Hi friends! Long time, no see!
Last week, I started the Bradbury Challenge. This is a reading and writing challenge posed by Ray Bradbury in the early 2000’s. It’s simple in theory: every day for 1000 days, you must read one poem, one essay, and one short story. Simultaneously, you must write one short story of your own every week for 52 weeks.
Of course, the real challenge is building the habit of finding material and reading it consistently– not to mention finding the time. There’s no “getting ahead” by crushing twenty poems in a day. The counter re-sets every day. Seven days in, I’m already feeling gentle pressure to find the time. This is exactly what I was hoping for.
I’m going to try and do this from memory:
The poems I read this week are Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats, Come to Dust by Ursula K Le Guin, Sonnet 1 by Shakespeare, The Hardships of Traveling the Road I by Li Bai, On Second Hill by Le Guin, On the Sea by Keats, and Lullaby by Le Guin.
The short stories I read this week are The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Veldt by Ray Bradbury, Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin, With Her Eyes by CiXin Liu, A Cat Among the Rabbits by Lu Xun, A Comedy of Ducks by Lu Xun, and The Wandering Earth by CiXin Liu
The essays I read this week are Chance the Rapper’s Golden Year by Hanif Abdurraquib, A Night in Bruce Springsteen’s America by Abdurraqib, A Citizen of Mondath by Ursula K Le Guin, Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons by Le Guin, The Broken Thread of Tradition by Hannah Arendt, Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back by Abdurraqib, and The Night Prince Walked on Water by Abdurraquib.
Nice! Part of the reason this challenge is appealing to me is that I’m looking for more opportunities to be fully present with material I’m consuming. Remembering each of them is a good sign, but it wasn’t as easy as I would’ve hoped. All too often, I scroll on endless feeds only to forget nearly all of what I watched.
I’ve felt embarrassed in more than one conversation when I think of reference to “something I saw online one time” only to not remember the post fully enough to form a coherent connection, and for no one present to have seen the same post. Where I once felt that being constantly online kept me “in the know,” with memes, current events, and what’s popular, I now feel the opposite. The internet (or my personal version of it) gives me a far more nebulous sense of what’s current. Scrolling mindlessly, I feel like some sort of medium– tranced and communing with the zeitgeist.
For that reason, I’ve been seeking recommendations from friends more actively. I have incentive to get around to them very quickly— when’s the last time you recommend a piece of media to someone and they checked it out the next day (or the same day)? Trying not to pat myself on the back here, but I did that this week— and I’d be really be proud to be known as that kind of person.
A few notes to myself:
• If I stopped the challenge tomorrow, I would be better off for having done just one week of it than if I hadn’t attempted it at all. In my eyes, it is already a success.
• I plan to have a sense of discipline around the challenge, and also be reasonable about it. If (when) I miss a day, or forget to read a poem, or pick a story that’s too long for a particular day, I will not have failed— I won’t decide that I’ve failed the challenge, I won’t decide that perfection is the only option, and I won’t imagine that I’m somehow worse off than when I started. The challenge isn’t over if (when) this happens.
• I also won’t fall behind. If I miss a day (or part of it), there’s nothing to make up (though I may decide not to count that day towards the 1000). The challenge is to read every day, and bake it into my routines as best as I can– I don’t need to play catch-up in repentance to myself for the sin of imperfection. It doesn’t work like that.
This week, I’ll begin the writing portion! I gave myself a pass last week because I started the challenge on Tuesday– this week, I make no such bargains. I’m excited to see what kinds of weird, unwieldy words my hands produce!
I might make more posts like this as I go— whenever I have fresh reflections on the challenge, perhaps?
Thanks for reading 🙂 – Sam Cote
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