April 25, 2013 The Culture Diaries Week in Culture: Sophie Pinkham, Slavicist By Sophie Pinkham May 22, 1929 I was sitting on the roof of the State Publishing House, making sure that everything was in order, because no sooner do you overlook something than something happens. You can’t leave the city unwatched. And who will keep an eye on the city, if not me? A Watchman has the right to:1. Sing.2. Shoot at whomever comes along.3. Invent and compose, also make notes, and recite in a low voice, or learn by heart. 4. Look over the panorama.5. Compare life below to an anthill. 6. Contemplate book publishing. 7. Take a bed along. —Daniil Kharms, Boris Levin, and Yury Vladimirov, from I am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary : The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms; translated by Peter Scotto and Anthony Anemone DAY ONE I go to Serbo-Croatian class, where we learn how to say “he gave her three piglets as a gift,” and “in Dalmatia there are many stones.” I look forward to the day when I will use these sentences in a conversation. I go home to read Turgenev, but watch the news all day instead. My friends and I are proud to be among the only Americans to know the whereabouts of both Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan, and the very real difference between Chechnya and the Czech Republic. it’s topsy-turvy but there’s something happy there’s dignity even in the idea that not all the world’s monsters are ours —Vsevolod Nekrasov, “I Live I See,” translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich DAY TWO On Saturday, I attend a panel titled “The Russian Avant-Garde Goes Underground.” On Monday, I attend a reading of the work of three Russian poets. (I reject linear time and treat these two events as one.) Saturday’s discussion is focused on Oberiu, the “Association for Real Art” founded by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky in Leningrad in 1928. Oberiu dissolved in 1930, after one of its signature poetry reading/magic shows attracted the attention of the authorities. It was the last Soviet avant-garde to live in the open. (Watch a cartoon version of Kharms’s absurdist writing here.) Eugene Ostashevsky, who translated the first English-language collection of Vvedensky’s poetry, quotes Nietzsche: “I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” Read More
April 25, 2013 On the Shelf Salinger Letters, and Other News By Sadie Stein “You can’t go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?” A new cache of letters by young J. D. Salinger comes to light. Granta editor John Freeman is leaving the magazine to teach. Edward de Grazia, a lawyer and free-speech advocate who defended both Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, has died at eighty-six. The strange mystery of the stolen books of Lambeth Palace. The Library of Congress (sort of) comes to terms with eBooks.
April 24, 2013 Look Lello Bookstore, Porto, Portugal By Sadie Stein The Lello bookstore, Porto, Portugal. “Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.” —Helene Hanff, Q’s Legacy
April 24, 2013 Arts & Culture Remote Viewing in the Sooner State By James McGirk Assuming my issue of EYE SPY, a British glossy devoted to “The Covert World of Espionage,” can be trusted, between 1973 and 1995 the United States government (and its Chinese and Soviet rivals) spent millions hiring teams of personnel to scry photographs of enemy installations and describe their heretofore unknowable innards. A final report on the Stargate Project, a remote viewing project conducted during these years (preceded by Sunstreak, Dragon Absorb, Centerline, Grill Flame and Gondola Wish), acknowledged a “statistically observable effect,” albeit one producing information too “vague and ambiguous … to yield actionable intelligence.” A contemporary remote viewing conducted by Jeff Martin, fiction editor of This Land Press and (with C. Max Magee) The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, yielded far better results. Imaginary Oklahoma is an anthology of forty-six writers’ attempts to envision Oklahoma without ever having visited America’s forty-sixth state. Martin, in his introduction to the book, describes his inspiration for the project. He gives nods to Lydia Davis’s collection of super-short stories, with their ability to create “worlds in mere sentences” and “beautiful questions” from “simple narrative,” and Ed Ruscha’s 1990 painting No Man’s Land, which Martin describes as “The ghostly outline of the pan-shaped land. The shadowy question mark stretched across the canvas, almost menacing.” It was an excellent pairing of prompts. Imaginary Oklahoma manages to raise the stakes of the short-prose form. Read More
April 24, 2013 On the Shelf Buy Tiffany’s, and Other News By Sadie Stein Should you have $50,000 lying around, you have two days to bid on this manuscript of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A new book argues that Jane Austen “isn’t merely fodder for game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems of 18th-century social warfare.” But … didn’t she come first? Doesn’t that make him a trousered version of her? Discuss. Andy Griffith and Robert Burns: a surprisingly convincing case for their spiritual kinship. An appreciation of The Lonely Doll and its complex legacy.
April 23, 2013 Nostalgia A Dinner in Moscow By Jonathan Wilson In March 1975, a couple of weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday, I accompanied my girlfriend Tina on a trip to Russia. At the time Tina was a graduate student at the University of Essex pursuing a thesis on “Dostoyevsky and the Russian Orthodox Church,” under the benign supervision of the eminent scholar and translator Angela Livingstone. Londoners both, we had been living together for almost four years in the village of Wivenhoe near its estuary, close to the college campus, far from the big city and the disapproving glare of our respective widowed mothers. My mother, a conscientious objector to interfaith relationships, had long ago banned Tina from visits to her home. “It’s bad enough you have to go out with someone who isn’t Jewish,” she said, “but why did you have to pick a girl with Christ in her name?” “Her name’s Tina,” I had replied. “And what do you think that’s short for, idiot?” For her own part, Tina’s mother, dressed always in Greek Orthodox widow’s black, was opposed to our living together on moral grounds, which had, I could see, a superior logic. Our workman’s cottage in Wivenhoe featured no bathroom, a decidedly unpoetic outside toilet, and walls so thin that the neighbors’ voices came through no softer than our own. The wife could be harsh. “Pick, pick pick,” we heard her yell at her husband as we sat down to eat. “You stick your finger so far up your nose that you’re gonna pick your bloody guts out one of these days.” Our kitchen table doubled as a work desk, and was covered with books by obscure (to me) Russian saints and philosophers, Tikhon of Zadonsk and Vladimir Solovyov among them. Angela Livingstone was already in Russia working on a translation project, and she invited Tina to come and visit her. I tagged along for the ride. We booked onto a group tour through Intourist, the Russian travel agency: it was not easy in those days to move without an official guide in the Soviet Union. We planned a few days in Leningrad, to be followed by a train journey to Moscow, where Angela would meet us at our hotel and, we hoped, spirit us away from our minders. Read More