Ray Bradbury Challenge 42/3000

Reaching the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

Hello! Welcome to the second installment of my Ray Bradbury Challenge, where I read one short story, one poem and one essay a day… for 1000 days. 2958 things left to read.

I must confess one thing. I bent a few rules last week. Due to unfortunate planning issues (more like failure to plan, am I right, Churchill?), most of my reading got postponed till Sunday. If there’s one thing I took away from college, is that you must do everything last minute. Live on the edge. That’s the law.

For convenience's sake, I’ll keep the day-by-day structure of the post, even if it’s just a farce this time.

Having to cram everything into a few hours added a layer of anxiety to the fine serving of guilt I already felt. Never again. Now, I have a spreadsheet, and you know it gets serious when you have to fill in 7 cells per title. It’s a bit of a mess now, but I’ll probably share it with you all next week.

📢 Finding another 2958 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 or by responding to this email.

BTW, it’s great to connect with other people doing similar challenges. Nathan, who writes the Barbarian Grunge newsletter, has the goal of reading two short stories a day. I might be swiping a story or two from his list for next week. Check him out:

Read Two Short Stories a Day

October 3

Essay. George Orwell. Politics and the English language. Working as an editor/PR rep/copywriter, I had to edit reams of texts written by people who just love it boring and dry. Political layer aside, Orwell’s essay is a must-read for anyone who has to argue with others about the bland language used in articles, press releases and other formats.

Orwell talks about how blandness creeps in, providing an example of how the beautiful language of Ecclesiastes can be turned into utter drivel. Just compare:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet 6 riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

VS.

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

And if you want to avoid turning beauty into garbage, here’s a few handy rules (written by Orwell himself, and broken by yours truly numerous times in this post alone):

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous

Story. Ernest Hemmingway. Cat in the rain. This is a textbook example of Hemmingway’s Iceberg Theory, where the author purposefully omits details, letting the reader fill in the gap. While great in theory, in practice it gives birth to horrrrrible interpretative essays. I googled a few and they sent me right back to high school Literature class, where we had to endlessly discuss what Turgenev or Dostoyevsky meant by this thing or the other. I still have nightmares about those classes.

Poem. Constantine P. Cavafy. Ithaka. One of my favourite poems of all time. I’ll spare you my interpretation and just provide it in full (translated by Edmund Keeley):

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

October 4

Essay. John Peel. Record shops. The late John Peel, one of the most influential radio DJs, writing about his record-shopping habits? Yes, please! I only wish I was as passionate and, by proxy, knowledgeable about a subject as Peel. Speaking of influence, there’s a whole Fan Wiki on Peel, with 16,000+ entries! Definitely going to dip my finger in that treasure trove. There’s also a show, where his son invites different musicians to explore his enormous record collection:

Story. Daniil Harms. Lecture. I was never a big Harms reader, but there’s just something about this absurdist writer that makes me remember the silliest stories years after reading them. I haven’t read his Lecture story before, though. It’s so short, I’ll just provide my translation here:

Pushkov said:

- A woman is a love machine.

And then he got punched in the face.

- What for? - Pushkov asked.

Having not received an answer to his question, he continued:

- Here's what I think: a woman should be approached from below. Women love it and only pretend not to.

Someone punched Pushkov in the face again.

- What is this, comrades! I'm not going to talk at all then, said Pushkov.

But after waiting for a quarter of a minute, he went on:

- A woman is arranged in such a way that she is all soft and wet.

Someone punched Pushkov in the face again. Pushkov tried to pretend he didn't notice it and continued:

- If you try to smell a woman...

But then Pushkov got whacked in the face so hard that he grabbed his cheek and said:

- Comrades, it is absolutely impossible to give a lecture under such conditions. If this happens again, I'll shut up.

Pushkov waited a quarter of a minute and went on:

- Where were we? Ah yes! So... A woman likes to look at herself. She sits in front of the mirror completely naked...

After uttering this word, Pushkov got punched in the face again.

- Naked, - repeated Pushkov.

"Bang!" someone punched him in the face.

- Naked! - Shouted Pushkov.

"Bang!" - right in the mug.

- Naked! A naked woman! A naked broad! - shouted Pushkov.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" - Puszkow got hit in the face.

- A naked broad holding a ladle! - shouted Pushkov.

"Bang! Bang!" the blows fell on Pushkov.

- A broad's tail! - shouted Pushkov, dodging blows. - A naked nun!

But then he got hit so badly that he fainted and collapsed on the floor.

Poem. Tomas Tranströmer. Traffic. I remember reading Tranströmer’s poetry on the 1st of January in 2015 or 2016, in an old cemetery in the artsy district of Užupis. Poetry, unlike any other genre, has this quality of clinging to a certain memory. I found a web copy of the same page of the very same journal I had in my hands that chilly day, but all the texts seem different now. You can find those poems translated from Swedish to Lithuanian here.

October 5

Essay. Audrius Dambrauskas. Return of a Star: Olga Chekhova in 1933 Lithuania (LT). I found this essay in an old issue of Nemunas, a local literary magazine. It tells the story of how the Lithuanian audience treated the theatre and cinema actress Olga Chekhova (who, according to Wikipedia, might have been a Soviet spy tasked with flirting with Hitler). I love reading pieces about the arts at the beginning of the 20th century, as it shows how little has changed. For example, a local newsletter was quite harsh in its criticism, talking about how “a cinema actress can’t really compete on the theatre scene with a real theatre actress”. Interestingly, modern Lithuanian cinema/TV actors, who had cut their teeth on the theatre scene, get the same kind of criticism (just in reverse).

Story. George Saunders. Sticks. I’d only heard Saunders’ surname before but never actually read any of his work. And I stumbled upon Sticks, because it was one of the shortest stories on some list of flash fiction, a genre I usually avoid. Guilty! But what a great find that was. Seriously, read the story and just marvel at what a brilliant artist can do in just TWO paragraphs.

Poetry. Edgar Allan Poe. A Dream within a Dream. I don’t have much to say about this, so I leave you with this short movie instead. It’s kind of neat.

October 6

Essay. Kirill Kobrin. The Nightmare of Robert Stevenson (RU). It’s fascinating how many horror/gothic characters of the 19th century have turned into memes. Frankenstein (his monster, rather than the professor), Count Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde. I haven't read either of the three books, yet I’ve seen the characters take bizarre shapes in various adaptations (Hyde and Hare with Bugs Bunny, Hyde and Go Tweet with Sylvester and Tweety, and a million others). The adaptations have erased all the nuance and made those characters into primitive archetypes. Or at least that’s Kobrin’s take. I’m yet to read the source material, so this stops being my reference point:

Story. Lucia Berlin. Carpe Diem. Recommended by DB (thanks, DB!), Berlin is going to be an author I’ll hopefully return to throughout this 1000-day challenge of mine. Carpe Diem is (at least to me, I’m no story interpreter) about change, ageing and maybe even anxiety? A worthy read, for sure.

Poem. Rudyard Kipling. If—. To quote Charles McGrath’s article in the New Yorker: “Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some scholars have argued that his views were more complicated than he is given credit for—to some degree he really was all those things”. Does it make his writings today… problematic? I need to read more to find out! If— is a beautiful piece of writing, though, and I hope it doesn’t get co-opted by Men’s Rights Activists or Alpha Male trainers.

October 7

Essay. Peter Bakker. "The Language of the Coast Tribes is Half Basque": A Basque-American Indian Pidgin in Use between Europeans and Native Americans in North America, ca. 1540-ca. 1640. I don’t usually read 30-page research papers on extinct pidgins, but when I do, my brain gets the highest dose of geeky armchair linguist satisfaction possible. So, imagine this. You’re a French/British explorer coming to what is now Canada a couple of generations after Columbus’ journey. You’re greeted by locals. Only not in their native tongue, but in a language that sounds just like Basque. Wouldn’t it make your jaw drop? If you just want to peek into the rabbit hole, here’s the Wikipedia article on the Algonquian–Basque pidgin. Also, thank God for Sci-Hub, without which I wouldn’t have been able to read the original article.

Story. Ray Bradbury. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. I think I’ll be reading at least one Bradbury story a week, since it’s his challenge. I liked this story, where the only character is a priest during confession. It’s spooky but wholesome. Note to self: I’ve always wanted to write a story set on both sides of the confessional.

Poem. Artur Rimbaud. A season in hell. As most poems this week, this belongs to authors I’ve read as a soppy teenager. One of the many reasons I liked Rimbaud was the fact that in Cyrillic his name “Рембо” looked so similar to “Рэмбо” (Rambo). I was a sucker for lame wordplay like that before my first hangover.

October 8

Essay. Kristina Sabaliauskaitė. Atsakymas p. Georgijui Jefremovui, arba „Na silu mil ne budeš“ (LT, as you can tell). I read an essay by famous Lithuanian novelist Kristina Sabaliauskaitė, where she opposes some person I had never heard of before who, in turn, opposes the decision to rename the Russian Theatre in Vilnius to the Old Vilnius Theatre. Honestly, this is not a race I have a dog in, as I’m a very very infrequent theatre spectator. Still, it was interesting to read the arguments and learn a bit or two of the Theatre’s (which was “Russian” only for a fraction of its lifetime) history.

Story. Ted Chiang. Exhalation. If you love Borges, you will love Chiang, simple as that. Some of his stories are similar in tone, others in structure or in theme. It doesn’t mean that he’s imitating Borges, though. Both are equally genius.

Poem. Gertrude Stein. Cezanne. I’ve only read about Stein in Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast, where she was portrayed as quite eccentric. I then heard her surname on Jeopardy, which nudged me to explore her meandering poetry. And her meandering poetry is quite meandering. Quite meandering and nice.

October 9

Essay. Slavenka Drakulic. We are all Albanians. I saw this article recommended on Twitter by one Kazakh activist. The parallels between the mindset described in the article and the mindset seen in Russia today (or at least the snippets I see online and on TV):

Clearly, this young woman, like so many Serbs, does not want to understand that her country is at war. They still seem to be thinking, What has all this to do with me?

Story. Flannery O’Connor. Why do the heathens rage? The shortest of O’Connor’s stories (pure accident!), this one hit close to home. The Biblical references (the title itself is taken from Psalms) might have flown over my head, but the take on masculinity, which can be interpreted in many different ways, stuck with me for good.

Poem. Kahlil Gibran. On Religion. Want a fun factoid for the end of this RBC post? Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi. Now, you have one more piece of trivia to amaze friends and loved ones.

Final thoughts

To make the challenge even more fun, I’m thinking of doing themed weeks. For October, it’s going to be SPOOOOKY. If you have something you’d want to recommend (a ghost story, a zombie poem, a vampire romance), share it in the comments below (or email me at tuxunefo@gmail.com).

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