pushkin47

Polis,

Russian Futurist…French Surrealist…? Are you serious?

Putting the inherent ridiculousness of these two ideas on the sideboard for a second, let’s have a closer look at them. My can-opener in this discussion, as usual, is going to be the Russian serial-amorist Alexander Pushkin, who Russians worship but who nobody else pays any attention to and rightfully so: he sounds stupid in any language other than his own, really beyond shitty.

I think he'd like this – I mean, if anyone spent less mental energy on writing and being a writer it was Pushkin, who founded Russian literature in a few brilliant strokes and then walked into a Frenchman’s bullet because his wife was a flirt. Live by the sword die by the sword; so he’s become a real hero of mine, not just for what he wrote, but for the way he wrote it. Reclined, generous, with swiftness and vigor and complete immersion.

Pushkin was a “lazy man,” by which I mean the usual pose of artistic industry didn’t appeal to him. Easy for us to forget in professionalized America, but art used to be, not so much a matter of when you clocked in and out, but rather how you positioned yourself so as to let the energies of the world flow down your pen-hand most efficiently. As beard-wearer/Soviet-escapee Abram Tertz wrote:

“If Pushkin (let’s assume!) was only pretending to loaf, it means that he needed that pretense to free his tongue, that it suited him as the plot motivation for the unfolding of his destiny, and without it he couldn’t have written anything good.”

I love this quote because it gets to the heart of what is a real writing problem for me. I mean, isn’t that what a long and intense part of what we do is about: not the writing itself but the getting ready to write, the Not Writing that leads to writing: organizing oneself like a circuit, the perfect combination of tradition and re-invention?

For Pushkin this meant giving yourself up, letting Fate (Pushkin loves F-f-fate) make you the greatest writer who ever lived one minute and a ridiculous cuckold the next. Your destiny is someone else’s business, which frees you up to look around and describe everything you see so beautifully and memorably that you end up, strangely enough, outwitting fate completely: escaping it, disappearing Houdini-style through a trap door no one else can see, because they're too busy doing what they do.

Another important fact about Pushkin, who was murdered by a Frenchman: he loved France. All Russians did – most of the upper class at that point spoke French from birth and had to have Russian letters translated to them, sniff sniff. But, attracted as he was to its masterpieces, P. knew he couldn’t compete, for example, with Victor Hugo. And he didn’t have to. He was a Russian. The whole thing was hilarious to him: the wigs and powders (which he loved), the balls (adored), the pretenses and high-blown speeches (made a few in his time). High-falutin’, fascinating but, at the end of the day, kind of beside the point. Now, a Russian horse shaking snow off its back – that was life! That was a moment that deserved to make its way into literature!

So Pushkin becomes one of the first flaneurs – the first walkers, to translate the term stupidly: one of the first guys to try to put everything and especially the underbelly of life back into art. Art is great, but art is also very, very stupid, Pushkin held. We’ve got to keep slapping it, keep reminding it to pay attention and not lapse into the laziness of inherited forms. Keep looking, Pushkin shouts at us – or not shouts, since he’s not really a shouter. He throws grapes at us and threatens to not invite us to his next party.

Empires, cultural or otherwise, develop underbellies, which the provinces explore vigorously; then if they’re smart the empires themselves learn from their subjects and begin dissecting themselves. So genius France develops in the 19th century a generation’s-worth of little Pushkins, which it now officially calls flaneurs: walkers, starers, examiners of underbellies. Rimbaud, for example (sound familiar?). Baudelaire. Alfred Jarry, and all the other people who piled out of that particularly roomy clown car. As archer/vegetarian Roger Shattuck says:

“The intellectual activity that Diderot refers to as libertinage (free-thinking, debauchery) in the opening sentences of Rameau’s Nephew rests squarely on this response to the fragment as ambiguous – both isolated and implicated. Baudelaire developed Diderot’s attitude into the endemic activity of the dandy: flaner (to stroll about, to saunter). The Surrealists in their prose narratives of city promenades refined flanerie into fine art…”

[fragments here – argumentative etiquette suggests I hold my tongue, but come on: there it all is, the 7th Draft aesthetic in a nutshell! Shattuck’s prose is as clear and strained as a man asking a passerby to kindly help him remove the badger from his Balzac, but you can hear the point trembling under there, compact and dangerous as the hum of an electron cloud…]

Pushkin showed France how to strut…but how does this fit up with us, who are anyway just Americans plain and simple, putting on these masks and codpieces as they suit our moments, whims, deficiencies and advantages? Well, to their surprise, the mob of flaneury has discovered in the centuries 20th+ that when a prone position transforms the entire world into a work of art, everybody becomes an actor. As the Shatt-man explaineth, once again:

“What is no longer given – station of self – must be created. It may take a lifetime. To that end most of us own a little property, have some adventures high or low, and revert at intervals to the mutterings of our innermost feelings. It all helps. At the same time I wonder how far the histrionic sensibility, the fourth path [!!!] to a place in the world, has also made actors, and perhaps lunatics, of us all.”

With the curtain closing, then, enter poor belated blogging, this fucking ridiculous enterprise comprised, as has been noted before mon frere, MOY DROOG, of equal parts tragic and absurd, or just plain stupid, and which runs on a frottage and aspires to smitage, the wholesale eyeball-peeling of the sun settling like a grapefruit on some distant dirty rooftop. “IT ALL HELPS” – I hear the famous Be Someone On Which Nothing Is Lost dictum in this, not to mention the dream of miscellaneists/bloggers/diarists, which at the end of the day seems to be nothing more than to catch all the little fragments of life and rub them together until they spark and the world (or, more often, an immediate circle) catches fire and burns.

Pushkin…proto-blogger? Dumber things have been claimed for him, I guess. The way I see it, the dream haunting literature is anti-literature and the nightmare of the Book therefore the Anti-Book, which, solidified, gets busy throwing its own shadow. Pushkin left behind a handful of fragments, which he didn’t think was anything to take seriously.

Communism Works: An Open Letter to Michael Silverblatt

Impossible to say exactly why, but the lumpen is rising, people. For example last night I listened to the voice of Michael Silverblatt and wanted to cry. I wanted to cry, Michael Silverblatt. For one thing is certain: we cannot go on like this…

I’ve been thinking about the world for a while now Michael – thinking of it not as a network of true or false propositions but as the inside of a gigantic whale tunnelling through time and darkness. Etymologically, as you know, whales and architecture come from the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum – but there is architecture in the whale as surely as there are whale pods migrating through downtown Los Angeles. Just because things aren’t brightly lit, doesn’t make them invisible, Michael.

Michael Silverblatt, to be honest I thirst for your tears as voraciously as a car whose little orange gas-icon has been lit up for the last thirty miles. I feel like we could get there, Michael. I really do. You interview authors on the radio and I am an author not on the radio, and together we are travelling through a series of interlocking whales that make up existence. One whale is America, another is Earth, then others that are God, Los Angeles, etc.

You remember the grade-school exercise that asked us to write our exact location on an undelivered envelope? Well, I think it’s time you opened that envelope and delivered the message that America has been promising the world for years. We’re ready for it – we’ve waited long enough, anyway, and the message is burning through the thin blue sheath like a coal. Messages, messages: we’ve been promised these for centuries, Michael. But your country’s hesitancy has made the rest of the world suspect her.

Michael, I believe I have made progress along these lines, and though I may not be the first person to say this to you, I want you to listen very closely: the thing that will make you cry is brotherhood.

“Brotherhood?” says Michael Silverblatt. “Just last night I talked to Junot Diaz. Jonathan Williams sat on that exact stool – you’re speaking into the microphone that once touched the lips of Seamus Heaney!”

What, exactly, is Michael’s point here? An older guard might pull out the over-rich consistency of the bourgeois worldview – but I like Michael, and more importantly I am like Michael, specifically in my reverence for the sacred and the high. I believe that we are all in the same whale and therefore hope to answer him, not with the scorn of the working class, or the kiss of the whip, but with a vision as pure and simple as a rose in winter. A ROSE IN WINTER MICHAEL! Am I speaking loud enough yet? Lower this partition, take off your headphones and I will show you how passion can make a rose blossom from your forehead and vines drip from your nose like shoelaces; thorns pierce your eyelids. I will show you the world you’ve been longing for.

Should Michael trust me on this one? Should he put down his collected works and chop wood with the rest of the sun-bronzed demi-gods? More importantly will the whale ever dock and the message dribble off its lips to collapse exhausted on the ivory sand?

Alright, I admit it Michael, you are making me cry now, which is not exactly what I was aiming for, but which I like anyway. Delicious tears of the people, or the person! Rosewater on my upper lip! I feel that we are halfway there – Communism works, Michael Silverblatt! Say it with me, and by saying throw off the fetters of your life and ambition and find yourself in the real utopia that we’ve been planning for generations, whose groundwork we laid before you were born and whose spires will continue their putsch long after you yourself have disintegrated. You may die, but the world you bequeath to your children will live on into the night.


Are you crying yet, Michael Silverblatt? Because listen, people, if Michael isn’t crying we haven’t done our job. Rend your clothes and don hairshirt after hairshirt, for an unmoved Michael is the surest indication that everything we have worked for is lost. The winter is upon us. The vast Russian winter. Take refuge in your rabbit holes. Because from now on the only things that you will experience in common are death and sleep and maybe not even the second of these, because the world we have made respects nothing and lurches gradually towards the twenty-four hour work week. The man on which nothing is lost looses everything, and this is the secret Michael. This is the switch you must flip to extricate yourself from this madness of industry, nightmare of endless books…

I know you can do it Michael. I have faith in you, I hear a spark travelling through your vast and deeply-sonorous naval cavities, making its way towards the light, moving as it not-moves, like Jonah in his whale. Longtime listener, first time caller, Michael. Take me into your heart and I won’t disappoint.

Third Ways 1: A Russia of the Mind

This may end up having to be a two part post, so I’ll get right down to it. For the last few weeks I’ve been making my way through an amazing landscape of wolves and trees and snow: Jesus, I’ve found myself muttering as my teeth chatter. Jesus fucking Christmas, am I glad to be back! Mother Russia, how I have missed you.

If every reader has certain mental terrains – cities, eras, rivers, houses – to which they return again and again like a cabin in the woods, to restore their courage or just get that old whiff of pine cone and stale Rice Krispies, then Russia is mine. Back in high school I took a bus across the country with Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment and Dead Souls in my embarrassingly-monogrammed LL Bean duffel bag. Sixth months later I was living in Moscow with a host family that had a parrot named Kiyasha, and kept jar upon jar of fruit preserves in a bench under their kitchen table.

I could go on and on about these people. The father was a soldier who hadn’t been paid for three months; the mother Irina smoked constantly. My two host brothers, Kiril and Grisha, gave up their room for me. The first thing I saw in this room was the gigantic poster of Freddy Mercury above the bed, fist-raised, be-wifebeatered and with the usual glorious moustache: Kiril was learning guitar, and like half of the male population of Russia, worshipped a pantheon of musical gods that puzzled me, to say the least. Richie Blackmoor, King Crimson, Freddy. The two prerequisites for his worship seemed to be: 1) Unholy guitar chops, and 2) A wardrobe that included wizard hats, velvet cloaks, and rune-covered parachute pants.

Grisha, who was seven, had been in one of Russia’s many pre-teen boy bands. He displayed his four-color tour poster proudly and offered to teach me some moves. He loved correcting my Russian, which one day made me so mad that I tore off all the legs on one of his stuffed caterpillars – I was and am very ashamed about this. Gennady, the father, nodded sadly when the little roll-shaped legs were discovered stuffed beneath one of their couch cushions. That night he recited parts of Evgeny Onegin to me from heart while I pretended to have some clue what he was talking about.

It was one of their worst winters in years! They had no money, bread lines stretched around corner after corner…And I fucking loved it. I had never met anyone so happy in my entire life.

Anyway, to relate this all back to something more than my own literary mastication: a few posts ago I talked about the diarist’s power to act as a sort of generator, a form that could take the raw shit of life and turn it into, or reveal it as, pure gold. This has to do mainly with perception, I think: with organizing your soul into something on which, as Henry James said, “Nothing is lost.”

I tell you, I am searching for this right now, Seth. It is my grail and the sock I just can’t find, but which I’m convinced has found a portal to another dimension behind my radiator or something.

It’s also a capacity and gift that I smell again and again in Russian writers: Nabokov with his gnats darning the air and Tolstoy who forgot whether or not he had dusted his chair and Shklovsky, who parked my car on Tuesday. The combination – the sheer, unadulterated frottage – of the mundane and the mystical, surreal and sub-real. Like they all just landed here from Mars or something, and are fucking ecstatic about it!

I think this is part of the key, too. Their solutions to problem are fresh and powerful, because they come at an angle, from one remove. My uncle likes to use the phrase “internal technology”; well, recently in my writing I have been trying to cultivate a very particular type of internal technology, one that I feel my Russians would recognize. It’s the literary equivalent of duct tape, which is versatile and sticks to everything and always tend to work better for me than, for example, buying a whole air conditioner (remember that it is, unbelievably, eighty five degrees in Brooklyn right now). Or maybe duct tape wielded by Gary Kasparov, since what I’m talking about is not low-tech exactly, as a technology that is both very low and very high, like the amazing Miranda July website you linked last time. Web page + writing on your appliances with a sharpie.

I throw all this down under the assumption that, as Miranda herself says (after seeing her fridge, I feel like I can call her Miranda), “Both of us know what I’m talking about.” I see Seventh Draft themes and obsessions beginning to rise, kraken-style, and one of these seems to be the mysterious Third Way of writing, where to find it, how to hunt it down. I don’t know. I am obsessed with certain possibly-useless things, for example the kind of devolution/evolution that Bob Dylan showed by going back to Depression-era folk songs. One step back to go two steps forward.

Next post: show and tell. I’ve got a kick-ass video.

Also, an open question: imaginary landscapes? The places that make you shout, like Tertz, “Kangaroo!”

Davenport’s best book: “The Geography of the Imagination.”

Without a grey hair in my soul...

Things are different in the suburbs. You want to park your car? No problem, park your car. Suburbanites are calm--we lack the spunk to flamboyantly towel anything, let alone corvettes with diapers.

Just kidding, we're even more crazy and spunky, due to our high levels of repressed desire.

Today I go outside and sit in the sun. I read Miranda July's story "Mon Plaisir".

I sunbathe for 34 minutes.

I do this. I count my minutes sunbathing. I accrue them and list them in the little journal in my head which also holds the phone numbers of every house I've lived in as well as a tedious reprisal of the amounts of sit-ups and push-ups I have performed day in, day out, over the last three weeks.

I dislike this little weird part of my brain and I try to ignore its siren's call, but the call cannot be ignored. Trust me, I've tried. A few days ago, I intentionally neglected to think about push-ups and sit-ups. That very night I bolted out of bed with one searing thought in my head: September 27th, 120 push-ups, 80 sit-ups!

I say to my wife: You see, I'm mildly autistic!

She says: It's four am.

Anyway, I was sunbathing, and I have to tell you about what happens on a typical cul-de-sac, in a typical town, on a typical Thursday afternoon, from 1:15 pm to 1:49 pm.

Not much.

But still, more than I would have expected. First of all, there's the lady across the street. She zooms in, zooms out of her driveway in her stationwagon about three times.

What is she doing?

I imagine she's killing time. She's adopted two little Asian boys and they're now in school. She seems incredibly agitated without them around, almost as agitated as when they are around. This Sunday, for example, she zooms into the driveway. I'm sunbathing.

She screams: Oh my god, Oh my god! Are you OK?!! Are you OK?!!

She's slammed the door on one of her son's fingers. That little devil could care less. His only concern, I know, is noise. So he remains mute, which I assume he knows will provoke higher-pitched, more agitated screams from his mother. So she screams and her screams, I know, are pleas for my attention.

But I'm half-naked and sunbathing. I'm hung-over and reading Miranda July. What the hell do I care?

After a few minutes, the tender, patient husband comes out. He assesses the situation.

She says: Why did he have his hand where my door is, that's what I want to know.

Indeed. The screaming stops, though, and the cul-de-sac resumes its spooky, boring hum.

So that's Sunday and now it's Thursday. What does she do today? She zooms in, she zooms out. I see her in her car, her head nearly on-top of the steering wheel. I think: No way, she's not masturbating in there. No way.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting on the lawn, a young man, almost naked. We share a glance at each other. I don't know what she's thinking, but I know what I'm thinking: not in a million years do you show up in a sexual fantasy of mine.

Without a grey hair in my soul
Or a snip of senility's gentleness
Raiding the world with
Sheer force of voice I'm strutting
handsome
22 years old.

That's what Mayakovsky says. I'm not saying that.

(In the Ambler school of Russian formalism, of which I am apparently the only member, nothing much happens.)

I just check my watch, count minutes.

This is how I distract myself from writing. This is my break. Without this time, I start to evaporate. I become pale. I lose my Vitamin D stores rapidly.

The Russian Futurist Parks His Car

Have you ever tried to park your car in Brooklyn? It is not easy. First of all, parking spots are impossible to find.

Second of all, Russian Formalists are not very good parallel parkers.

Especially Mayakovsky.

Why him in particular? Well, parallel parking takes patience and precision, and though Mayakovsky did remodulate Russian verse, thereby eliminating predictable end-rhymes and rejuvenating literature as a voice for the masses, he lacked the kind of large, car-filled expanse of gradated pavement in which parallel parking can be learned without danger to oneself or others.

In America, on the other hand, the asphalt grows on trees. Dean Moriarty, according to legend, could hair-turn a school bus while going eighty off an exit ramp, sliding it without adjustment between a pair of priceless Ming vases.

But then Dean Moriarty was a symptom of capitalist malaise. That kind of energy goes nowhere.

Far better to leave your apartment at four o’clock in the afternoon, move your car to the opposite side of the street, and then wait until the parking ban on that side is lifted. This way, you will probably not have to parallel park.

You will have to wait in your car for two hours, but that will allow you to see things.

You will see:

The arrogance of the far-too athletic pregnant woman.

The flamboyance of the guy who spends forty five minutes towelling his orange Corvette with a diaper.

The birds of our neighborhood.

One of the rhymes that Mayakovsky saw as obsolete was krov / lyubov, blood and love, which in English are dissimilar enough to qualify as slant rhymes.

What does “Love” rhyme with in other languages?

Dove.

Stove.

(In the Brooklyn school of Russian formalism, of which I am apparently the only member, stoves are clotted with the ashes of the trodden-upon proletariat and therefore rhyme with "Love.")

What happened to the Revolution, Seth? What am I doing here, parking my car for two fucking hours?

My heart beats faster as the rear-lights on the van in front of me blaze red, red! My mind prepares for open space. Tundra! Russia! The snowy fields stained black with the blood of my enemies! Unfortunately it turns out he’s just backing up.

He wants that extra inch.