Ray Bradbury Challenge 21/3000

7 stories, 7 essays, 7 poems. Jackpot!

Hello! If you haven’t heard it yet, I’ve decided to take the Ray Bradbury Challenge, and read one short story, one poem and one essay a day… for 1000 days. You can find more about the challenge and my reasons in last Sunday’s Fictitious. From now on, I’ll be sharing the stuff I read every week.

So, first week done. My general feeling is that the challenge is a bit harder than I thought. Finding stuff to read isn't the hardest part, it's finding the time and keeping focused. I’m not going to go all Atomic Habits on this one though. Just read, read, read. That should do the trick.

Not my bookshelf

Starting the challenge, I didn't have a clear understanding of what these posts will look like, so in a few weeks’ time, the form might change. For now, it's gonna be something between a diary, mini-reviews and notes. I’ll try my best to link to pieces that can be found online. If you see a title underlined, it means there’s a link behind it.

📢 Finding another 2979 worthwhile things to read will be impossible without your recommendations. So if you’ve got a favourite poem, story or essay (even better if it’s one of your own), drop a link in the comments below! You can also email me at tuxunefo@gmail.com.

September 26

Story. Ray Bradbury. The Trolley. I couldn’t find a better author to start the challenge with than Bradbury himself. It’s one of the shorter ones in the collection of his stories I own, probably not one of his best either. It’s a double nostalgia piece. Bradbury’s nostalgic about his childhood, and I’m nostalgic about my childhood reading him. It’s beautiful prose as well, with passages like:

And Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the gray glove waving, and dropped from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats and there was no charge.

Essay. Christopher Hitchens. Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite. I hope Hitch’s legacy is going to be his writing skills, and not his militant atheism or questionable political leanings. In this piece, Hitchens takes a little drop of annoyance (“The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of the second kind of bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself, but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle.”) and brews it into a masterful rant.

Poem. Walt Whitman. Song of the universal. This is going to be a recurring topic in the RBC (Ray Bradbury Challenge) series, so brace yourself. You know how there are certain authors you always think you’ve read? Maybe you had to pretend you had read them to impress a girl you liked in college. Whitman was one of those authors. I had a little black Penguin book of his poems on my shelf for YEARS. Reading Whitman for the first time is magical though. And it also sent me back to one of the best movies ever:

September 27

Story. Flannery O’Connor. Enoch and the Gorilla. I read some O'Connor in American Lit (my favourite elective) more than 10 years ago. It’s been a while. What always amazed me about O'Connor though was how her stories are not speculative fiction but still manage to mess with you. Enoch and the Gorilla's quite grim, and the guy stealing a gorilla suit reminded me of Kobo Abe’s Box Man. Also, if you ever thought that Flannery O'Connor was a man, you're not alone.

Alex Dobrenko. An essay I can’t mention the title of yet. I read fellow STSC member Alex Dobrenko’s latest essay, which was heartfelt, funny and… still unpublished! I can't disclose much detail, but if you want to discover a genuinely funny writer (who reminds me of Gary Shteyngart), Alex is your guy. And maybe this humble mention will push him to publish the essay. UPD: Alex’s essay “my grandpa, my car, and also me” is out!

Poetry. Mahmoud Darwish. On This Land. Not learning Arabic beyond the marhabas and the shukrans is something I regret a lot, especially when I hear Arabic poetry. Mahmoud Darwish’s quintessentially Palestinian poem On This Land is beautiful in translation, but sounds so amazingly better in the poet's mother tongue. Here you can hear it performed in both English and Arabic by Omar Offendum, a very formidable lyricist in his own right:

September 28

Story. Philip K. Dick. Minority Report. Minority Report is one of those stories that I thought I’d read. It’s funny how we create fake memories like this (wink wink, PKD). I’m sure I’ve seen the Tom Cruise movie but Dick’s adaptations, apart from A Scanner Darkly, are usually too far from the original.

Essay. Stephen J. Downs. The Jetsons, Now 60 Years Old, Is Iconic. That’s a Problem. Growing up, I knew The Jetsons to be basically Flintstones in space (and yes, there was at least one cross-over episode). Little did I know how much the pretty formulaic cartoon show influenced technology design and the “future” we live in right now.

Poetry. Orhan Veli. Ağacım (My tree). It felt like cheating to read an 11-line Turkish modernist poem, so I decided to at least translate it into English. So here goes my translation:

If there were another tree
In our neighbourhood
I wouldn’t love you as much.

But if you knew how to play
Hopscotch* with us
I’d love you even more.

Oh beautiful tree!
When you dry out
I hope we’re already
Living in another neighbourhood.

* The original has a different game mentioned (one that involves pebbles), but I couldn’t find a good equivalent in English. Generally speaking, children's games’ naming is an interesting topic. Take “tag”, for example. According to my short poll on Facebook, in Lithuania, there are at least 20 names for this one game, varying not just from town to town, but from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.

September 29

Story. Ted Chiang. What’s Expected of Us. This is a super short story (3 pages) that expresses the haunting realization that free will might not exist better than any long tirade you’ve seen delivered by New Atheists in the aughts.

Essay. Noah Charney. Cracking the Sitcom Code. Sitcoms are predictable, and that’s why it’s easy to watch them. You probably knew that already, but reading about the actual formula that many screenwriters use might help you add another layer to your sitcom experience. Couple that with Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, and you too can be that annoying guy who comments on episode structure:

Poetry. Bukowski. So you want to be a writer? I haven’t read Bukowski in ages, and reading him in my 30s feels so different from reading him in my 20s. It’s hard for me now to relate to the whole shtick of:

don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

When I was younger, I thought that writing (or at least LARPing as a writer) had something to do with getting drunk and spending a lot of time inside one’s head. Today, I think you just need to write. A lot.

September 30

Story. Franz Kafka. On the Tram. I chose this story as it was the shortest in the collection I own, and I was really in a hurry. The story (less than a page long) invites us into the mind of a young man staring at the world and this one girl he sees on the tram.

Essay. Ian Alan Paul. Are Prisons Computers? Hands down the most complicated essay I read last week, Are Prisons Computers? reimagines the relationship between prisons (actual and metaphorical) and digitality through the writings of Foucault and Deleuze. Being away from academic texts since my attempt at getting a Master’s, I really struggled with the text, which only means that there will be more similar texts on the reading list in the near future. It’s a challenge after all, not a walk in the park!

Poetry. Lioha Nikonov. My Russia sits in prison… Последние Танки в Париже was one of my favourite bands in my late teens, and I’ve read at least 3 of the lead singer’s poetry collections. The imagery of his poems is quite grim (Chechen War, Beslan tragedy, Putin, drugs, sad sex). It’s even grimmer to read his anti-regime poetry from the early 2010s in 2022, seeing that most of the things not only didn’t change for the better but took a turn for the worst.

October 1

Story. Ben Lerner. The Media. That was a fun and weird read. I didn’t really get whether the people in the story were insects, or vice versa. The New Yorker page also has the story read by the author, if that’s your thing.

Essay. Sarah Kendzior. Can Minor Languages Make Revolution? Just like reading Nikonov’s poetry and seeing that little has changed in 10 years, the same is true for this piece. It follows two Uzbek activists, who live-Tweet their hunger strike, yet no one seems to take notice. That was 11 years ago, but feels like today.

John Freeman. The Ex-Basketball Players. I wish I were as good of a storyteller as John Freeman. So many layers. So much energy. And it’s about 90s Yugoslavia.

October 2

Story. Jorge Luis Borges. Los Teologos. Some Borges’ stories read like fake Wikipedia articles (yes, I’m aware the maestro was a librarian). This is one of them but it’s quite a ride. The gist given by Wikipedia is:

The story follows Aurelian and John of Pannonia, who compete with one another as theologians. Though much of their work is a thinly veiled criticism of one another, the topic of their writing is regarding the heretical factions that appear around them such as the Monotoni, whose heresy is to preach that "history is a circle, and that all things have existed and will exist again", and the Histrioni, who argue that all individuals occupy dual forms--one on earth and one in heaven--and that actions on earth influence heaven.

Essay. Kelefa Sanneh. The message: why should hip-hop have to teach us anything? Articles like this make me realize how little I know about music and the way it shapes the world around us. A great read for anyone whose hip-hop journey started before the advent of mumble rap (a genre the author chose to just ignore, maybe for the better). Obligatory soundtrack:

Poem. Arthur Sze. Transpirations. A nice, uplifting and Zen poem to end the first week. First time reading anything by Sze, definitely adding his big fat book of poems (500+ pages, people!) to my ever-growing reading list.

Final thoughts

Thanks to everyone who recommended stuff to read: Malcolm, Vanya, Anne, Mark, Frank, and others I forgot to mention. If you have something you’d want to recommend, share it in the comments below.

You can also buy me a coffee☕! All proceeds will go towards buying books and other content I’ll be reading for this challenge that will last 1000 days.

Until next time,

Oleg