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Episode 472 - The Lake (Patreon)

Published:
2019-10-19 02:09:49
Imported:
2021-07

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We're continuing our journey through Ray Bradbury's The October Country with a dip in The Lake - join us!

Here's a glimpse at that  Weird Tales cover.

Next up: Jack-In-The-Box 

Comments

Anonymous

Thanks, gents. That was lovely. I have always loved these little extended meditations. One of the things that brought me to Japan was the Noh theater. (The joke: "Noh theater" means "no theater") A typical Noh plot: Guy introduces himself to the audience as a priest heading down the road and he finds a place to rest. Along comes a woodcutter. Priest asks the woodcutter about the area. Woodcutter provides a really detailed account of past events. Priest says, "Hey, you're a ghost, aren't you?" "Yup." Woodcutter exits, priest repeats what we just saw and how surprising it is to run into a ghost like this - especially such a knowledgeable one. Woodcutter re-enters in a new costume and does a nice dance, Priest says, "Dude, you can totally move on if you'd like to." Woodcutter exits. Priest exits. Ah. There's no conflict, really. Just an extended exploration of mood. Loss. Longing. Remorse. Younger self potential unrealized... If the form were not so slow and challenging to understand, I'd recommend you come on out here and watch some. No that I'm not interested in having y'all visit mind.

Anonymous

I'm with you, Chris. By the time I finished this story I was straight up bawling. Even trying to describe the story to a friend later on I started choking up.

Anonymous

What a poignant story for this weekend! I am reflecting on the fact that my daughter is turning 7, I myself will be 39 in 3 weeks, I divorced in the past year, as well as whole host of other calamities and occasional triumphs. As a kid, I probably would have read this story and disliked it (where's the gore??). Now, yeah, it gets me right in the feels. I still have a lot of life left, but I think it is important to slow down a bit and reflect on where I've been. A great episode.

Anonymous

I guess one person's poignant is another person's maudlin. I found this story just irritated me, despite the amazingly skilled evocation of place and mood. Maybe part of it is the sentimentality about being twelve doesn't reflect my experience at all. Perhaps being a girl is part of it - by the time a girl is twelve, she's grappling with puberty, and her friend groups are becoming way more political and tricky to navigate. It's hard to connect that experience with the nostalgia for simple, pure friendships and innocence.

Anonymous

https://youtu.be/iAg9eIgqMKc

Anonymous

This whole month reminds me of the Rachel Bloom song 'F me Ray Bradbury'. NSFW, but VERY catchy. Don't listen unless you want the earworm for a week, you've been warned. https://youtu.be/gONl3jXrzBE

Anonymous

I have a vivid memory of my 10th birthday down the shore with my mom and dad and younger brother. Nothing spooky per se, just remembering how wonderfully unselfconscious I was running around in a red, white, and blue bikini and how that last look at the beach out of the car window at the end of the day always made me melancholy. I didn’t know then it was a reminder that I would never turn 10 again. This story evoked some of that feeling.

Anonymous

The Ray Bradbury Theater version is actually very good .They changed Harold into Douglas and they are both 10 instead of 12.That is definitely a better change because it is more a time of innocence.And it fixes the worst part of the story,that a 22 year old would think of himself as “grown up” ,it probably worked in 1944 (went many young people went to war and came back changed ).But is laughable now ,Douglas is 35 years old and the body has been in the lake for 25 years.Also it is more clear that the beach scene at the end is really in his head.

Anonymous

Like most others, I found this story to be a very poignant meditation on the meaning of love, loss, and change. I could even see that the protagonist was simply settling with his current wife, because the person he wanted to be with was forever gone. That leaped out at me at the very moment he says he found a woman and got married. He describes her like an object. Like he would a retro Starsky and Hutch lunchbox he found on Ebay. Not like a great person he found who makes him feel complete. So he settles for the lunchbox and gets married, because that is what you are supposed to do after all. I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but by the end I was ruminating over the story and it hit me. This is a paint-by-the-numbers example of Stuffed into the Fridge https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge A male writer creates a female character for the sole purpose of killing her, in order to create character development for his male protagonist. *sigh* As an amateur writer I have trained myself to deconstruct every story I read or watch. I look at how the writer put it together, and try to understand why they did the things they did. That is the only way to learn how to be a better writer yourself. I have also trained myself to look for these bad tropes in my own writing. And yes, I have committed them myself. But I have also scrapped stories because I realized they were founded on bad tropes. Or went back and re-wrote large portions of them. Like you guys said before, as a writer you have to be willing to kill your children. Now I am not saying that Bradbury is a mysogonist bastard. I don't think he was gleefully cackling away on his throne of skulls as he banged this out on his typewriter. But the truth is that ultimately I did not come away with even a bittersweet feeling from this story.

Anonymous

This is very off topic, but you guys HAVE to go see The Lighthouse when it comes out next week and a bit later in UK. It's a weird horror masterpiece.

Anonymous
>>28058605

I find that Bradbury is very much A Product of His Time, and seems to have trouble getting away from the perspective of a white male born in the midwest in 1920. I agree that it's not malicious, just a deficit that's all the more jarring because he writes so well overall.

Steve

I have no soul.

Anonymous

Suggestions for future episodes consideration: 1) The Smiling People (Ray Bradbury), 2) The Man Upstairs (Vampire story, Bradbury style), 3) Enoch (Robert Bloch), Bradbury's 4) The Wind, 5) Cistern, 6) The Emissary. ALSO, please, please, please do HS Whitehead's creepy story "Cassius"! And since I love MR James SO much, let me entreat you two to consider these: 1) The Ash Tree, 2) The Tractate Middoth, 3) Casting the Runes, 4) The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, 5) An Episode of Cathedral History, 6) The Wailing Well. Oh, and (dare I ask it?) how about Bradbury's Homecoming?

Anonymous
>>28047724

Christine, I have to basically agree. In my opinion, this story just doesn't fit in with the spirit of "The October Country". For me, it felt too autobiographical. Like something from his past.

Anonymous

I thought that considering it was written by a white cis male member of the patriarchy it was pretty good! But seriously some of the comments here are kind of why I didn’t take English Lit. at uni, it’s good to explore a texts themes but over analysis based purely on postmodern theories on power structures is tedious, let’s all get our Foucault out and deconstruct everything!

Anonymous

Really moving episode. Near the end when Chad is talking about his own experience and how losing someone you love at a young age allows you to put them in a pedestal in your mind, making them seem perfect, really resonated with me. Especially the line about, "If she had just lived I would have been happy for the rest of my life". I lost my first real love in a car accident around 15 years ago and I think about her that way sometimes, even though our relationship was pretty disfuncional and not good for either of us. But all these years later, time is still slowly rubbing away at all the terrible things we did to each other, until only the shiny happiness of that time in my life is left. Just as in the story, it really can poison you if you let it... "The Dead" by James Joyce, jumped into my mind as a good companion piece to this story, if anyone is looking to follow the theme a little deeper. Now if you will excuse me I need to find out who put all these tears on my cheeks.

Anonymous

Like Chris I also didn't make what I would call good friends until I was older. I don't have a lot of sentimentality for being 12 and so a lot of Bradbury's later works always leave a little flat in that regard. The October Country is my favorite short story collection of his and that's mostly because it has far fewer of his nostalgic stories about being 12 than most of his other collections. Like others have mentioned, I suspect that a lot of that has to do with gender. Boys are usually allowed to stay innocent far longer than girls are, though individual results may vary of course. The last time I read this story I was probably in my early teens and it connected with me even less than his other nostalgic odes to boyhood, because death was still largely a stranger in my life and I wasn't old enough to understand what the story was saying about loss and change and getting older. I remember thinking it was a lame story about nothing, so I'm really glad you guys brought it back into my life now that I'm nearing 40 and have the perspective to get more out of it. This time it made me cry and I wasn't even reading the actual story.

Anonymous

Also, I know you're only doing it for a month for Halloween, but you guys could seriously do every story in this book and I would love it. You could do this again next year and every year for the rest of my life and I would never get tired of it.

Steve

There are 6 Bradbury tales on BBC Radio over the next month, including The Jar. Each is introduced by Ray Bradbury, recorded in 1995. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jpx2

Anonymous

A more recently published short story I listened to on the Pseudopod Podcast had a strikingly similar setup - childhood friend drowns, but then has a possibly ghostly return that may be in the narrator's head. The theme again touches on ideas of idealizing a youthful love experience. I guess this idea just comes up a bit. What I get out of the story is something similar to what Truman Capote perhaps hinted at in the written version of Breakfast at Tiffany's - that, at the end of the day, friendships can actually feel more reliable or deeper sometimes than conventional love affairs where one is going through the transactional things of bodies and home making etc. A part of us longs for someone who is our best friend first, and perhaps a lover second, but it often doesn't quite work out that way while navigating sexual themes and gender roles etc., especially if you are just going through the motions as it seems the narrator of this story may have done. People lament our current over %50 divorce rate, but I wonder if things were really so much better back in the day if people married and stayed together because it was what one was supposed to do. While Bradbury may be sentimental, what makes his stories from The Foghorn to this one so haunting is that the stories don't dodge the tough issues in their sentiments, like loss and the unattainable things in life. It's far from simply maudlin sentiment.

Steve

And for a musical accompaniment, what about this from October Country from 1968: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjCQmLTffnM

Anonymous

Ouch, right in the feels! Chad's reading made me think he was about to burst into tears at any moment, or perhaps he did and is just really good at hiding it. I listened to this episode the night before my writers' salon (I work at a library) so I brought it up during discussion — which was serendipitous considering I had already prepared a hand-out of Bradbury's advice on writing. In particular I mentioned how Bradbury considered this his first great story; if you, as an author, can make yourself cry, you really have something. Also, the participants were astounded Bradbury could knock out something high-caliber in two hours.

Anonymous
>>28093250

I think you bring up a really good point about friendships and how sometimes they can be deeper than romantic relationships, even marriages. I think that's especially true of friendships made when one is young. I had a similar thought about divorce when listening to the episode on the Jar earlier. People used to stay married less out of social convention, though I'm sure that was a lot of it, than the fact that divorces were difficult to obtain. When they became easier to get in the 1970s, the divorce rate rose a great deal, but the rates of domestic violence, spousal murder and the suicide rate of married women dropped significantly. Not to mention the number of people trapped in bad marriages where they were miserable. I think divorce is much preferable to those alternatives.

Mike Nusbaum

This is my first post after supporting you from the beginning. This episode made me tear up. you conveyed it so well that I was truly moved. I haven’t read through all the comments but at the end, divergent from your opinions, it made me think of PTSD and repressed memories. As someone who’s been battling PTSD I thought the narrator was remembering something that he had repressed due to it’s emotional weight. He did see his love pulled from the surf as a young man. This is really how memories can work. I don’t think it’s a supernatural story. I think his memories were released when he finally went back. Also I’m a person who experienced this type of love at 15. She broke my heart but even though I’m married for 28 years with two children I occasionally think back to that love. It’s an illusion I know but as you say I’m trapped in time as well. I wouldn’t change anything but those memories do come back. The past is gone but it can still cause pain. That’s the price of growth. I

Anonymous

Beautiful story, beautifully discussed. I tend to skip the Bradbury sentimental stuff, but this one always gets me. As you said Chris, every sentence is just perfect. I agree that it probably can't be transferred successfully to another medium.

Jason Thompson

It's interesting how your tastes change as you grow up -- I read "The October Country" as a teenager and I remember the cool gross stories like "Skeleton" vividly but I didn't remember this one at all. It seems a lot more relevant once you're older.

Anonymous

Beautiful story. I can see why Ray Bradbury may have cried after writing it. It is one hell of an accomplishment! I have to say though, I have no idea where you two went with the ending. To me, it felt that when the main character went back to his home town he found closure from the events of his childhood and with someone close to him drowning in the lake. I didn't think he felt anything negative or less of his wife whatsoever. It is just different and he is unable to compare an innocent love from that time to a marriage in adulthood.

Jason Thompson

Given how some commenters didn't like this story because of the gendered dynamic, I'm honestly curious: would y'all find it more relatable or sympathetic if the genders were flipped, or if it involved a LGBT relationship? Setting aside Bradbury's eventual descent into grumpy-old-man-dom, I don't *think* there's anything innately gendered in the idea of becoming wistful for a lost love and checking out of your current relationship. Of course, I realize the text has its perspective and its biases, and it's a little ridiculous to ask readers to basically rewrite it until they like it. Myself, I'm old enough that I've both checked out of relationships and been checked out on, so I'm sympathetic to both the protagonist and his thinly-sketched spouse.

Anonymous
>>28187766

Jason, as an older gay man I can say I never felt alienated from this particular story. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I read it, probably 12 or so and like Chris and Chad said probably didn’t get into it much or I really just wanted it to be ghost story and was disappointed and confused. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to like this as one of the few Bradbury pieces that goes for the feels and not the thrills. Normally, I don’t like his wispy “life is a fading carousel of emotions dying in the autumn breeze” tales. This one is the exception. I never read it as ”straight-folks” or “straight man” problems and could easily see the protagonist as a woman or gay person. I don’t claim that any of the commentators disputing this are wrong. I just kind of believe Bradbury was right when he said he knew he had finally written something good. I suppose it is the writing more than anything that redeems it from other works. Like I said earlier, a lot of his sentimental stuff is or becomes maudlin. This one doesn’t, at least not for me. I’d rather read Something Wicked This Way Comes, but a short story like this is a pleasant interlude. As for what is the relationship with his wife at the end and so on, I don’t read too much into it, other than he has earned some wisdom, but so much is still unknown. You know like life.

Anonymous

I grew up just a couple miles from the shore of Lake Michigan, and have a lot of thoughts about this story - one brief factual: It sounds like Tally got caught in a rip current, which can sweep someone out and underwater quickly. Scary things, especially for a kid, and I remember the signs warning about it on the beach at my local state park. Which makes me think about my childhood at that park, and how I visit it today. I used to go there and ramble for hours, when I was 12 or 13 my parents let me cycle there by myself, and I continued to go there throughout high school and college. It's a lodestone for me and probably the place I feel the most contemplative and aware of myself. Sometimes over the years I've taken friends there to share what's such an important place to me. I look at them, and then always regret bringing them. They look at the water and nod their heads and keep walking. I usually get so frustrated that they don't seem to "Get" what an amazing place that is. Sometimes I remember that for them, it's just a scenic bit of shoreline, that they didn't stand there at important stages of their life and try to understand their place in the world and other people. But when we all leave, and I talk to my friends away from that place, everything's fine - of course it is! They're people I care about, hence wanting to share it in the first place. I guess what I'm ramblingly saying is that this is what I take from the protagonist's situation at the end of the story. The lake can bring a lot of memories and feelings to a person, and any outsider will seem like an intrusion. I don't think that means his relationship with Margaret is doomed, it just means that memory and emotion are always there within us, and certain places focus it much more than the rest of our passage through life.

Jason Thompson

Now that I think of it, Bradbury *did* (sorta) write a gender-flipped version of this story. I don't remember the title, but it's about an elderly woman who's obsessed with a boy/young man she once loved, who died young and thus is now "forever young and beautiful." It has a different emotional arc than "The Lake", though, and also, notably, there's no spouse character for the protagonist to be emotionally unfaithful to: the protagonist is either a widow or unmarried, I forget.

Anonymous

So far all Bradbury stories seem to involve a man who really dislikes his wife. Maybe I am reading too much into that. I am kind of ok with being one of the small percentage of listeners who is an idiot.

Anonymous

I think there is validity in the idea that people from our past, dead or alive, are sort of frozen in time in our memories. Obviously, if they die young, it's just that much more impressionable. But, in a way, all adult relationships are at a disadvantage to those of our youth. The novelty of all things back then makes it almost impossible for anything to compare to most of our experiences now. I certainly understand the character feeling longing for those emotions he felt in his past, but I don't think it means he looks at his adult partner as failing by comparison. If he does, then he would almost be denying all that life had taught him since that time. Odds are that his partner has had many such experiences in her own past, yet her road has led her to him. There's value in that, and they are probably better for having had those experiences.

Anonymous

Stories about kids reminded me of Thus I Refute Beelzy; http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?76253. Did you ever cover that?

Anonymous

Chad & Chris: I think the "Jack in the Box" story is really interesting & strange. But you missed the timing! Coming just before Halloween? It should have been the vampire story with a Bradburyan twist: "The Man Upstairs"! =o(

Anonymous

I was moved by the story. Reading some of the other comments here it's clear that attitudes towards it are divisive, and much of whether you liked it or not I think boils down to your assessment of Harold. I don't think we should be so quick to condemn Harold as sentimental or self-indulgent, even though he is trapped in the past and living in his own head. It's not just Tally's development that was arrested when she died but Harold's as well. Part of him remained twelve years old, and it's that twelve year old boy we would be accusing of being sentimental, self-indulgent, and sexist towards women. And then there's the whole debate on whether 'adulthood' as an emotional state even exists, even with the understanding that we are talking in relative terms as an average of one's peergroup. We are all pursuing a state of emotional fulfillment and maturity but at the end of the day there's no checklist to let us know if we've reached it. Another possibility more in line with the accusations is if you believe Harold is merely using the tragedy of Tally's loss as an excuse to account for the discontent in his current life, but I disagree with this because there is no evidence he was unhappy with his life or had the epiphany about his marriage prior to his return to the lake. The story is less 'Stuffed into the Fridge' trope, but a related one 'The Lost Lenore': https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLostLenore (specifically Annabel Lee, and Humbert Humbert's Annabel Leigh) which I don't think automatically makes it bad, as all powerful or evocative ideas eventually become tropes. I've only ever dipped my toe into Ray Bradbury's work... and even then my exposure to him came mainly from secondary adaptations like the Bradbury 13 radio drama series or The Halloween Tree cartoon. It's clear now I have to go back and read through The October Country and his other collections.

Anonymous

Well, consider me a paid-up idiot. When it came to the wet face I thought I was listening to hppodcraft, and naturally concluded a sea beasty was on the attack. The only things under attack were my FEELINGS. Excellent reading guys! I'm really enjoying these Bradburys.

Anonymous

I am that one dumb listener of your show :) English is not my first language and the part about the wet face, which meant he was crying, went completely over my head when I read the story. Thank you for explaining, Chad