Bradbury Challenge - Day One
Dec. 15th, 2025 03:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1 A. David and I had a phone call the other day where he told me he's doing the Bradbury Challenge -- apparently something Ray Bradbury said during an interview or lecture, where he challenged his audience to read one poem, one essay, and one short story every night before bed. A. David had been doing this for a while and really enjoyed it, and I thought it sounded fun too.
I did an inventory of the short story and essay collections I already have but haven't read yet and it's some good stuff but also a little sparse -- for essays, it's The Triggering Town (Richard Hugo, I think), Nobody Knows My Name (James Baldwin), Our Women on the Ground ("essays by Arab women from the Arab world"), White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion), Sexually Speaking (Gore Vidal), plus a T.E. Lawrence selection of essays and some science/nature-writing anthologies.
None of these were immediately interesting and novel enough to entice me -- I've had them all for too long XD So I went on Internet Archive and did three searches, one for "poems," one for "essays," and one for "short stories" and came up with a pretty good selection for my first night.
Poem: "Memorial" by Audre Lorde.
This is a short, rhyming, expertly-crafted poem in four stanzas about death/grief. Favorite line: "only those who stay dead / shall remember death." But I also love a line from the final stanza, something like, "we sit here beneath two different years" -- I like the implication at the last second that this isn't a conversation between a dead person and their living relative, but between two dead lovers sharing a grave.
Essay: "That We Should Lie Down With the Lamb" by Charles Lamb, the Victorian fella who famously chopped up Shakespeare's plays and reformatted them into child-friendly abridgements. My parents got Rich an anthology of Lamb's Shakespeare stories when he was six or seven, and he was PISSED.
It's a fun essay, though. Very short -- one page, maybe -- and very lyrical. It's all about candlelight and darkness: how light affects the senses, and how unnatural light (the candle) is better for your romantic, sensuous side than natural sunlight -- especially when it comes to creating art, and to understanding artwork that other people have made. Lamb argues that no good art has ever been made in the day (obviously humorously) and that the best way to parse said art is to do so at night with a flickering candle nearby.
Short Story: "A Richer Dust" by Noel Coward.
This is almost a novella, formatted in around 10 chapters with a prologue as well. It follows Morgan Kent, an ultra-famous Hollywood actor in the 40s, whose hungover day at the pool is ruined when his wife brings him a letter from his kid brother Sid. Morgan is first irritated by the fact that Sid uses his real name in the greeting ("Les" as in "Leslie") and then alarmed when he realizes that Sid's ship is stopping near L.A. and Sid will come to visit soon.
The truth is that Sid's always been the better of them -- he's moral, hard-working, kind, loving. And he genuinely hero-worships Morgan, who doesn't deserve it one bit and is deeply insecure about it. He's simmering with rage during Sid's visit, humiliated by Sid's affectionate stories of their lower-class English childhood, and bitterly jealous of all the attention Sid gets for being a Royal sailor during the early years of WWII. He wishes secretly that Sid's ship will sink and he'll die -- and he gets that wish! Not long after, a telegram arrives informing Morgan that Sid is missing, presumed dead.
Morgan's career really takes off after that. Everyone in Hollywood is soooo sympathetic to him about his brother's death; he plays Stoic Grief very well, and he gets the best roles of his life -- all in war movies, playing heroes. But his bubble bursts when an emaciated, haggard Sid reappears in L.A. for a surprise visit. Sid's ship did sink, but he survived for 10 days on a raft, was taken prisoner by the Japanese, escaped a POW camp, and is making his way back home. The media goes wild, and Sid gets the full Hollywood treatment -- mobs of photographers, invitations to the best parties, adoring press. It wearies Sid, and he's glad to return home to England -- and it infuriates Morgan. Worse, his next two movies are such awful duds that his contract is severed; he develops an ulcer that affects his acting, and the studio sends him on a humiliating USO tour.
During that tour Morgan finds some measure of peace and is even looking forward to the tour's eventual end -- in England. He hasn't been back home since he changed his name and found fame in Hollywood. But his ulcer completely downs him, and the USO tour goes to England without him, while he recuperates. When he does finally go back home years later, his father is dead, his sister has two kids, and Sid is getting married himself. His mother is frail and elderly. There's a very melancholy tinge to this whole scene, and Morgan's briefly happy as he catches up with everyone. But soon they run out of things to say. He finds it odd that they won't talk about the devastation of the war; he's keenly aware that they were all here (or fighting), facing the bombs together, while he stayed in a mansion in Hollywood, unsure if the bombing of London was even a true fact or if it was just propaganda.
Morgan stands to leave; his mother rushes after him to say one last thing in private. Morgan, and the reader, think it'll be something sweet or hopeful or sad, but instead, she tells him in a rush that she's awfully sorry about his ulcer -- but she also found the whole ulcer thing embarrassing, so she's told everyone it was a tubercular lung instead.
I LOVED THIS. Dry, funny, kind of subtly sad, filled with quick little commentaries on patriotism, war (I love when Morgan goes to Canada to promote War Bonds and is puzzled and surly about the less-than-enthusiastic response), happiness, success, antisemitism, gossip, etc. It's also a great sense-and-vision depiction of Hollywood in the 40s. And I learned a new word for "spitoon" -- "cuspidor." Never heard that one before, sounds hilariously fancy. Morgan is a deliciously unlikable main character.
---
I don't know if I'll update every day with the Bradbury Challenge, or if maybe I'll just do a weekly review instead highlighting my favorites. I'm keeping a written journal to go along with this, that way, regardless of what I decide re: Dreamwidth updates, I'll have some brief notes on each essay/poem/short story to refresh my memory.
I did an inventory of the short story and essay collections I already have but haven't read yet and it's some good stuff but also a little sparse -- for essays, it's The Triggering Town (Richard Hugo, I think), Nobody Knows My Name (James Baldwin), Our Women on the Ground ("essays by Arab women from the Arab world"), White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion), Sexually Speaking (Gore Vidal), plus a T.E. Lawrence selection of essays and some science/nature-writing anthologies.
None of these were immediately interesting and novel enough to entice me -- I've had them all for too long XD So I went on Internet Archive and did three searches, one for "poems," one for "essays," and one for "short stories" and came up with a pretty good selection for my first night.
Poem: "Memorial" by Audre Lorde.
This is a short, rhyming, expertly-crafted poem in four stanzas about death/grief. Favorite line: "only those who stay dead / shall remember death." But I also love a line from the final stanza, something like, "we sit here beneath two different years" -- I like the implication at the last second that this isn't a conversation between a dead person and their living relative, but between two dead lovers sharing a grave.
Essay: "That We Should Lie Down With the Lamb" by Charles Lamb, the Victorian fella who famously chopped up Shakespeare's plays and reformatted them into child-friendly abridgements. My parents got Rich an anthology of Lamb's Shakespeare stories when he was six or seven, and he was PISSED.
It's a fun essay, though. Very short -- one page, maybe -- and very lyrical. It's all about candlelight and darkness: how light affects the senses, and how unnatural light (the candle) is better for your romantic, sensuous side than natural sunlight -- especially when it comes to creating art, and to understanding artwork that other people have made. Lamb argues that no good art has ever been made in the day (obviously humorously) and that the best way to parse said art is to do so at night with a flickering candle nearby.
Short Story: "A Richer Dust" by Noel Coward.
This is almost a novella, formatted in around 10 chapters with a prologue as well. It follows Morgan Kent, an ultra-famous Hollywood actor in the 40s, whose hungover day at the pool is ruined when his wife brings him a letter from his kid brother Sid. Morgan is first irritated by the fact that Sid uses his real name in the greeting ("Les" as in "Leslie") and then alarmed when he realizes that Sid's ship is stopping near L.A. and Sid will come to visit soon.
The truth is that Sid's always been the better of them -- he's moral, hard-working, kind, loving. And he genuinely hero-worships Morgan, who doesn't deserve it one bit and is deeply insecure about it. He's simmering with rage during Sid's visit, humiliated by Sid's affectionate stories of their lower-class English childhood, and bitterly jealous of all the attention Sid gets for being a Royal sailor during the early years of WWII. He wishes secretly that Sid's ship will sink and he'll die -- and he gets that wish! Not long after, a telegram arrives informing Morgan that Sid is missing, presumed dead.
Morgan's career really takes off after that. Everyone in Hollywood is soooo sympathetic to him about his brother's death; he plays Stoic Grief very well, and he gets the best roles of his life -- all in war movies, playing heroes. But his bubble bursts when an emaciated, haggard Sid reappears in L.A. for a surprise visit. Sid's ship did sink, but he survived for 10 days on a raft, was taken prisoner by the Japanese, escaped a POW camp, and is making his way back home. The media goes wild, and Sid gets the full Hollywood treatment -- mobs of photographers, invitations to the best parties, adoring press. It wearies Sid, and he's glad to return home to England -- and it infuriates Morgan. Worse, his next two movies are such awful duds that his contract is severed; he develops an ulcer that affects his acting, and the studio sends him on a humiliating USO tour.
During that tour Morgan finds some measure of peace and is even looking forward to the tour's eventual end -- in England. He hasn't been back home since he changed his name and found fame in Hollywood. But his ulcer completely downs him, and the USO tour goes to England without him, while he recuperates. When he does finally go back home years later, his father is dead, his sister has two kids, and Sid is getting married himself. His mother is frail and elderly. There's a very melancholy tinge to this whole scene, and Morgan's briefly happy as he catches up with everyone. But soon they run out of things to say. He finds it odd that they won't talk about the devastation of the war; he's keenly aware that they were all here (or fighting), facing the bombs together, while he stayed in a mansion in Hollywood, unsure if the bombing of London was even a true fact or if it was just propaganda.
Morgan stands to leave; his mother rushes after him to say one last thing in private. Morgan, and the reader, think it'll be something sweet or hopeful or sad, but instead, she tells him in a rush that she's awfully sorry about his ulcer -- but she also found the whole ulcer thing embarrassing, so she's told everyone it was a tubercular lung instead.
I LOVED THIS. Dry, funny, kind of subtly sad, filled with quick little commentaries on patriotism, war (I love when Morgan goes to Canada to promote War Bonds and is puzzled and surly about the less-than-enthusiastic response), happiness, success, antisemitism, gossip, etc. It's also a great sense-and-vision depiction of Hollywood in the 40s. And I learned a new word for "spitoon" -- "cuspidor." Never heard that one before, sounds hilariously fancy. Morgan is a deliciously unlikable main character.
---
I don't know if I'll update every day with the Bradbury Challenge, or if maybe I'll just do a weekly review instead highlighting my favorites. I'm keeping a written journal to go along with this, that way, regardless of what I decide re: Dreamwidth updates, I'll have some brief notes on each essay/poem/short story to refresh my memory.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-15 05:08 pm (UTC)"Toreador, don't spit on the floor
Use the cuspidor
That's what it's for."
Why did I ever learn that, and why can I remember it all these years later? No clue.
The Bradbury challenge sounds interesting, but I think my eyes would start to close before I got through an entire short story and an essay if I tried to read both right before bed.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-15 08:12 pm (UTC)