Larissa Shmailo's Blog, page 10
January 2, 2019
In-depth Interview about My #METOO Poem "&"
An in-depth interview about the emotional and creative process leading up to my poem, "&" which appeared in a recent edition of SHREW guest edited by Michael T. Young. Thanks to Christal Cooper for this kind write-up.
READ FULL INTERVIEW HERE
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/...
About this website
CHRISRICECOOPER.BLOGSPOT.COM
#55 Backstory of the Poem "&" by Larissa Shmailo
Chris Rice Cooper
READ FULL INTERVIEW HERE
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/...
About this website
CHRISRICECOOPER.BLOGSPOT.COM
#55 Backstory of the Poem "&" by Larissa Shmailo
Chris Rice Cooper
Gratitude List
1. For my life as a writer, for the apparent insanity of writing poems
2. For my friends and colleagues
3. For health despite all I have done to impair it
4. For the ability to make needful changes
5. For three days clean from food addiction - thank you for your support!
6. For recovery from drugs, alcohol, nicotine, sex addiction, and codependence
7. For my life - for turning self-destruction into purpose. I never thought I would make 30 (neither did anyone else) and here I am, 62.
8. For the memory of those better than me that are gone
9. For my books, the children I leave behind
10. For you!
Happy New Year!
2. For my friends and colleagues
3. For health despite all I have done to impair it
4. For the ability to make needful changes
5. For three days clean from food addiction - thank you for your support!
6. For recovery from drugs, alcohol, nicotine, sex addiction, and codependence
7. For my life - for turning self-destruction into purpose. I never thought I would make 30 (neither did anyone else) and here I am, 62.
8. For the memory of those better than me that are gone
9. For my books, the children I leave behind
10. For you!
Happy New Year!
December 25, 2018
Christmas Diary
Another year, a good one except for Trump, and even he is now on the run; I say goodbye to 2018 with fondness. Creatively, the muse has been kind to me.
We said goodbye to the Cornelia Street Café with a bang with a Democratic poetry fundraiser before the midterms. "All-Star Women Poets Read" with Elaine Equi, Rachel Hadas, Patricia Spears Jones, Trace Peterson, myself, and emcee Maggie Balistreri raised awareness and a big chunk of money as part of the global 100 Thousand Poets for Change initiative organized by Michael Rothenberg.
At AWP Tampa, I presented on the poetry of Claudia Rankine and Patricia Smith with illustrious co-panelists Marc Vincenz, Elizabeth L. Hodges, and Michael Anania. I also did two readings with Dean Kostos in the New York Public Library system for our MadHat poetry books, mine, Medusa’s Country, and Dean’s, Pierced with Night-Colored Threads.
They say that if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. I was definitely in the right room at the brilliant Association of Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies 50th Anniversary conference, where I presented on the experimental poetry of Alexander Skidan. Co-panelists on the contemporary Russian poetry panel were Evgeny Pavlov, Eugene Ostashevsky, and chair Vladimir Feshchenko.
In 2018, I had pubs or acceptances in the St. Petersburg Review, the Journal of Poetics Research, Unlikely Stories, The New Verse News, Shrew, Intersections: Poetry with Mathematics, A Gathering of the Tribes, North of Oxford, the bilingual English-Bengali journal Shadowkraft, The Lit Pub, EcoPoetry, and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, where I became a contributing editor. I also was included in the Italian compendium The Sound Poetry Library and the anthologies Bosch and Bruegel Poems and Choices: Poems about Abortion (editor Annie Finch). And the Poetry School based a course on the online anthology I edited, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (free at http://bigbridge.org/…/twenty-first-c...-…).
Extremely exciting is the publication of my new, very weird novel, Sly Bang, available now from Amazon and Spuyten Duyvil– launch date is March 6, 2019 at the Jefferson Market Library, so please save the date. I also look forward to AWP Portland 2019, where I will be on two panels, The Crtitical Creative and Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position? (with Erica Jong!!!) and to reading at the New Orleans Poetry Festival in April- thanks to Jonathan Penton for inviting me.
Wishing you blessings of health, creativity, and love in 2019!
Love,
Larissa
We said goodbye to the Cornelia Street Café with a bang with a Democratic poetry fundraiser before the midterms. "All-Star Women Poets Read" with Elaine Equi, Rachel Hadas, Patricia Spears Jones, Trace Peterson, myself, and emcee Maggie Balistreri raised awareness and a big chunk of money as part of the global 100 Thousand Poets for Change initiative organized by Michael Rothenberg.
At AWP Tampa, I presented on the poetry of Claudia Rankine and Patricia Smith with illustrious co-panelists Marc Vincenz, Elizabeth L. Hodges, and Michael Anania. I also did two readings with Dean Kostos in the New York Public Library system for our MadHat poetry books, mine, Medusa’s Country, and Dean’s, Pierced with Night-Colored Threads.
They say that if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. I was definitely in the right room at the brilliant Association of Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies 50th Anniversary conference, where I presented on the experimental poetry of Alexander Skidan. Co-panelists on the contemporary Russian poetry panel were Evgeny Pavlov, Eugene Ostashevsky, and chair Vladimir Feshchenko.
In 2018, I had pubs or acceptances in the St. Petersburg Review, the Journal of Poetics Research, Unlikely Stories, The New Verse News, Shrew, Intersections: Poetry with Mathematics, A Gathering of the Tribes, North of Oxford, the bilingual English-Bengali journal Shadowkraft, The Lit Pub, EcoPoetry, and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, where I became a contributing editor. I also was included in the Italian compendium The Sound Poetry Library and the anthologies Bosch and Bruegel Poems and Choices: Poems about Abortion (editor Annie Finch). And the Poetry School based a course on the online anthology I edited, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (free at http://bigbridge.org/…/twenty-first-c...-…).
Extremely exciting is the publication of my new, very weird novel, Sly Bang, available now from Amazon and Spuyten Duyvil– launch date is March 6, 2019 at the Jefferson Market Library, so please save the date. I also look forward to AWP Portland 2019, where I will be on two panels, The Crtitical Creative and Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position? (with Erica Jong!!!) and to reading at the New Orleans Poetry Festival in April- thanks to Jonathan Penton for inviting me.
Wishing you blessings of health, creativity, and love in 2019!
Love,
Larissa
December 24, 2018
Poetry "written" by the protagonist of SLY BANG, Nora Volkhonsky
An excerpt from the new novel, SLY BANG:
A series of poems with scansions, diacritical marks, and underscores appeared on the screen. A voice synthesizer, sounding very much like Nora, read the words.
VOW
(for Genya)
/ /
We will love like dogwood.
/ / (cretic)
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths (cretic repeat)
I promise. (amphibrachic inversion)
JAMAS VOLVERÉ
To touch the sidereal limits with the hands—Otero
/ / / / / (redo in trochaic pentameter)
To see you is to see a warm brown bird
flash in a black night: I shudder.
Gone are the stars that are not the sun
that punctuate heights no longer heights,
heights become space. Things I will never know
with my proximity senses are gone, all gone:
I will never hear a star upon this earth,
but I feel the warm gusts your wings stir up.
If in the daytime I were to leave bread and fruit for you,
you might come again. I am not so different from
the mangrove swamp where you play.
FOR SIX MONTHS WITH YOU
For six months with you, I would
Quit my lover (trochaic)
Leave the city
Sell my books. (/ u/ (u))
For six months with you, I would
Live in Kansas
Join a carpool
Shave my legs.
For six months with you, I would
Be an actress
Wait on tables
Burn this poem.
But what if it doesn’t work out?
If it doesn’t work out I’ll join a convent
If it doesn’t work out I’ll cut my hair
If it doesn’t work out I’ll leave the country
If it doesn’t work out I still don’t care . . . .
For six months with you, I would
Break the true law
Break my poor heart
Break my vow.
Now ask me what I’d do
For a year or two.
“That’s not bad, for poetry.” Andrew exclaimed.
A series of poems with scansions, diacritical marks, and underscores appeared on the screen. A voice synthesizer, sounding very much like Nora, read the words.
VOW
(for Genya)
/ /
We will love like dogwood.
/ / (cretic)
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths (cretic repeat)
I promise. (amphibrachic inversion)
JAMAS VOLVERÉ
To touch the sidereal limits with the hands—Otero
/ / / / / (redo in trochaic pentameter)
To see you is to see a warm brown bird
flash in a black night: I shudder.
Gone are the stars that are not the sun
that punctuate heights no longer heights,
heights become space. Things I will never know
with my proximity senses are gone, all gone:
I will never hear a star upon this earth,
but I feel the warm gusts your wings stir up.
If in the daytime I were to leave bread and fruit for you,
you might come again. I am not so different from
the mangrove swamp where you play.
FOR SIX MONTHS WITH YOU
For six months with you, I would
Quit my lover (trochaic)
Leave the city
Sell my books. (/ u/ (u))
For six months with you, I would
Live in Kansas
Join a carpool
Shave my legs.
For six months with you, I would
Be an actress
Wait on tables
Burn this poem.
But what if it doesn’t work out?
If it doesn’t work out I’ll join a convent
If it doesn’t work out I’ll cut my hair
If it doesn’t work out I’ll leave the country
If it doesn’t work out I still don’t care . . . .
For six months with you, I would
Break the true law
Break my poor heart
Break my vow.
Now ask me what I’d do
For a year or two.
“That’s not bad, for poetry.” Andrew exclaimed.
December 22, 2018
READ AN EXCERPT FROM SLY BANG
Nora heard Larissa as from a distance. “We are never alone,” she mumbled. “But Larissa, we are. It’s the nature of life, this loneliness. Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Primo Levi, suicides. All the suicides.”
READ AN EXCERPT FROM MY NEW NOVEL SLY BANG, UP NOW AT UNLIKELY STORIES!
http://www.unlikelystories.org/conten...?
Sly Bang
READ AN EXCERPT FROM MY NEW NOVEL SLY BANG, UP NOW AT UNLIKELY STORIES!
http://www.unlikelystories.org/conten...?
Sly Bang
December 21, 2018
DARRYL WAWA'S REVIEW OF SLY BANG
On reading Larissa Shmailo's "Sly Bang"
by Darryl Wawa
If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of thinking, Larissa Shmaillo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with non-sensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all out madness, a batlle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs's Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godotand Frantz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds, who, by all means, should stay away from a book like this. Things pop out of nowhere. Characters have multiple personalities that change right before your eyes in ways that make complete sense in the universe created by Shmaillo,but would otherwise make absolutely no sense. And the language, disguised in a veil of blatant grotesquerie, will need a subtle reader to decipher its gems and eloquence. The novel is hilarious, gruesome, repulsive, pervasively perverse, sadistic and moral like a Rick and Morty episode and the story takes place in a building of 300 floors going down, reminiscent of a concentration camp. Nora the protagonist is trying to save the world from an army of sadistic Nazi perverts with whom she is also in love. Other notable characters of the cast are: Michael, her lover, helper and serial killer, Ouspensky, the leading antagonist, sociopath, indiscriminate rapist and also her lover and Larissa, Nora’s interchanging alter ego, and also the supreme ruler of all of Russia. The only thing that seems linear in the novel is the progression of time.
Here are a few hidden gems from the novel, quotes that confess our human tragedy, spread throughout the madness of the book:
“Interesting idea here about false identity, on a spectrum, in all of us, the ego as opposed to the true self. Survival identities shed in recovery to reveal true being and oneness with God. We are all false; who am I to judge?
“Is it evil to destroy evil?” (p65)
“AS I SEARCH MY HEART I SEEK FOR SOME EMBER OF WHAT I ONCE FELT AND I FIND ONLY SORROW GRIEF DISGUST AND SHAME… I AM SEEKING HELP FOR MY ADDICTION TO YOU SO THAT I DO NOT LAPSE INTO FANTASY AND A STUPOR OF NOSTALGIAC RECALL.” (p66).
“Michael burst into Hawk’s office and shoved the plate of macaroons into her face. He grabbed Nora and began the ascent up 300 flights. It took him 50 flights to realize that Nora, his Nora, was in his arms.
This is holding a real live girl, he mused. This is much better than oatmeal. Even better than hot, if that were possible.
Michael’s energy surged and he flew up the stairs. But by -201, Michael felt his energy drain.
I can’t carry her another two hundred flights, he realized.” (p69)
““the mind cannot bear a hurt too great to the heart” (p124)
The effect on the reader, is one of surprise and shock. The author cleverly interweaves poems in the novel as passages from the main character’s journal. The interlude, a historical anecdote about Nora’s parent’s during WWII and her ensuing upbringing, comes in the middle of the story to ground the reader. We are told of accounts of concentration camps and of an unlikely story of survival not as predictably drenched in heroism as it is in betrayal. This second part of the novel surprises as it is told in screenplay format at first, before reverting back to an ordinary past tense narrative with a ‘normal’ progression. The anecdote traces back Nora’s origins. Along this second part, the sprinkled poems and passages confess personal feelings, musings, and history of the main character, revealing her troubled upbringing and unsuccessful first marriage. But afterwards, the book goes back to its madness. The chaos continues, and our protagonist is once again trying to save the world. In its exploratively chaotic style, the story comes across as a description and metaphorical answer to quotidian psychopathology. It is a novel in which you can enjoy your own madness, if you are in that mood, but it does so in criticizing outdated masculine behaviors and championing female flexibility. It is a highly entertaining book and worth the read.
“We women will never forget. Those who do not remember history, as those of us who have been drugged and tormented and raped and pissed on and STILL REMEMBER ... I don’t even have words for the contempt I have for you predators.” (p178).
Available on Amazon and from the publisher, SPUYTEN DUYVIL: http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
by Darryl Wawa
If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of thinking, Larissa Shmaillo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with non-sensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all out madness, a batlle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs's Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godotand Frantz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds, who, by all means, should stay away from a book like this. Things pop out of nowhere. Characters have multiple personalities that change right before your eyes in ways that make complete sense in the universe created by Shmaillo,but would otherwise make absolutely no sense. And the language, disguised in a veil of blatant grotesquerie, will need a subtle reader to decipher its gems and eloquence. The novel is hilarious, gruesome, repulsive, pervasively perverse, sadistic and moral like a Rick and Morty episode and the story takes place in a building of 300 floors going down, reminiscent of a concentration camp. Nora the protagonist is trying to save the world from an army of sadistic Nazi perverts with whom she is also in love. Other notable characters of the cast are: Michael, her lover, helper and serial killer, Ouspensky, the leading antagonist, sociopath, indiscriminate rapist and also her lover and Larissa, Nora’s interchanging alter ego, and also the supreme ruler of all of Russia. The only thing that seems linear in the novel is the progression of time.
Here are a few hidden gems from the novel, quotes that confess our human tragedy, spread throughout the madness of the book:
“Interesting idea here about false identity, on a spectrum, in all of us, the ego as opposed to the true self. Survival identities shed in recovery to reveal true being and oneness with God. We are all false; who am I to judge?
“Is it evil to destroy evil?” (p65)
“AS I SEARCH MY HEART I SEEK FOR SOME EMBER OF WHAT I ONCE FELT AND I FIND ONLY SORROW GRIEF DISGUST AND SHAME… I AM SEEKING HELP FOR MY ADDICTION TO YOU SO THAT I DO NOT LAPSE INTO FANTASY AND A STUPOR OF NOSTALGIAC RECALL.” (p66).
“Michael burst into Hawk’s office and shoved the plate of macaroons into her face. He grabbed Nora and began the ascent up 300 flights. It took him 50 flights to realize that Nora, his Nora, was in his arms.
This is holding a real live girl, he mused. This is much better than oatmeal. Even better than hot, if that were possible.
Michael’s energy surged and he flew up the stairs. But by -201, Michael felt his energy drain.
I can’t carry her another two hundred flights, he realized.” (p69)
““the mind cannot bear a hurt too great to the heart” (p124)
The effect on the reader, is one of surprise and shock. The author cleverly interweaves poems in the novel as passages from the main character’s journal. The interlude, a historical anecdote about Nora’s parent’s during WWII and her ensuing upbringing, comes in the middle of the story to ground the reader. We are told of accounts of concentration camps and of an unlikely story of survival not as predictably drenched in heroism as it is in betrayal. This second part of the novel surprises as it is told in screenplay format at first, before reverting back to an ordinary past tense narrative with a ‘normal’ progression. The anecdote traces back Nora’s origins. Along this second part, the sprinkled poems and passages confess personal feelings, musings, and history of the main character, revealing her troubled upbringing and unsuccessful first marriage. But afterwards, the book goes back to its madness. The chaos continues, and our protagonist is once again trying to save the world. In its exploratively chaotic style, the story comes across as a description and metaphorical answer to quotidian psychopathology. It is a novel in which you can enjoy your own madness, if you are in that mood, but it does so in criticizing outdated masculine behaviors and championing female flexibility. It is a highly entertaining book and worth the read.
“We women will never forget. Those who do not remember history, as those of us who have been drugged and tormented and raped and pissed on and STILL REMEMBER ... I don’t even have words for the contempt I have for you predators.” (p178).
Available on Amazon and from the publisher, SPUYTEN DUYVIL: http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
December 19, 2018
PRAISE FOR MY NEW BOOK, SLY BANG!
I'm excited to share the blurbs for my new novel, SLY BANG! Like nothing I've ever done before! Order now on Amazon or from Spuyten Duyvil http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
Larissa Shmailo’s SLY BANG is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battlefield of the psychosexual female libido.
Cecilia Tan, author of Slow Surrender
SLY BANG IS ASTOUNDING! The "typhoid Mary of rape and murder," having been determined by alien pterodactyls to be "the only non-Nazi in the universe," teams up with a skinner-alive of pubescent virgins and ardent collector of Rothko daubs. Together they wage war against an ialdabaoth who intends, just for kicks, to atomize the universe by means of particle accelerators. Hyperspatial scene-shifts are conveyed by telepathy or supercomputer-assisted dialogue that bristles with snappy one-liners paced faster than a meth rant. Somehow, across these solar system-spanning pages, supercharged as they are with psycho-, neurobio- and quantum-physical erudition, the plot comes across vivid as anything Tolstoy ever evoked with his most considered panoramic prose. Larissa Shmailo's SLY BANG is like nothing that has ever been seen, or heard, anywhere.
Tom Bradley, author of Useful Despair
In this breakneck, futuristic, socio-sexual-psychological thriller, Larissa Shmailo tells the story of Nora Volkhonsky, a smart FBI agent targeted by multiple evildoers. As bad guys and worse guys close in on her, Nora’s main goal is to survive. She is helped somewhat by her “telepathic” powers, but her experience is often more dream than reality. “Who was sending these clangs and hoodoo messages? Who was receiving hers? Who wanted her insane or dead?” Fasten your seatbelt as you ride along a wicked highway with SLY BANG’s tough, spirited heroine.
Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Border Crossings
Available now at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
Larissa Shmailo’s SLY BANG is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battlefield of the psychosexual female libido.
Cecilia Tan, author of Slow Surrender
SLY BANG IS ASTOUNDING! The "typhoid Mary of rape and murder," having been determined by alien pterodactyls to be "the only non-Nazi in the universe," teams up with a skinner-alive of pubescent virgins and ardent collector of Rothko daubs. Together they wage war against an ialdabaoth who intends, just for kicks, to atomize the universe by means of particle accelerators. Hyperspatial scene-shifts are conveyed by telepathy or supercomputer-assisted dialogue that bristles with snappy one-liners paced faster than a meth rant. Somehow, across these solar system-spanning pages, supercharged as they are with psycho-, neurobio- and quantum-physical erudition, the plot comes across vivid as anything Tolstoy ever evoked with his most considered panoramic prose. Larissa Shmailo's SLY BANG is like nothing that has ever been seen, or heard, anywhere.
Tom Bradley, author of Useful Despair
In this breakneck, futuristic, socio-sexual-psychological thriller, Larissa Shmailo tells the story of Nora Volkhonsky, a smart FBI agent targeted by multiple evildoers. As bad guys and worse guys close in on her, Nora’s main goal is to survive. She is helped somewhat by her “telepathic” powers, but her experience is often more dream than reality. “Who was sending these clangs and hoodoo messages? Who was receiving hers? Who wanted her insane or dead?” Fasten your seatbelt as you ride along a wicked highway with SLY BANG’s tough, spirited heroine.
Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Border Crossings
Available now at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
December 27, 2016
New York Public Library ordered Patient Women!
A dream come true! My autobiographical novel, painful but ultimately triumphant, will be on the shelves of the New York Public Library soon!
You can order it at Amazon today:
https://www.amazon.com/Patient-Women-...
You can order it at Amazon today:
https://www.amazon.com/Patient-Women-...
January 16, 2016
Excerpt from PATIENT WOMEN
One of the themes of PATIENT WOMEN is prostitution, physical and spiritual. Here is a brief excerpt from Chapter 5, "The Mudd Club."
“Around here, there’s no such thing as premature ejaculation. Believe me.”
“With the young ones you just have to do it again.”
“You can suck them off.”
“I’d rather fuck.”
“The less time they’re inside me the better. The way some of them hold you is frightening.”
“Sam sweats.”
“He doesn’t like me.”
“He talks too much.”
“I’d rather listen to them talk than touch them.”
Nora downs her drink. “As long as they don’t ask to see me on the outside, I don’t care. Or try to hold my hand.”
More about PATIENT WOMEN at www.larissashmailo.com.
“Around here, there’s no such thing as premature ejaculation. Believe me.”
“With the young ones you just have to do it again.”
“You can suck them off.”
“I’d rather fuck.”
“The less time they’re inside me the better. The way some of them hold you is frightening.”
“Sam sweats.”
“He doesn’t like me.”
“He talks too much.”
“I’d rather listen to them talk than touch them.”
Nora downs her drink. “As long as they don’t ask to see me on the outside, I don’t care. Or try to hold my hand.”
More about PATIENT WOMEN at www.larissashmailo.com.
January 13, 2016
Rain Taxi review of my translation of Victory over the Sun
Victory Over the Sun: The First Futurist Opera
Aleksei Kruchenykh
Translated by Larissa Shmailo
Edited and with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky
Červená Barva ($16)
VictoryOverTheSun157The confrontational Victory Over the Sun debuted in 1913 to the same jeers that “provided the ordinary soundtrack to avant-garde art” at the time (fellow Russian Igor Stravinsky’s famously divisive Rite of Spring premiered the same year). Eschewing representation in favor of a “millenarian” deconstruction of logic and meaning, Futurism’s core themes are all here: a blustering masculinist posture that doesn’t quite ring true; a flippant heroization of violence (so poignant and stupid on the eve of total war); and a ceaseless enthusiasm for an “extraordinary” present sans past, “dangerous but without penitence and memories . . . like a clean mirror.” This aggressive agenda of total deconstruction feels intoxicating and disconsolate—the liberation of words from meaning and now from then is both exhilarating and “pretty damn scary.” As Eugene Ostashevsky notes in his introduction, Futurist “victories” represent desperate, nonsensical losses: “The sun of alogism is a black sun.” Yet Kruchenykh’s nonsense is aphoristic, funny, and even sentimental; it can have as much meaning as the reader is able to imbue. Even those uninterested in the avant-garde may find something worthwhile in Victory Over the Sun—the work proves that there’s value in being provoked and (to paraphrase another great Futurist), a certain pleasure in being jeered and in being defied to jeer. Or, to put it more succinctly: “Can’t stand it? Follow that.”
http://www.raintaxi.com/victory-over-...
Aleksei Kruchenykh
Translated by Larissa Shmailo
Edited and with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky
Červená Barva ($16)
VictoryOverTheSun157The confrontational Victory Over the Sun debuted in 1913 to the same jeers that “provided the ordinary soundtrack to avant-garde art” at the time (fellow Russian Igor Stravinsky’s famously divisive Rite of Spring premiered the same year). Eschewing representation in favor of a “millenarian” deconstruction of logic and meaning, Futurism’s core themes are all here: a blustering masculinist posture that doesn’t quite ring true; a flippant heroization of violence (so poignant and stupid on the eve of total war); and a ceaseless enthusiasm for an “extraordinary” present sans past, “dangerous but without penitence and memories . . . like a clean mirror.” This aggressive agenda of total deconstruction feels intoxicating and disconsolate—the liberation of words from meaning and now from then is both exhilarating and “pretty damn scary.” As Eugene Ostashevsky notes in his introduction, Futurist “victories” represent desperate, nonsensical losses: “The sun of alogism is a black sun.” Yet Kruchenykh’s nonsense is aphoristic, funny, and even sentimental; it can have as much meaning as the reader is able to imbue. Even those uninterested in the avant-garde may find something worthwhile in Victory Over the Sun—the work proves that there’s value in being provoked and (to paraphrase another great Futurist), a certain pleasure in being jeered and in being defied to jeer. Or, to put it more succinctly: “Can’t stand it? Follow that.”
http://www.raintaxi.com/victory-over-...
