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If you need weather information--faceshaker's daily complaint and associated day poems--please feel welcome to go to www.myspace.com/faceshaker for updated reports. Here you will find up-to-date commentary designed to combat the unnecessary narcissim, billious and overblown egotism and self-regarding, pretentiously false wisdom in the blogosphere. Take down as follows:
"The walls were covered with paintings that must have looked very strange to the public, and with sentences no less strange. 'I like watching children die'--that line from Mayakovsky's early, prerevolutionary poem--was on the wall in order to shock those who entered...No one talked art here, there were no discussions, no heart searchings: those present were divided into actors and spectators. The audience consisted of the remnants of the bourgeoisie--profiteers, writers, philistines in search of entertainment...David Burlyuk would mount the platform, his face heavily powdered, lorgnette in hand, and recite: 'I like pregnant men.'"
--Ilya Ehrenburg
commenting on
her experiences
at Moscow's Stray Dog
1920
"The walls were covered with paintings that must have looked very strange to the public, and with sentences no less strange. 'I like watching children die'--that line from Mayakovsky's early, prerevolutionary poem--was on the wall in order to shock those who entered...No one talked art here, there were no discussions, no heart searchings: those present were divided into actors and spectators. The audience consisted of the remnants of the bourgeoisie--profiteers, writers, philistines in search of entertainment...David Burlyuk would mount the platform, his face heavily powdered, lorgnette in hand, and recite: 'I like pregnant men.'"
--Ilya Ehrenburg
commenting on
her experiences
at Moscow's Stray Dog
1920
posted by Faceshaker at 2:25 PM
1 Comments:
The intent being, of course, that everything some fools believe is "new" and "utterly groundbreaking" has been done before--in another place, another time, under utterly different circumstances. Lenin held intellectuals in contempt, although he market-profiled himself as an intellectual tough-guy. Using the poets as a vanguard set of public criers, in the bars, the clubs, sometimes on the streets of St. Petersburg, once he tired of them, he jailed many, exiled others, eventually killing the "best minds of his generation." When he began to believe Mayakovsky was getting too influential, he made a call for anti-futurist poets to counter the dangerous influence of futurists like Mayakovsky. What on earth is an anti-futurist? A poet who writes about pre-revolutionary Russia? But he'd already dismissed those--like Akhmatova, who had been labeled "nun/whore" in an attempt to portray her as an outmoded mind representative of the outmoded past. Ah, yes! If they're too big in the minds of the people to either kill or exile, ignore them. Through the persistence of time and human dignity, however, Akhmatova won her own private revolution.
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