Languor Management

To prison with Pamuk!

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faces up to three years in jail for backing allegations that Armenians suffered genocide at Ottoman Turkish hands ninety years ago....

The public prosecutor in Istanbul's Sisli district found Pamuk's remarks violated Turkey's newly revised penal code, which deems denigration of the "Turkish identity" a crime, the publisher of Iletisim, Tugrul Pasaoglu, told Reuters.

[Via Maud Newton]

A Platonov Birthday!

Some time between August 28 and September 1 is supposed to be Andrei Platonov's birthday. To celebrate, SovLit.com has added new Platonov materials to their site.

First and foremost, a new translation of Platonov's play "Fourteen Little Red Huts".  Written in 1932, in the midst of a food crisis and famine, "Fourteen Little Red Huts" touches on the trauma, hunger, and death which accompanied Stalin's rapid collectivization of agriculture. It also lampoons Western intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw, who visited the Soviet Union in 1931 and confidently reported that there was no famine or hunger.  (Only Act One is there right now, but the rest of the play will soon be posted...translation -- prepared by Gennadi V. Alexeyev and Dmitri G. Alexeyev -- in progress as we speak)

That's where that figure came from

Masha Gesson, author of How My Grandmothers Survived Hitlers War and Stalins Peace, on Beslan:

At the Aug. 16 hearing in Vladikavkaz, where the lone accused hostage-taker is standing trial for last year's attack on a school in Beslan, a remarkable exchange took place. A man named Eduard Adayev testified as a witness. A well-known and, apparently, well-connected athlete in North Ossetia, he arrived at the school soon after it was seized. Then, two days later, he was one of the people saving children from the burning school. He says he saved two children before he was injured.

Adayev's description of the rescue effort was blood-chilling. But something else he described was perhaps even more important. One of the prosecutors asked Adayev what he knew about the origins of the figure 354. This was how many people Russian officials claimed were inside the school -- when in fact there were more than 1,000. Former hostages have testified that when the hostage-takers heard the figure on television, they concluded that Moscow was laying the groundwork for a planned storm of the school by lowering the estimate of potential casualties. This, say the hostages, was when their captors stopped giving them water.

[Via David McDuff's One Step at a Time]

Book with a capital B

Radio Prague interviews Czech academic, sociologist, cultural theorist and feminist Jirina Smejkalova:

"I think that actually we were really very lucky in the 1970s - I mean the people that met at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University - because despite all the obvious political constraints and ideological brainwashing, and so on, I think we managed to form a group of committed souls, people who really understood each other, who read books together, discussed philosophy and played music and did theatre and so on. I would say, paradoxically enough - and now I can say that as a university teacher myself - that precisely those constraints of the institution, of the university, made us create work of our own, which was perhaps even more authentic and more exciting than students have today - but perhaps that's too ambitious a hypothesis!"

Macabre tales

The Moscow Times on Anna Starobinets' short story collection The Awkward Age (Perekhodny Vozrast),

Published this summer by Limbus Press, [The Awkward Age was] heralded by critics as the advent of a Russian Philip K. Dick. Some compared the author to Stephen King, some to Franz Kafka, while others put Fyodor Dostoevsky or idols of Soviet science fiction such as the Strugatsky brothers next to her name. The slick design of Starobinets' book -- a small ant on an white cover and nothing else, not even a title -- added to the mystique.

A gentleman's dilemma!

While strolling up University Place, I noted a seeing-eye dog taking a dump at the curb. I've never seen this before! Though I suppose it makes sense.

Next I saw the elderly blind man it belonged to groping for the dog shit on the ground. He couldn't actually see the pile so he had to *guestimate.* I felt like I should help him, because he was way off the mark a few times, but I all I did was watch. I heard you're not supposed to get involved with the blind and their dogs...but I felt terrible for him, or perhaps, terrible about myself for not helping.

An erotic retelling of the Immaculate Conception

Literature is undoubtedly a major identifying force for Russia. Now the Russian Orthodox Church is claiming to be another.

Russian literature has been very much anticlerical since its inception in the 18th century. The young Alexander Pushkin wrote the blatantly blasphemous poem "Gavriiliada," an erotic retelling of the Immaculate Conception. Leo Tolstoy developed his own set of Christian morals, actively denounced the official church and was ultimately excommunicated. In "The Master and Margarita," Mikhail Bulgakov gave an highly unorthodox account of the gospels and put a very likable Devil and his entourage in the center of the plot. Perhaps the only notable exception among the geniuses of Russian literature was Fyodor Dostoevsky, but even his views were far from being officially approved.

To feel like I am ALIVE!

"If you didn’t get the picture, then maybe you can read the writing on the wall…"

-- George Jones

M--, my ex-roommate and nemesis, had finally landed an assistant professorship, but it was upstate, so he was leaving the city. He sent an e-mail around inviting some of us to a going-away party he was throwing for himself, as well as for a woman, D--, who just that morning had successfully defended her dissertation on some subject or another. I had often received e-mails and voice mails from M-- inviting me out for drinks or to dinner parties, but in the eight months since I moved out of the apartment, I hadn’t responded to a single one. He was my nemesis, after all. Everyone knew this, but, apparently, M-- hadn't been CC’d on the memo, which may or may not have been true since I possess passive aggressive tendencies and confrontation issues. Still, after eight months without a response, you’d think he would have gotten the picture.

Though delighted by the news that M-- was leaving the City, I treated this missive like all the rest; I ignored it. But when I told my friend S-- about it, she insisted that I go, and that I invite her along, as well as E--, so they could finally see what this academic Lothario looked like. S-- had just broken it off with a newly tenured professor who focused his inquiry on the filibuster. He performed so abysmally in the bedroom that she just couldn’t believe that another academic could sleep with a different Korean woman nearly every night. I had to remind her that it was a different woman every night, but she just had to see if he was “all that.” I reluctantly agreed to attend, as did E--, and S-- promised that we only had to stay for one drink and then we could leave. E-- assured me that showing up at the East Village bar, where the party would be held, with two ladies on my arm, would be an appropriate way to confront my nemesis. I RSVP’d to M--'s invite, congratulated him, and told him I’d buy him a drink.

As the date of the party arrived, I still had my doubts about attending. My single e-mail response seemed to have released a flood from him. “Could you invite so and so?” No. “Are you still a practicing homosexual?” Ignored. “Your old ‘girlfriend’ F- is probably going to be there.” Shit. While M-- had barged into my bedroom on several occasions to find me and F-- in bed together, he didn’t really put the pieces together and figure out that we were involved. He just assumed that I was letting her play me so I’d let her stay over, but that it was just platonic. He used to tease me about my “crush” on her and accuse me of “following her around like a puppy,” which was more or less true, except that we were sleeping together. I just wasn’t one to talk about it. And though I find it easy to befriend women, it’s not my practice to sit naked under the covers with my friends...or at least not anymore.

Things hadn’t ended well between me and F--, a beautiful Italian photographer who had bailed out on a doctoral program and was now giving private Italian language instructions in cafes across the City. What started out as sleeping together out of boredom and then blossomed into what felt like a very adult affair culminated in a screaming match in front of the discount liquor store on Broadway and Astor Place over what I was willing to spend on a bottle of wine. Teaching wasn’t paying her bills, but she insisted on eating in the best restaurants and drinking only expensive Italian wines: “To feel like I am ALIVE!”. Except for the odd piece of freelance work I could find, I was more or less unemployed, so I had suggested, rather than going out, “Why not just pick up a bottle of wine and make something at home?” But this was unacceptable to F--. If you can’t afford a ‘fantastic’ bottle of wine, why settle for “squalor?” “Where is the pleasure?!,” she shrieked. “I can’t live like this anymore!” And that was the last time I saw her. So I thought that seeing her again, especially with S-- and E-- on my arm, might turn ugly. Besides, I’m not particularly proud of that dalliance and I hadn’t introduced F-- to any of my friends, telling them only that I was sleeping with a crazy Italian woman. This would elicit a positive “Wow, good for you!” as opposed to the negative, if more accurate, “Stay away from that virago! She’s dangerous! You’re life is out of control!”

In short, F-- was crazy, as was M--, and if I had stayed in that apartment, it would only have been a matter of time before my body was found at the bottom of the air shaft. I was happy living in my new apartment in Greenpoint. I was working again and seeing someone new. I had moved on. Why would I want to revisit the past? Bu I suppose I wanted closure of a sort, and with M--'s imminent departure, I figured this was the time for it. I would just say “Congratulations!” like I meant it, buy him a beer, and leave, hopefully avoiding F-- in the process.

When we arrived at the bar, M-- saw me first and approached with his oblivious smile and greeted me with his usual, “Hello there, young man.” I hated this but pretended to be happy to see him. We shook hands and he introduced me to a gentleman at his side who was quite nice. M-- told him, “This is my ex-roommate Kevin. We lived together for about six months and it was a really fucking good time, even though he’s a fag.” His friend winced at this last remark. The sad thing, I realized, was that M-- was sincere. He really thought we had a great time living together and that we were friends, even though he had been my nemesis all along and contributed actively to my misery. Sure we shared a few late night academic conversations and a few laughs at the expense of The New Left, but otherwise all he talked about was how he tricked women into sleeping with him, or how everyone else around him was a “fag.” Besides, he was a self-proclaimed Trotskyite and anyone self-proclaiming that old chestnut had to be crazy…and dangerous…and lonely.

S-- and E-- stood off to the side observing the scene from a distance and I kept my eye peeled for F--, who could show up at any moment with a knife. She didn’t show up. And we didn’t stay long; just long enough for me to note that we were the only ones who had shown up to his going away party, which he had thrown for himself, and that all the others were here for D-- who had just successfully defended her dissertation that very morning.

If you're into this sort of thing

Allen Ginsberg and Ann Charters class discussing and reading from Russian Futurists. Topics include Sergei Esenin's book Confessions of a Hooligan, Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "A Cloud in trousers," Mayakovsky's biography and prison story, rebellion's relationship to Punk, utopian heroic Communism, linguistic exploration, and Lenin and Trotsky on Russia's $150 million loan.

[Spaceeba, Shannon!]

Towards a foreign likeness bent

duration press has put online the first of its new critical e-book series, towards a foreign likeness bent: translation. It contains fifteen essays, from Ammiel Alcalay's "Politics & Translation" to Chet Wiener's "The Legacy and Future of 'Horizontal' and 'Vertical' Translation in Contemporary Poetry."

We tend to talk about translation in a very narrow context, comparing, for example, how few translations get done in this country as opposed to most other places in the world with similar or even fewer resources. Such an approach can buttress the idea that translations, ultimately, get done because of cultural importance or literary quality. Although this may occasionally be the case, it usually isn’t. Texts that manage to sneak through the policing of our monolingual borders still only provide a mere taste — fragmented, out of context — of what such works might represent in their own cultures, languages, historical and political contexts. A single novel or book of poems by a single writer, removed from the cluster of other writers and artists from which it has emerged, without correspondence, biographies, gossip, debates or critical studies, more often than not just reinforces our uniquely military-industrial-new critical approach to the work of art as an object of contemplation rather than as part of a dense social, political, cultural and historical fabric. In other words, like so many other things in this country, we tend to talk about translation as if it was removed from either personal or collective politics, an approach that, unfortunately, reminds me of Paul Wolfowitz’s recent comments in Iraq: “You don’t build a democracy like you build a house,” Mr. Wolfowitz said over tea, honey pastries and water buffalo cheese. “Democracy grows like a garden. If you keep the weeds out and water the plants and you’re patient, eventually you’ll get something magnificent.”