He is too good to be kept on the shelf. Let me share with you Kirill Medvedev.
from It’s No Good: Poems/Essays/Actions
this is all very interesting
I have a lot to say about all this
I really empathize
with these cinephiles
I think these are the ancient specters of art,
these are the doomed spirits walking among us,
for me, they represent everything
fevered
about art and its surroundings:
the fanaticism,
the snobbery,
the silly
obsession, the baseless
sense of some sort of philanthropy,
community
or
superiority;
I believe
that these are
the fevered specters of art
that speak in declarations
art isn’t this, isn’t that
art isn’t this or that or that
art is a fistfight in the orchestra pit
art is God knows what at this point
art is not, in any case, Verlaine and Rimbaud
in a bar in Belgium
most likely, art is a wife who does not share or partake in
your interests, it’s your young son
an insensitive idiot, cretin
(I remember
how
when one of my friends was a teen
he wrote
“DAD IS A BASTARD”
on the wall of his room)
this, this is basically how I imagine it happens:
art is noise, howling, barking
weeping swearing in the foyer;
it’s perfectly possible that art is God knows what
I think that art is a fight in the orchestra pit
those schizocinephiles sometimes remind me
of the insane stamp collectors
I used to buy stamps from when I was a kid
they are also something like
elderly soccer fanatics
overall, I consider them a wonderful, nostalgic, dying type,
tragic,
the carriers of a disappearing character
the schizocinephiles—
who sense before everyone else
the falling of souls
and a drop in the temperature.
—Trans. Bela Shayevich
Originally printed in English by n+1 & Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012
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