Blog Til You Drop

Blogging: A Cautionary Tale...

Biomorphous Black Monster: Slapdash and Ambiguous

Here's an interesting story out of Russia about a proposed monument to former president of Russia Boris Yeltsin that was rejected out of hand by the competition committee and by representatives of Yeltsin's Family.

After a competition that involved over 6,000 entries, the winner was declared to be the young artist Dmitri Kavarga, whose black metal sculpture was called Biomorphous Black Monster.

Here's a picture I found of the biomorphous black monster on the BBC News website:



It looks like some kind of infernal ab machine, if that isn't redundant. As the article points out, the stated reason for rejection of the BBM was that it has not been 10 years since Yeltsin's death, though why then they were having a contest at all is a little puzzling. In rejecting the proposed monument, a spokesperson for the State Duma's commission for monumental art also called Kavarga's work "slapdash and ambiguous," so apparently there were at least some aesthetic considerations that were made as well.

Kavarga himself said of his work that it "symbolized de­struction and break-down, the swallowing-up of orderliness by chaos." (Again, very much like an ab machine.) And this is a view of Yeltsin's reign that is not unheard of. For anyone interested in learning more about Russia in the nineties with Yeltsin at the helm I highly recommend Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinsky's wonderful book The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy, a gripping and detailed account of the slapdash and ambiguous Yeltsin years.

The statue would have stood in Lyubyanka Square, not far from Red Square and the Kremlin, and in front of the old KGB headquarters, currently the FSB headquarters. For many years, the square was the home to a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, which was the muscle behind the Red Terror.

New Kid on the Block

Lucy played with the neighborhood kids for the first time the other day. I mean she plays already, of course, whether at daycare or at home etc. And she has friends, though they are mainly kids of our friends; but yesterday was the first time that she played with the neighborhood kids.

We were walking home from daycare and she saw this older girl (about 8 or 9?) whom she knows slightly, and her brothers, also young -- one is about Lucy's age and the other may be 5 or 6 -- out in front of their house kicking a ball against their front stoop, and she was mesmerized. This was happening a few doors down from ours and she wanted to go down and see (she wouldn't go inside) and when we got closer she just stood there frozen, watching. The girl smiled at her and invited her over, but she didn't go, though I could see her become more alert. I asked her if she wanted to go home, hoping that would prompt her to join the kids, but she shook her head and remained planted, watching them kicking the ball.

She drifted closer to them, almost imperceptibly, while holding onto my finger, trying to be cool about it, but she wouldn't break free and go over. Suddenly, she looked up at me and mouthed "My ball," and pulled me home. She wanted to get her ball and bring it outside. So we went inside and found her lime green rubber ball and when we got back outside she started kicking the ball as best she could, to me mainly, and I kicked it back to her, but it generally went in the direction of the kids. And she wanted to play closer to where they were still playing. And she kept getting closer, until she blended in with them, and then suddenly they were playing together, and I saw the next years of her life laid out there...

I Threw Out 50 Books Today...

It wasn't easy but it had to be done. We are bursting at the seams and need to lighten our load.The books I threw out were all old yellowed paperbacks, many with either water damage, bent or ripped or missing pages, or markings too unintelligible to ever be of use again. Some were "doubles" and some were cheap (usually Dover) editions of works that I had in other formats. They weren't even books that could be given away. I would be turned away at any respectable bookstore and probably run off my street if I was to try to have a stoop sale.

But even with the guilt free knowledge of the necessity of it all it was a melancholy day. Out went William Blake; out went Thomas Traherne; Plato was discarded three times over, Edgeworth twice. A water-damaged Mary Shelley was hard to part with as I don't know when I might see her again, though frankly a marked up Norton Critical Edition of Percy Bysshe was a relief to be rid of. I didn't even realize I owned Tom Clancy. Well now I don't. Andre Hodeir argued with me fiercely, but I put him out next to Conrad and some Cavalier poets. The Blind Owl was left to consider the state of dark wisdom from the perch of the Thursday night curb. I threw out 3 copies of Madame Bovary, leaving two behind (all 5 translated by Steegmuller). I threw out a very old very yellowed paperback copy of Harry Kemelman's Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet, a book I acquired more than 10 years ago at the American Studies Department of the University of Innsbruck, where I rescued it from being discarded (it being yellow even then). My goal was 100. I had a quota and conviction. But the more I pruned, the harder it got. I had to stop thinking like a collector and consider the likely use these books would get, the use that *I* personally could give them or get from them, and only such twisted and perverse thinking allowed me to proceed. But it was bibliocide, and my conscience kicked in just as I got to around 50. I turned and looked at a semi-worn Rebecca West. I eyed the cover and the muscular paragraphs and the lithe sentences. I put the book down, and that day I threw out no more.

I can only imagine what it would be like to decimate a library like this, not just a collection. In some ways it would be easier to weed, because you could submit the task to the discipline of criteria and rules, and not get caught up in the erotics of it, the sensual nature of paper and bindings and memories, and the stark authority of it all. You could simply deselect a set number of books and mark each one for reassignment according to such practical matters as how infrequently it has been looked at, or requested, or touched, or how much dust it had accumulated, the dust of its own disintegrating self, loosed from the body of the book and redescended in a certain thickness. As if that was a bad thing.