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Real Bradbury hours

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  This is a poster for Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (I know I wrote my last blog post on this, I swear I’m not that Bradbury brained, I just think that this is a very ripe story for both analysis and posterization. I’m really not the biggest fan of Bradbury on the whole). The overall composition is simple, calling back to other stories of the Bomb like Fail Safe and The Hunt For Red October . White and black dominate the poster; white, backgrounding the ruined buildings on either side of the suburban house in the center, represents blinding nuclear fire, while the black, cool, calm, and paradoxically boiling up from a mushroom cloud, represents the strange peace the house is thrown into. Let’s examine first the large upside-down T, the form which most dominates the page. We’ll call it Form 1 for convenience. The form is simple, being only two rectangles, with only two comparatively similar and neatly partitioned colors. Both vertically and horizontally, it fills most of
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Demons, Commies, and Garbage Incinerators

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     One line in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” stands out to me: on the second page, detritus, tracked in by a dying dog, is swept away and destroyed in a garbage incinerator, which, in the book’s narration, is said to “ [sit] like evil Baal in a dark corner.” This is immediately strange: Baal (or Ba’al, it depends), is a historically broad term, referring to many varietal deities, but Bradbury was raised Baptist, so it is most useful for us to examine the Christian idea of Baal: variably idol of the Israelites, philistine Lord of the Flies, or Literally Just Satan. The garbage incinerator, on the other hand, is the garbage incinerator: a little quaint, Atomic©, perhaps, in its representation as an automated household fixture, but comparatively standard. Certainly not Literally The Lord of Hell and Prince of Demons. Strange to link the two.             United States Senator Joseph McCarthy didn’t like those commies. It was really his whole thing. We like to c
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