totalitarianism today

Dara Wier on "large wars of occupation".

Photo credit and source: Terence Bunch and war-torn Afghanistan.

The Boston Review published Dara Wier's prose poem, "Declining Public Appetite for Large Wars of Occupation", and I love it. So I'm sharing it- and tipping my hat to the poet as well as her publisher.

Unlike before, unlike in prehistoric times, unlike during the good old days when the public’s appetite for large wars of occupation made for lively, crisp, contoured news reporting filled with edifying dramas of mass slaughters and satisfying banquets of blood and guts and sinew-strewn sidewalks. Those were the better days, the past times, the public knew a good large war when it got one, the public demanded large wars preferably of the kind which could be counted on to kill, wound, maim, ruin, displace, dislodge, condemn, crush and otherwise offensively rush to overrun someone else’s public and its otherwise starved for attention, truth be told, somewhat dull life in need of large injections of free misery, served sliced, sans ice, more rife, less priced, what’s that, that’s the roar of the gathering voice of the declining public appetite, who are these people who say such things, the public appetite for large wars, for large wars of occupation, declining public appetite for large wars, declining public large war occupation with increasingly larger public appetite for petit discrete minute wars, you hear it all the time, we need some more smaller wars, what we need is, it is just the tiny ticket, things will improve, wars will be smaller and much more satisfying, increasing public appetite for small wars of quasi-occupation, perhaps virtual occupation of insignificant size bundles of modalities, wars of all sizes, wars, little tapas wars, little miniature wars, pint-sized wars, little buddy wars, cute wars, skinny wars, pocket-sized wars, smart wars, starter wars, correctly sized airline travel-sized wars, tasting wars, war samplers and war jars just the right-sized war for a public whose whims are made up by a thug disguised as Palladium or a mass murderer whose job’s to justify whatever war a warrior wants cause a warrior’s purpose wants war or maybe not, maybe warriors talk just like artists, blaming it all on the muse of war or on weapons which when we have them we have to use them or so says the playwright who says an axe or a shotgun or maybe it was a bow and arrow or a missile of some kind, or a pretty little bomb, bomb, camouflaged in a dainty little napkin introduced in Act I must go off, or is it will go off, by the end of the story. Story’s end.

OSIP TELLS THE TRUTH: STALIN'S EPIGRAM.

When the end justifies any means, a poet's desires to tell the truth is suicidal.

In November 1933, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem about Stalin which he then shared with a small of coterie of friends in his Moscow apartment. Among those present for the reading of "The Stalin Epigram" were Boris Pasternak, Anna Ahkmatova, Sergei Petrovich, and Nahdezha Yakovlevna (Osip's wife), among six or so others. 

To this mixture of listeners, Robert Littell adds a "Zanaida Zaitseva-Antonova" known to be a "theatre actress" and "poetry-lover"- and suggests that the actress and mistress was the one who turned in a copy of Osip's poem to the secret police. Littell's account of Osip's fall-from-grace is "based on stories he heard directly from Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda". But Littell does not specify which parts are stories and which parts are stories of possible stories left untold.

My personal guess, based on nothing but a high regard for serendipity, suggests that Mandelstam's actress-mistress may have been Sofia Evgenievna Gollidey, a close friend and lover of poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Marina and Sofia cultivated their friendship in Moscow during the time of the famine, and Marina wrote a number of plays for Sofia. It is unclear whether the plays were performed in Moscow or to what extent Sofia was involved in supporting Marina's writing ambitions.

Marina and Osip ran in similar circles. In fact, by the time she met Sofia, Marina had published a book of poems revealing her past affair with Osip. Later, Marina would do the same for Sofia with the novella Povest' o Sonechke. Some say that Sofia eventually betrayed Marina to the Soviet government. Either Sofia and Zanaida were sisters, or they were two sides of the same treacherous coin.

THE STALIN EPIGRAM as translated by W. S. Merwin

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

THE STALIN EPIGRAM as translated by Scott Horton

We live, not sensing our own country beneath us,
Ten steps away they dissolve, our speeches,
But where enough meet for half-conversation,
The Kremlin hillbilly is our preoccupation.
They’re like slimy worms, his fat fingers,
His words, as solid as weights of measure.
In his cockroach moustaches there’s a hint
Of laughter, while below his top boots gleam.
Round him a mob of thin-necked henchmen,
He pursues the enslavement of the half-men.
One whimpers, another warbles,
A third miaows, but he alone prods and probes.
He forges decree after decree, like horseshoes–
In groins, foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.
Wherever an execution’s happening though–
there’s raspberry, and the Ossetian’s giant torso. 

Both translations testify, though Merwin gives more credence to translating Mandelstam's images and flurry. Scott Horton is closer to the literal, especially in the last line where the Russian word "malina" directly translates as "raspberry". (I know this because raspberry has long been the favorite fruit of this particular Alina who appreciates the possessiveness of the letter "m" in the Russian word.)

The poem played a role in his own arrest and arrests of son and husbands of Akhmatova, Lev Gumilyov and Nikolay Punin. Anna's own life, of course, took its own dizzying turns. In 1921, Gumilyov was shot by the Bolsheviks, and Anna adopted an unusual itinerant, homeless existence, sleeping on sofas and floors around St Petersburg, unhappily remarrying, finding lovers and discarding them. Anne Applebaum writes:

For many years she lived with the art historian Nikolai Punin and his wife, at first sharing a bed with Punin, then sharing a room with his daughter when he decided he preferred his wife after all. Often ill with tuberculosis and thyroid diseases, she rarely had enough to eat. She suffered through the siege of Leningrad and through the Stalinist terrors that both preceded and followed the war, watching as friends and acquaintances died or disappeared into the camps.

Above all, Akhmatova suffered from the arrest of her son, Lev Gumilyov, who was later to blame her directly for his fate. He believed it was her fame which had led to his imprisonment for more than a decade in the Gulag. At the same time, he believed she had failed to use her connections to get him released, and accused her of relying on his misfortunes to inspire her poetry. At one point, he told her that ‘for you it would have been even better if I had died in the camps’, meaning it would have been better for her poetry. Although Feinstein defends her against charges of hard-heartedness, pointing out that both Lev’s fate and his terrible resentment brought Akhmatova pain, she also quotes Brodsky arguing that Lev’s attacks hurt his mother precisely because there was some truth to them.

It is assumed by many that Nikolai Bukharin tried to help Osip, but eventually, Stalin's obsession with Trotsky (and Bukharin's possible connections to Trotsky) neutralized any ability Bukharin may have had to affect the outcome of Osip's trial.

Ultimately, Bukharin was executed after an interview with Stalin. In his last note to Stalin, Bukharin poses the question which echoes through the Red Terror and the halls of Russian history- "Koba, why do you need me to die?". The question is left unanswered.

MORE EPIGRAMOGRAPHY

Reunited Digital Archive of Osip Mandelstam 
Carl R. Proffer discusses "The Attack on Mme Mandelstam" (New York Review of Books)
 The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell (Google Books)
 Steven Poole reviews Epigram (The Guardian)
Michael Carlson probes the "amguity" (Irresistible Targets) 
Joy Neumeyer explores "the women behind Russia's most famous writers" (Moscow Times)
Friendship in a time of terror: Anna and Nahdezha (Creative Conflict Wisdom) 

Moments with a Multipedic Mind: Episode 1 on the podcast.

A postcard from Mary Ruefle's website to go along with this podcast.

This is the first podcast in a new project called Moments with A Multipedic Mind. Ten minutes of circumstantial evidence for the drive home or the sacred restroom break.

To download the mp3 or just listen to the podcast, click on the image above. 

EPISODE 1: Mary Ruefle, Soviet steel, and the Value of Marginalia
links for those inclined to ramble on....
Mary Ruefle
The end of marginalia?
Six personal libraries of marginalia
"I Remember I Remember" by Mary Ruefle
Outline of Nechaev's Revolutionary Catechism
George Macdonald's grave in Bordighera
 View from a blond on Ann Coulter

Mayakovsky and Lily Brik: Love in the time of revolution.

A poet first and foremost, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) wrote and illustrated one of the primers put out by the Commissariat of the Enlightenment during the Russian civil war. This primer was intended to "educate" the peasants in the tenets of social revolution as conceived by the Bolsheviks, who were still struggling to secure control of the country.

What Orlando Figes called a "brilliant piece of popular satire" made use of the offbeat couplets characertistic of the peasant chastushka, or rhyming song. It also tapped directly into the new "manliness" with which the Bolsheviks hoped to invest their popular image. You can see from the abecadarius below a strong appeal made to young, demobilized peasants who would be shamed by flowers and all things effeminate.

B
The Bolsheviks hunt the burzhoois
The burzoois run a mile

K
It's hard for the cows (korovy) to run fast
Kerensky was Prime Minister 

M
The Mensheviks are people
who run off to their mothers

T
Flowers (tsvety) smell sweet in the evening
Tsar Nicolas loved them very much 

When he wasn't propagandizing the revolution, Mayakovsky kept his hands full with a notable love affair and his participation in developing avant-garde art movements.

Alexander Rodchenko elaborated upon the the photo montage technique, which was pioneered by Italian Futurists and popularized by the Dada movement. To illustrate About It, a poem written by his friend Vladimir Mayakovsky, he created a series of composite pictures, combining magazine clippings with the photographs of Mayakovsky and his lover, Lily Brik. (HT to Dieselpunks for the image and idetails.)

A few screenshots from a book which provides interesting details about Lily and Vlady.

Old Winston ads and the poetry of Henrik Nordbrandt.

To the latter belong my new fountain pen

a well-known perfume

on the skin of a woman I hardly even know

and the new light bulb I put in the bedroom lamp

by whose light I read about you

in every book I try to read.

    Excerpted from Pragmatic by Henrik Nordbrandt

The Stein way.

Man Ray's portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas via Forward. Article excerpt:

Stein turned part of her Paris apartment into a gallery, where artists could see their own works on display and, in some cases, even add to the collection by creating on site. The apartment housed two Louis XIV chairs with upholstery based on Picasso’s designs, and also displayed extraordinary wallpaper, which the Contemporary Jewish Museum has replicated on one large wall so that so visitors can enjoy the decorative élan of its design, featuring dozens of pairs of white pigeons. Those who know Stein’s opera librettos may recall a lyric about “pigeons in the grass, alas”; here, the birds know only a blue sky.

The pigeon-covered wallpaper served as a backdrop for Stein’s own de facto performance art — self-presentation, with Toklas, in scenes of domestic life. She may not have known that these scenes would someday be framed and shown in museums, but at the very least, when posing for gifted photographers like Man Ray and Beaton, the couple must have been aware their portraits would appear in high-fashion journals, and be seen around the world in print. In these meticulously composed domestic scenes, the apartment becomes a stage. Toklas costumes herself in traditionally feminine clothing, unlike Stein, and sits farther away from the camera, as a reserved wife might sit in a picture with her husband. But this is no ordinary couple, as both parties knew; and the visual documents of their life now can be appreciated as harbingers of today’s celebrated same-sex marriages, especially in San Francisco.

At night, I follow the hum of the fridge to a feast of Greek yogurt and honey. Osama bin Laden's favorite meal consisted of yogurt and honey. Getrude Stein might have liked yogurt with honey, but there is nothing comparable to Tender Buttons. Nothing that so gently catalogues the material characters of domesticity. Alice fit the set, or made the set the scene. She knew how "to make everything be something". Ayn Rand expressed her horror at the Stein way and the ways in which a home deserved love in its humility, so close to the ground. To the ideologically-profound and the foot-soldiers of movements, Stein's love for the little things suggested a stylistic flippancy that extended from content to cover the soul in lightly laundered sheets. Michael Gold couldn't help but notice that she was a "literary idiot":

In essence, what Gertrude Stein's work represents is an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist, and a reflection of the ideological anarchy into which the whole of bourgeois literature has fallen.

What was it that Gertrude Stein set out to do with literature? When one reads her work it appears to resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums. It appears to be a deliberate irrationality, a deliberate infantilism. However, the woman's not insane, but possessed of a strong, clear, shrewd mind. She was an excellent medical student, a brilliant psychologist, and in her more "popular" writings one sees evidence of wit and some wisdom.

And yet her works read like the literature of the students of padded cells in Matteawan.

 Stein's social conscience was that of the dedicated dabbler. She wrote Reflections on the Atom Bomb (reproduced below) in 1946. 

They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.

I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn't any more than in everybody's secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.

Some people have created impressive tributes to Stein, while others have made her work available online. Stein doesn't read well on a Kindle, and there are more ways to demonstrate love than the gentle tickle of lips pressed to a forehead.

• The World of Gertrude Stein, someone's mediated love song.
• "The Making of Americans" in audio format read by Stein.
• "A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson" in audio format read by Stein.
• "How She Bowed to Her Brother" in audio format read by Stein.
• An audio excerpt from an interview with Stein somewhere around 1942 somewhere around the Algonquin.
• Ziarek on "Patriarchal Poetry".
• Karen Ford on "Patriarchal Poetry".
• Three Lives by Gertrude Stein.
• What Happened, a play by Gertrude Stein.
• "What are the Master-pieces, and why are there so few of them", an essay by Gertrude Stein.
• "Composition as Explanation" by Gertrude Stein.
• A bibliography of Stein's work.
• Portraits by Carl van Vetchen. The famed flag portraits are here.
• John Ashbery on Stein.
• The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater in New York.
• "Toward A Digital Stage Architecture" by Cheryl Faver, a look at Stein on stage with electric lights. Also worth exploring is the Digital Performance Institute.

Travels with donut.

[Banksy]

Constantin Virgil Banescu: The angel in the Coloseum.

The last time I spoke to Bobita, this past June, was pleasant. He agreed to answer questions for an interview to be published on this website. Things were going well. He preferred not to be called "Bobita" anymore-- Virgil wore better. He seemed at the top of his world. 

The last time I saw Bobita, I was at the bottom of mine. And he was still Bobita.

I was in Europe, savoring the days lived from a backpack. After spending a summer in Krakow, my cousin whisked me back to Romania on a long, beautiful, broken train ride. Once in Bucuresti, there was little to stop me from exploring the dark alleyways and haunted crannies of Romanian life. It was the early 2000s; every moment milked for its vitality and generosity. 

My cousin and a few of his friends threw an all-night party at a Bucharest apartment-- a party which mixed poetry, wine, tuica, Aristotle, Cioran, and Marilyn Manson (the latter would not have been Bobita's choice for music). Among the ten of us laughing and arguing was included the gentle presence of Bobita. When he spoke to you, there was nothing else more ravishing than the sounds coming from your mouth. As in his poems, Bobita's words came slowly and softly, yet so powerfully one couldn't help but marvel. I remember being impressed by his talent, his interest, and the scent of angels than seemed to surround him. 

Speaking to my aunt in Bucuresti yesterday, our Skye connection fuzzed by storms, she told me that "Busnadms" (covered by storm fuzz) had taken his own life. I knew before she repeated it that she was talking about Bobita. There were no more angels in the room, the light wove its own texture.

Constantin Vigril Banescu was 27 years old when he took his own life. Or rather, he took what was left of his life after the medications treating his alleged schizophrenia made peace with the difference. In those 27 years, Bobita emerged as an exceptional talent, winning the coveted Prize of the Bucharest Young Writers Association and the international Hubert Borda Prize for Young Poets. He had a 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. And when he read his poems aloud, every single word was a song. But in the last few months of his life, Virgil seemed to lose his voice. 

My worst disease is the fact that I am still alive.

So read the note found by his mother in the room with empty pill bottles and a body empty of Bobita. Family and friends knew he was depressed, but everyone hoped the medicines would work. In a blog conversation early this summer, Bobita told Mugur that he couldn't sleep and he "didn't see a sense to life anymore", though he admitted that he would like to "escape to a hospital where he could read and write". Even as Bobita's taste for life diminished, his desire to put his words on paper did not.

Mugur Grosu suggests this may have been Bobita's last poem. My translation, of course, has that heartless aftertaste that translations tend to spread like a virus, but I wanted to share it. Somehow. To convey the place he left as he saw it-- heavy, tiresome, and thick with dread.

sufletul meu se odihneşte My soul is resting

văd un copac înalt strălucitor I see a tall, sparkling tree

înfăşurat în toate culorile Wrapped in a rainbow of colors

apoi o fântână mică Then a small fountain

din care se ridică From which there rises

odată cu fiecare trecere puternică a vântului    With every powerful passing of the wind

un bulgăraş de apă A tiny lump of water

cerul s-a desfăcut The sky has opened

dintr-odată mai e atît de puţin Suddenly there is so little

până mă voi trezi Before my waking

şi iarăşi voi ieşi de sub pleoape And again I will emerge from underneath eyelids

ca să mă îndur pe mine Only to endure myself

printre măştile realu Among the masks of the real.

Before I finally got around to sending those interview questions, Bobita (or Virgil) finally renounced his masks. May his soul find the sleep he sought. His touch will be missed.

A link tribute to Bobita plus a video in which he reads in May 2009 at the Writer's Union meeting:

• The Romanian Writer's Union, in which he played a part.
• Bobita at the 9th International Literature Festival in Berlin.
• Virgil's translation of "Encounter" for Words Without Borders.
• Virgil's page at Agonia.ro (note his one-lined biography).
• Virgil and a colleague won the 2007-2008 ICTW Translation Grant.
• More about Banescu's Burda Prize (in Romanian).
• "Romanian Bodies: An essay on new Romanian poetry" from Romanian Bodies.
• A tribute from a friend.
• Razvan Tupa's final memories of Virgil.

[Cross-posted at Romania Revealed.]

Something "goodly": A list of links + the American eugenics medal.

Art Histories

David Bate gives a two-page description of the Surrealists and their politics.

David Evans does likewise for Guy Dubord and the Situationists.

Literary Kicks, an online memoir in progress.

"Unusual Imports" by Paul E. Richardson from the brilliant Russian Life (PDF).

An excerpt from Diane P. Koenker's article, "Whose Right to Rest? Contesting the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union", Comparative Studies in Society and History, April 2009. 

An interview with Jonathan Hoenig, manager of Capitalist Pig Hedge Fund.

Portal 31, Kentucky's first exhibition coal mine.

Zombies, Vamps, and the Undead

"Dracula's Charity Ball" at The Smart Set.

Speak of the devils, Romaniuc reports that the Strigoi (i.e. vampires) are "getting out of their graves" and harassing the humans in Mogoseni-Dambovita. 

"Why Zombies Are Inconcievable", a paper by Professor Eric Marcus of the Auburn Philosophy Department (PDF).

Vultures descend upon Andre Breton's exquisite corpse.

Eugenics in America

The medal to the right, officially known as the "Fitter Family Medal" awarded by the American Eugenics Society, reads I have a goodly heritage. These medals were regularly awarded in the early and mid 1900s at various social events and family fairs, especially in the midwestern states. Is it smug on my part to prefer my good heritage-- my decent, quaint, non-eugenic heritage-- to the possibility of a "goodly" one?

"Stages", a poem by Herman Hesse.

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.

Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence. 
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slave of permamence.

Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.