please take charge

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Over the years, he was considered the Soviet poet par excellence. It is certainly true that he lent his enormous talents to further the propaganda needs of the Soviet regime. He began his career as a revolutionary in both art and politics in pre-revolutionary Russia and remained an apologist for the revolution until almost the end of his life, despite criticism by contemporaries. Mayakovsky loved to break conventions in life and in poetry. He used free verse, unlike most Russian poetry, and created unusual rhymes and jarring images. His work was often upsetting, over the top, yet brilliant at the same time. Near the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky became increasingly disillusioned with bolshevism and propaganda; his satirical play The Bedbug, dealt with his frustrations with Soviet philistinism and bureaucracy. During his last month, Mayakovsky struggled with illness and personal disappointment in addition to his mounting frustrations with the regime. On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself. An unfinished poem in his suicide note read, in part:

The love boat has crashed against the daily routine. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts

After his death, Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist" and a "fellow-traveller". When, in 1935, Lilya Brik, his muse and lover, wrote to Stalin to complain about the attacks, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's letter:

"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..."

Following Stalin's death, rumors arose that Mayakovsky did not commit suicide but was murdered at the behest of Stalin. During the 1990s, when many KGB files were declassified, there was hope that new evidence will come to light on this question, but none has been found and the hypothesis remains unproven.

because I have nowhere else to put this

I wish wish wish I could find someone who shares the same interests as me. In a sense that I want to have a really really really really really good conversation. The conversations that I have currently are not dissatisfying, rather they simply do not cover what I would sometimes like to be talking about.

Since I have not found this person (yet) I will vent on here.

In an essay that I read recently, 'Revenge is Sour' by George Orwell, Orwell outlines how revenge is never as satisfying once the deliverer has pursued it. He talks about this in terms of a Jew getting revenge on a powerless Nazi following the collapse of Germany in WWII. The Jew now has the power to do what he wishes to the helpless German soldier, but because the opportunity has presented itself in a way that sees the shoe on the other foot, the revenge becomes more an act committed for 'the sake of it' rather than one motivated by a true desire to cause harm. Today I read a quote by the rather pessimistic and particularly ignorant Arthur Schopenhauer (pictured);

It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only
transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater
than the pleasure of the devourer.

Basically, I made some sort of association between the two ideas, and was desperate to express this, somehow.

:)

oh, good

If the sight of the blue skies
fills you with joy,
if a blade of grass springing up in the fields
has power to move you,
if the simple things of nature have a message
that you understand,
rejoice, for your soul is alive.

- Eleonora Duse

well, I just purchased 'Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You' by Peter Cameron (one of the books on my list) and am feeling a little more hopeful. This book intrigued me the most out of the many that I stumbled upon whilst creating the list, and I am now extremely excited to read it. I found out about it through fuck yeah, literary quotes, a site that I frequently visit. The extracts included caught my eye; I immediately established a connection with the character. One review put it like this:

James Svek doesn't really fit in. He isn't interested in the same things as other eighteen-year-old guys, doesn't even like people his age.. James is a contemplative young man whose views on the world around him aren't always congruent with popular opinion. He sees the world with a mix of ironic humor and disdain. Although he isn't an "angry" teenager, James has distanced himself from the people and things that surround him.. He has been accepted to Brown University but he has decided that he doesn't want to go to college. He would rather buy an old house in the Midwest and live in obscurity.

It is quite literally my ideal book. Perhaps I am not alone in my thinking after all. I found myself reading George Orwell for the majority of my day in the school library in an attempt to avoid my surroundings. It worked. Oh, the power of literary escapism.

Alien Like You

Its true. The way in which the human mind manipulates its environment to produce emotion is absurd. It comes from nowhere, and we are the only creatures that seem to possess the ability to attach meanings to otherwise mundane objects and then allow ourselves to be controlled by them. Often there is no real substance that bothers us, rather just the emotion alone. Alone. This is a good example of a complex human feeling that comes from nowhere. You could be living in a crowded city, sharing a house with a loud bunch of roommates, spending day in day out with colleagues and classmates, and yet all the while be feeling like the only person on the planet. David Wojnarowicz illustrates this emotion in his book 'Memories That Smell Like Gasoline':

Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds

that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there. I’m a Xerox of my former self. I can’t abstract my own dying any longer. I am a stranger to others and to myself and I refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have history attached to my heels. I am glass, clear empty glass. I see the world spinning behind and through me. I see casualness and mundane effects of gesture made by constant populations. I look familiar but I am a complete stranger being mistaken for my former selves. I am a stranger and I am moving. I am moving on two legs soon to be on all fours. I am no longer animal vegetable or mineral. I am no longer made of circuits or disks. I am no longer coded and deciphered. I am all emptiness and futility. I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I’m looking for outside of myself. It doesn’t exist out there. Maybe it’s only in here, i

nside my head. But my head is glass and my eyes have stopped being cameras, the tape has run out and nobody’s words can touch me. No gesture can touch me. I’ve been dropped into all this from another world and I can’t speak your language any longer. See the signs I try to make with my hands and fingers. See the vague movements of my lips among the sheets. I’m a blank spot in a hectic civilization. I’m a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice. I feel like a window, maybe a broken window. I am a glass human. I am a glass human disappearing in rain. I am standing among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words. I am getting so weary. I am growing tired. I am waving to you here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.

I just thought I would write a blog about it, because lately I've realised how ridiculous we really are in creating our own demons. Its very silly. But its also very real. And although we all may feel alone, if we're all alone, then we're all together in that

too.

The only problem with such emotions is that those who do not let them out are in danger of truly defining loneliness.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have the friends and family that I do.

A true evening of reflection.

Had this song on repeat..

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions? Will you follow dogma, or will you be original? Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize? Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

Rainy Day References

From 1970 until his death in 1984, from January to March of each year except 1977, Foucault gave a course of public lectures and seminars weekly at the College de France as the condition of his tenure as professor there. All these lectures were tape-recorded, and Foucault's transcripts also survive. In 1997 these lectures began to be published in French with eight volumes having appeared so far. So far, seven sets of lectures have appeared in English: Psychiatric Power 1973–1974, Abnormal 1974–1975, Society Must Be Defended 1975–1976,Security, Territory, Population 1977–1978, The Hermeneutics of the Subject 1981–1982, The Birth of Biopolitics 1978-1979 and The Government of Self and Others 1982-1983. Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population pursued an analysis of the broader relationship between security and biopolitics, explicitly politicizing the question of the birth of man raised in The Order of Things. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault outlines his theory of governmentality, and demonstrates the distinction between sovereignty discipline, and governmentality as distinct modalities of state power. He argues that governmental state power can be genealogically linked to the 17th century state philosophy of raison d'etat and, ultimately, to the medieval Christian 'pastoral' concept of power. Notes of some of Foucault's lectures from University of California, Berkeley in 1983 have also appeared as Fearless Speech.

AND

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality