Spring 2016

Autumn Season

Enigmatic, bay female (Hydroplane–Invention)Precious, grey male (Fingernail–Freshness)Visitor, grey female (Trifle–Guarantee)Quartet, dark grey male (Rion–Mail-armour)Optician, bay male (Flood–Perfect Life)Literate, dark grey male (Response–Groupy)Pettish, dark grey female (Doc–Octave)Weather, dark brown female (Hydroplane–Filling)Emptiness, […]

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Spring 2016

Six Simple Rules for Becoming Human

That there should be six and not five rules was suggested by Bronislav Vinogrodsky following his Ancient Chinese sources; Rule Seven was suggested by Giuseppe Mascoli as a preventative measure against taking oneself too seriously. The rules are meant to help those 11 520 real and genuine human beings that according to a very precise estimates of Bronislav […]

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Spring 2016

Rescue Plan

Rescue Plan No. 1 People must be exterminated. They have made life unbearable: you can’t find a seat on the Metro, you have to elbow your way through the shops, they have spat sunflower seed husks all over the place.[1. A reference to the Russian and Ukrainian low-class habit of consuming sunflower seeds as snack food outdoors and in public places, […]

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Spring 2016

On The Day I Died

On the day I diedI took my mother for a ride“Where shall we go, my dear,Where shall we go?”And for the longest timeThere were no songs to singNo words to rhyme.“How can I my loveHave failed you so?”And on the day I diedI drove her to the riversideAnd saw my father thereAnd he was fishing thereAnd on the water there was snowSnowSnowSnow

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Spring 2016

A Poet Called on Me Yesterday

Dear Yuri Mikhailovich!I am sorry for bombarding you with requests, but this time I nevertheless choose to do so. Yesterday a poet Iosif Alexan­dro­vich Brodsky called on me. He drank some tea and ate some melon, and was humble, quiet, ultimately sombre, discontent, annoyed, and unhappy. He begged me—almost kneeling at my feet—to ask you to pull some […]

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My hope is that I’m not a complete fucking asshole after I’m dead. Spring 2016

Baby Dee

Baby Dee

“There is a harp in that piano. And there’s a girl in that boy,” is the refrain to the song “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities”, which records two experiences of the unusual singer, harpist, pianist and accordionist Baby Dee (1953). First, at the age of four she saw two of her neighbors in suburban Cleveland, Bobby Scott and Freddie Weis […]

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London is a kind of disarray where everyone knows how to behave. But separately. Spring 2016

Alexander Piatigorsky

Alexander Piatigorsky

Strange to his country and time, he faces the space where he can think, and even think about thinking.Alexander Piatigorsky Alexander Piatigorsky came into this world in 1929 in Moscow, the city of his first love, and left it in 2009 in London, the city that had become his last love. Everything that happened between the two events was a series of […]

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I even prefer the drawings to be in the same room with me, whatever room I happen to be in. Spring 2016

Harijs Brants

Harijs Brants

Maybe it’s my natural wariness getting in touch with the unknown inside me. Maybe art is the ability to take what’s inside you, articulate it and make it visible… But, generally speaking, I don’t want to burden myself with the artist’s role.Then, what kind of role do you want? A draughtsman’s, right? Yeah, a draughtsman. To me, a draughtsman… […]

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I have something to say that begins me going but my desire in writing it is to make something that is beautiful. Spring 2016

Donald Hall

Donald Hall

I first encountered Donald Hall in the winter of 1968 when he came to my high school in Michigan to read and talk about his poetry. It was a big occasion for many of us more ‘literary types’. Poetry readings were not common in those days, and poets were an exotic species. I remember Hall was clean-shaven and wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He […]

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Spring 2016

Sensitive Versus Passionate

This text was written on a separate piece of paper, which is preserved among similar ones in the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library of Russia. There is no exact date, but the year is known—1931, after the month of November, and it is also known that it was written on the other side of this same piece of paper. Quoted from Daniil Kharms. […]

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Almost everything I do in philosophy to be derived from this remark: speech comes to an end, the body comes to an end… Spring 2016

Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell

Many consider Stanley Cavell one of the most original thinkers in modern American philosophy. His voluminous writings over the last fifty years include an influential reading of the later Wittgenstein, but also address themes as diverse as cinema, opera, Shakespeare, and Romanticism. He characterizes what is probably his most significant work, The Claim of […]

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Somehow the universe has a tendency to be as interesting as possible, more and more diverse, more and more interesting. Spring 2016

Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson

At the age of four, he tried to calculate the number of atoms that constitute the Sun; at the age of five, he began working on a treatise on the development of nature; when he was eight, he wrote a sci-fi story about a trip to the Moon; he lost interest in biology after his first attempts to dissect crayfish; he entered the famous Winchester College, […]

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