Languor Management

Precisely docile and legible

This Hungarian exhibit on mass gymnastics under communism may have only seemed interesting at 4am when staring at the ceiling failed to hold my interest, but I was hoping all this revolutionary vigor would help me fall back to sleep. It didn't. I hope it helps you.

The purpose of this exhibition is to explore how this symbolic potential was confronted with and transformed by the communist ideology in mass gymnastic rituals all over Eastern Europe. It will study how the key concepts that the mass gymnastic performances offered - strength, youth, beauty and discipline - were transformed into symbols of a strong, young, beautiful and disciplined socialist society, and how this was used to legitimize the leadership, which observed these rituals from the tribunes of stadiums.

The guy in the Flash intro looks distractingly like Jack from Will & Grace, doesn't he?

Monday begins on saturday

CESLIT.org points us to a strange little archive of Soviet era translations of Russian novels and stories (mostly children's stories). Many of these link to HTML pages but most go to Zipped or otherwise compacted files.

In the USSR English language publishing was regarded as a propaganda tool. After the USSR disintegrated, the financing stopped and most of those publishing houses collapsed. The books are not likely to be published again in the future. Some of them are class struggle motivated and very intolerant. Some, especially children's books, make nice reading. But they all make a monument of the epoch...The aim of this tiny collection is to preserve those translations for students of the epoch

The good or bad nature of life after the Velvet Revolution

In No Saints or Angels, Ivan Klima tells the story of Kristyna, a divorcee dentist dealing with the conditions of life in Prague, circa 1998: Her hardline communist father has passed away, her ex-husband is dying of cancer, and her only daughter, Jana, is increasingly alienated. To add to the pressure, Kristyna begins a love affair with Jan, a former student of her ex-husband's, and receives a number of threatening letters from an unknown correspondent.

In fact, Klima's opinion of young people appears to be rather negative, to put it mildly. After reading No Saints or Angels, you'd be forgiven for thinking that all Prague teenagers are drug addicts who engage in petty thievery, vandalism and group sex. You would have trouble finding any examples to the contrary.

Not surprisingly, they argued

Robert Dessaix's Twilight of Love looks at Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev life and work.

Turgenev was an atheist who deplored his country's cultural backwardness; Dostoevsky was a religious fanatic and a bigoted nationalist. Where Turgenev's fiction was understated and stylish, Dostoevsky's was furious and bombastic

Like giant toadstools yearning for respectability

Knopf just rolled out Collected Poems By Donald Justice. My birthday is September 3, if anyone is stumped as to what to get me...

Wafts of old incense mixed with Cuban coffee Hung on the air; a fan turned; it was summer. And (of the buried life) some last aroma Still clung to the tumbled cushions of the sofa.

At lesson time, pushed back, it used to be
The thing we managed somehow just to miss
With our last-second dips and whirls — all this
While the Victrola wound down gradually.

Read an excerpt.

Produced by an author appearing on the threshold of a book

Konstantin Vaginov's Satyr Chorus (translated by Chris Lovett):

  For some time now, Petersburg has been shaded for me in a greenish color, glimmering and glinting, a ghastly color, phosphorescent. Snaky and snickering, a greenish flame quivers on buildings, on faces, and in souls. A flame will flicker--and it's not Pyotr Petrovich before you, but a gooey reptile. A flame will shoot up--and you yourself are worse than a reptile. And it isn't people walking down the streets: you glance under a hat--it's the head of a snake; you peer at an old lady--a toad squats, bloating its stomach. And there are young people, each with a particular dream: an engineer just has to hear Hawaiian music, a student--for a bit more effect, to hang himself, a schoolboy--to father a child, to prove his virility. You find yourself in a store--a former general stands at the counter and wears a drilled smile; you go into a museum--the guide knows he's lying, and continues to lie. I don't like Petersburg. My dream is over.

Of making a very wide appeal indeed among young ladies in places like Smith

Open Brackets offers up a proposal to translate Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to address the shamefully sloppy job translated the first time around.

The work is hardly alone in having suffered this fate but, particularly given the book’s place in the scholarly canon, Knopf/Vantage’s refusal to commission a new translation reeks of bad faith (no pun intended).

And despite my personal misgivings about the woman, I do believe that Sartre took a great deal of credit for her ideas.

So perhaps as penance for all the nasty things I’ve ever said about the Beaver I should offer up a new translation, and make it available on line.

(Willing collaborators would make the task more alluring, not to mention feasible. I suppose I should also find out whether it would be legal.)

We never had any contact with him and nobody in our family dared say his name

The new issue of The Cafe Irreal has two stories by Czech writer Jiri Kratochvil: "A Sad Play", and "From the Pulps."

I decided not to wait around until my turn came. So I got out of there and lived for some time in hotels in foreign cities. One night I woke up in one of them and went to the window and stood there. It was hot and I was sweating. I raised my hand to wipe off the sweat, touching what I long considered to be my face. When I looked at my fingers, I was surprised. What, during the day, was covered over with make-up was now naked and palpable. It was then that I finally understood that I'd also long ago been replaced by an actor and that the whole of my rash escape had only been an attempt to hide from this reality.

[Via Ceslit.org]

If you don't like Comrade Stalin, then why didn't you say so while he was alive?

A devoted party functionary cohabits for forty years with a statue of Josef Stalin in Vladimir Voinovich's new novel, Monumental Propaganda. The Moscow Times finally takes this one up:

As an artist, Vladimir Voinovich would make a good drinking buddy. Though not a graduate of the gulag, the 71-year-old dissident writer has important pieces of the past embedded in his memory. One imagines that he knows every Russian drinking protocol to rustic perfection, and that his sense of humor doesn't quit after 3 a.m.

Apologia

In a mere few hours I will be a New Yorker again, but it will take nearly a week for me to cram my meager belongings into my new Second Avenue monk's cell. So posting will be shoddy for a few days (as it's been over the past week or so). Your patience will be rewarded. Spaceeba.