Languor Management

Cause I got more rhymes than Joseph Brodsky

The Bookslut on Eugene Ostashevsky's: The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza from Ugly Duckling Presse:

Ostashevsky’s work is best when he follows his natural instinct for rhyme and rhythm, and especially when he turns to zany, historically-rich references: I should have known they were Basques/ Roland says to DJ Spinoza/ By the looks of their casques/ By the widths of their masks/ I should have known they were Basques. There’s a moment, for example, when Andrew Marvell wakes up: AM: Boy, that’s what I call a snooze! That felt, like, thirty thousand years. Hm, and my pants are stained. (Hee! And, ew.) There’s some punk-rock bravado that reminds me, in a good way, of The Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso was Never Called an Asshole”: Yes, I’m a radical rapscallion/ cruising around in my Spanish galleon… There’s a satisfying rap about Brodsky and Trotsky -- It’s me that stalks by the zoccolo… cause I got more rhymes than Joseph Brodsky/ I got more rhymes than Leon Trotsky -- that ends with the DJ getting drop-kicked in the head. And there are some truly powerful conversations between the DJ and the Lord God, who needs Spinoza to convince him that he exists.  Kierkegaard shows up, lest you were worried he wouldn’t.

The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is a loveable little book, with fitting illustrations by Eugene Timerman. I’ll ignore the fact that it’s part of the Ugly Duckling Presse’s Eastern European Poets series and, I’ll ignore the fact that this is unmistakably Russian poetry, and, when someone asks me which young(ish) American poets I like, I’ll recommend Eugene Ostashevsky.  I’m sure DJ Spinoza could find a zany way to rationalize this. After all, There are so many axioms/ there is not a single proof. And, Is there a beginning that is not also an end? Twenty-three years of school and I don’t know whether ‘this is my foot’ is a true statement.

And if you visit Ugly Duckling's site, why not pick up a Transrationalist t-shirt for a friend?

Strange fruit

This story reminds me of my own office, which is disguised as a laundry room in a *garden* apartment tucked away in the Polish-occupied Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Visitors would come to pretend to buy fruit and leave with pamphlets of dissension to distribute:

The blue, discolored facade at 55 Lesnaya Ulitsa says "Kalandadze's Wholesale Caucasian Fruits Trade," but no lemons have been sold there for more than 70 years. Hidden behind the store is a little-known museum dedicated to what was once a secret printing house.

The Museum of the Underground Printing House 1905-06, a filial of the Museum of Contemporary History, gives visitors a glimpse of the conspiratorial atmosphere of tsarist times when the socialist opposition rallied for reform using the written word to call for strikes and argue for human rights, free press and revolution.

When No One Is Home

All morning long, the moon glows red,
Everyone is gone--I'm all alone.
And it's excellent! It's wonderful!
It's pretty obvious:
I am the bravest of men.

To look at the moon, me and my cat Nonsense
Climbed up on the bed:
The Moon, our brother; the Wind, our uncle--
Now that's an uncle!
The Stars, our sister; the Sky, our mother...

I sing loudly--loudly!
Loudly, loudly I sing,
So that in the darkness
A bear isn't drawn to us
By a ribbon of smoke from the stove

I'm not afraid of rats or the bogyman--
I'll stick a poker in his nose!
Nor of a crippled devil with his cane,
Not even of vipers--
Not of anybody or anything!

In the sky, a cloud has curls,
The curls of a lamb.
I'm not a boy, I'm an elephant
Or a tiger cub
Dozing in the reeds...

I wait adn wait, In vain I wait--
The handbell has grown dumb...
Moon, my brother, red moon...
Clear moon,
Why have you grown so pale?

1921

A draft translation of a children's poem by Sasha Chernyi

So as to create a sense of posturing

The Bookslut on Dmitry Golynko's As It Turned Out (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Rebecca Bella, with Simona Schneider for Ugly Duckling Press):

Poised within a matte black cover are poems that slice, as scalpels sharpened by years of linguistic oversimplification, at the postmodernist scab that formed after the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. With “brutal naturalism” and the reassemblage of stumbled-upon things, Golynko’s incongruous fragments of an equally alien experience come into being as a clinical experiment of sorts: its function resultant upon the “debasement of the soul.” As such, Westerners seeking explanation in Golynko’s chapbook will not find it, for to a large extent the illusionary scenes of a society caught in “the speech of criminality” continue to resound in a pitch that remains as foreign as the original language of this translated collection. Try as we may, our “emery board won’t admit [us] into [Golynko’s] photograph.” And yet, this unflinching non-admittance proves as stimulating as it is cruel.

Whereas “Sashenka” may expound the “dandyism, camp and mauvais goût” of Golynko’s early postmodern writing, his conveyance of human behavior as mechanized manifests most significantly in “Elementary Things”:

it has an increate, morbid, inanimate nature
the elementary thing is always mimicking something
rarely itself, more often the papal nuncio, satrap
old father superior or stepmother maniac
usually monsters or cultural figures
it sometimes imitates an immobilized idol
cadaver tricked out in sackcloth
professor basking in auditoria
at times struts like a hussar, fans itself with a dolman
wears a cossack coat, on the rim of a reservoir

Autumn

Autumn. Boredom. The wind whips.
A light rain on the window drips.
My mind longs; my heart whines;
And my soul for something pines.

- Kozma Prutkov (Translated by Mikhailych)

The man with one face

Kevin is hideous—a fact not lost upon him. He has understood this to be true for much of his life—certainly his entire adult life. All the same, one must be discreet. Kevin may be hideous but he does go to some length, if not to hide it, then at least to lessen the blow, so to speak. So he’s unattractive—even terribly so—but should he stop living his life? Of course not. It’s just that Kevin has to think a little more than the rest of us about how he puts his best face forward.

To the envy of the world

A peasant, feeling betrayed by his wife, permanently abandons the world. From Sovlit.com: A translation of Leonid Leonov's short story The Tramp.

 

Provided with everything needed for conquering life, Chadaev lacked only the gift of laughter; but even this bitter injustice of nature brought an advantage to him: he was feared. The war spared his tall, reddish body, which looked like a pine tree against the sunset; he returned intact, having received not so much as a black-eye. But then suddenly, petty misfortunes, like mice, began to plague him. He fought with them for a whole year, getting crazy from the battle, but still hordes of them attacked to gnaw at his celebrated good fortune. On days of respite, he bitterly looked into himself but could find no cause for his ruin. Only now, traveling to this latest punishment of fate, did he recall one adventure at the front...and although a muzhik is not ashamed of any sin that is covered in a soldier's greatcoat, this recollection burned and gnawed away at Chadaev's very essence, and there was no way to root it out.

 

 

 

Parting Poetry of Pindostan's Political Pygmies

Viktor Pelevin's latest book, P5--a collection of short stories--was announced by the publisher as a novel, because short story collections don't sell. But it sounds like the publisher is going to need more tricks than that to sell this one. From the Moscow Times:

The critical consensus after the book's appearance was unfavorable to Pelevin. Some said he was moving toward Sergei Minayev (the author of several very badly written bestsellers). Some said Pelevin had become undistinguishable from his numerous imitators. Galina Yuzefovich wrote in Vedomosti that the creative spirit that had inspired the author throughout the 1990s has obviously left him.

Aeroflot posters

This just in from Maxx Klaxon, hot of his Authoritarian Idol tour:

The Chelsea Museum is featuring an exhibition of very cool historic Aeroflot posters--this week only 9/22 to 9/27.

Chelsea Art Museum - 556 West 22nd Street - New York, NY 10011 USA

Incredibly stupid, silly, and meaningless

From Roman Jakobson's memoir My Futurist Years:

In 1918 or 1919 Mayakovsky and I were walking along the street in Moscow, when suddenly he asked me: "Listen, canI ask you something that may strike you as strange?" I said: "Ask away."--"You're  walking along the street alone and suddenly you notice that you're thinking of something incredibly stupid, silly, and meaninglyess, and that you're thinking about it in a concentrated way. Does that ever happen to you.?"--Oh yes, it happens all the time."--"Thank God, I thought it happened only to me." This is very characteristic for Mayakovsky's psyche.