the guinea pig, the subject of our first author interview on Shelf of Crocodiles.
Oh yeah. Ian’s ready.
Shares and stickers
If you want some pole-worthy ‘Shelf of Crocodiles’ stickers, leave a comment before they’re all gone.
And if you enjoyed this Croc Bite, please put it on someone’s radar with a share, a like, a comment, echolocation… whatever you have!
I’m building my small readership with the hope / prayer / pipe dream of launching a paid subscription in the near or far future, a move that should keep the edgy, bookish content coming for some time, even as I’m sticking more irons in the fire.
Thanks for reading and see you next time.
Found your newsletter from a recent Substack thread. Nice to know about the story behind the name: "Shelf of Crocodiles"