Back Flash: Mikhail Zoshchenko
(cake by Lukka Sigurdardottir)
Words by Mikhail Zoshchenko.
He liked to yap out, “This is not theatre!”
He had a bird he named Dog.
His writing often deadpan. We know why people write deadpan (E.L Doctorow to Dashiell Hammet to, oh hell, Tao Lin)–they are saying what they are saying and are not. A deadpan is an iron skillet. The flavor is “cured” in the core. Like a bowl of bacon or a jelly intruder. [But now I am getting hungry.]
He saw that flash fiction (“snapshots” his term) was disreputable to the bourgeoisie. (At the time, they felt the genre unfit for critical analysis, so unfit, period.) This glowed Zoshchenko to the form. The bourgeoisie lived as if life was theatre. Worms under teacups, something.
So fuck them.
ropes, strings, poppea and 3 stories by Daniil Kharms
Watch all 3 parts.
They are lovely like fish.
Back Flash: Daniil Kharms
(Cartier-Bresson)
People sometimes scoff flash fiction by noting its recent flabelliform of popularity. I occasionally refute by bringing past authors of flash to the now. I hope you may one day gather this feature and create a joiner’s mallet.
Enter Daniil Kharms.
He felt cause and effect were funny, buy not ha-ha funny. I once thought serious silliness the only real answer to life (but I digress), so was/am happy the day I stumbled upon Kharms. Automatic and lifeless makes us into a thing. This is good or bad?
Excellent site here of his work.
Here is a flash for you, titled, “How a Man Crumbled.”
– They say all the best tarts are fat-arsed. Gee-ee, I really like busty tarts, I love the way they smell.
Having said this, he started to increase in height and, upon reaching the ceiling, he crumbled into a thousand little pellets. The yard-keeper Panteley came, swept all these pellets up into his scoops in which he usually picked up the horse muck, and he carried these pellets away somewhere to the back yard.
And the sun continued to shine as ever and splendiferous ladies continued to smell just as ravishingly as ever.
BOMBlog: Russian Avant-Garde
Those who are following my year-long Russian lit journey might be interested to glance over at the BOMBlog, where Kevin Kinsella has an essay about the Russian Avant-Garde, particularly the photos of Aleksandr Rodchenko, whose portraits of Lilya Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Osip Brik have shifted through various meanings/uses: photographic evidence of the threesome’s close friendship, symbols of the Russian Avant-Garde movement, and state propaganda posters.