Maintenant #87 – Eugene Ostashevsky
Look, Kharms and his friends are the first Russian poetry group to take something akin to a linguistic turn. They are not after the Logos, as the Futurists and Mandelstam are. They distance themselves from language–by “language” they mean all cognitive frameworks, not just linguistic ones–emphasize its alterity, conventionality. Yes, their position is historically contingent. The Russian around them is Stalinizing, words move further and further away from their referents. But despite their historicity, Kharms and Vvedensky match our concerns very closely, infinitely more closely than the attitudes of their predecessors.
In the 87th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Russian poet Eugene Ostashevsky.
The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi
And as he hung over the railings losing his insides like some kind of piñata,
The pirate didn’t know whether to curse or laugh and so was suddenly struck by a stupendous stutter,
And thereafter–like the old man of Alma-Ata who fell into a gutter after eating panna cotta while sexually molesting Harry Potter,
That Harry Potter who, with his spook tackles off, looked like an Eros–without errata
To the old man of Alma-Ata who, later lying in the gutter, got an urging to utter, “I feel so ashamed cause my wife, whose motto was Nothing in excess, has just died and I already forgot her!”
By Eugene Ostashevsky.
The Missing Links
Djuna Barnes exhibition (via Paris Review). * “I think I’m writing for somebody – like being the ghostwriter for someone who had a very different life from my life today.” Eileen Myles (see also, 3:AM‘s review of Inferno). * On Wallace Stevens, the “magisterial aesthetician, the abstract reasoner, the obsessive formalist endlessly scrutinizing the gulf […]