Translated material
Sergey Kuznetsov. NasNet: issue 13
NasNet: issue 13
Sergey Kuznetsov
Publication date: August 3, 2000
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Name
E-mail
Name
E-mail
Sergey Kuznetsov
Publication date: August 3, 2000
Keywords: sex, Satanism
Belov and his wife at one time fell in love with going to the bathhouse. Driven by an interest in new places and a desire to save money, Belov found a new place every weekend. And then one day he came across an advertisement for a bathhouse, located quite close to his house and also surprisingly cheap. He called, agreed on a time, invited friends.
On the appointed day, he and his wife arrived at the place and found out that the bathhouse was located inside the Peoples' Friendship University. Patrice Lumumba. This alarmed them - but when they went inside, their wariness turned into real fear: the bathhouse consisted of three rooms: the bathhouse itself, with a steam room and a jacuzzi (the smallest), a billiard room and a bedroom with mirrors (the largest).
The Belovs tried to take a steam bath - the steam room was bad, there was no buzz. Friends were late. It got a bit boring. They sat down on chairs in the hallway and thought.
- Can you imagine what usually happens here? - said Belov.
“Yes,” answered his wife, “real depravity and abomination.” Just imagine what happened in this bedroom...
Belov nodded.
- And the furniture remembers all this... you lie down in a bed like this and fall straight into hell.
Pause. The couple look at each other. They silently get up and go into the bedroom.
A curtain.
Your stories from the life of the nineties will be read and published with joy:
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Pynchon/personal
A few issues ago , I already wrote about the fact that the first book by the Russian Pynchon was published and that this was like a personal holiday for me. Subsequent events made me think once again about the singer of paranoia and the maestro of world conspiracies.
It all started with the fact that Ilya Kukulin decided to interview me for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, or more precisely, for ExLibris NG. He came to visit me, drank tea, and talked into the recorder. Everything is wonderful. A couple of days later I sent the text of the interview. A normal interview, but I didn’t like some parts stylistically. And in some places there were mistakes in surnames. And in my opinion, translating Gravity's Rainbow as "Gravity Rainbow" is also not correct - it should be "Gravity Rainbow". I turned on the “correction” mode in Word so that Ilya could see what exactly I changed, and went through the entire text. I saved it and sent it to Ilya.
Three days later the newspaper came out. I looked at the text and didn’t recognize it. Suffice it to say that it began with the paragraph:
****
The astute reader has already guessed what happened: due to a technical error, the carelessness of the NG workers, or why both versions were published at once! That is, not only my corrections are visible, but also the previous version! (The easiest way to achieve this is to save the text in Text Only mode. Ilya, as an employee of the magazine of the same name, probably did just that).
But what amused me most was that when finding out what had happened, Ilya said: “Name, when I read the article, I felt that something was wrong and corrected it a little . ” How he corrected the paragraph quoted above remained a mystery to me - but I realized that it was to this person that we owe the fact that “Gravitational Rainbow” appears everywhere in the printed text, and not “Gravity Rainbow of Gravity”.
I strongly recommend reading this article even to those who are completely indifferent to Pynchon: it is an amazing example of tautological grammar.
If you think that this is all over, you are mistaken. After the conversation with Kukulin, but before the publication of the interview in NG, Boris Kuzminsky, editor of the Reading Circle, decided to talk to me on the same topic. We met in a cafe; With Boris, confirming his reputation as the favorite author of Playboy magazine, was a young and beautiful girl. She turned on the recorder and we talked for half an hour. Kuzminsky expressed doubts about Pynchon's greatness and his ability to influence the lives of his readers. He set Salinger as an example for me (and him). He said that the view of a person as a toy of supra-personal forces (technical, political and economic) is overly pessimistic. I fought back weakly. In the end, the recorder was turned off, Kuzminsky promised to send a text - and disappeared.
About a week later he wrote to me that there were problems. The interview proved impossible to decipher. It seems that Kuzminsky accidentally took a top-secret FEP voice recorder for a conversation with me, designed to record secret conversations of politicians. During the recording process, this voice recorder cuts the conversation into parts and records them at random - you can put them together only by inserting the cassette into FAP's super-secret computer. Since the recorder is secret, Kuzminsky should not have taken it - and therefore he did not dare to go to the FEP authorities, who kept the computer in a special safe. And no other device can decrypt the cassette. And therefore there will be no interview.
Perhaps some of the above is a figment of my imagination - but, whatever one may say, the story with the dictaphone clearly confirms that Pynchon is right: a person really is a toy of supra-personal forces - in this case, technical and political.
As for economics, here too Pynchon showed his maliciousness: as soon as I started negotiations with one online publication about creating a special resource dedicated to the “Russian Pynchon,” they began to have financial problems and the founders hastily cut their budget three times. Therefore, Thomas Pynchon Russian Home Page remains only a dream for now...
Quote
The quote today has the character of a riddle. Below is a fragment of an advertising text published in a famous Moscow magazine. It is required, of course, to guess what is advertised in the middle I released. Unfortunately, the magazine is quite famous and therefore many readers could read this ad. I ask them not to respond, but the rest are welcome to guess. The text is called "Convention of the Love of Theater"
“Do you love theater as much as I love it,” Doronina’s heroine asked from the silver screen. I love theater and I’m ready to go to see the great Gurvich’s “The Great Illusion” for the hundred and fifth time, go to St. Petersburg for the 11 o’clock Dodinsky “demons,” and once again try to understand “Eugene Onegin” in the vision of the “New Opera”. Theatrical art attracts like a magnet, makes you empathize, sympathize...
(...)
In Russia, unfortunately, there are no certain conventions, without which spiritual life, if you like, the spiritual development of society is unthinkable. For example, the convention that theater is a national treasure has long since sunk into oblivion. Will it happen that we lose our potential, change our mentality, thereby losing something unique that we were so envious of abroad and that we so carefully protected within ourselves for many, many years."
Well, now send your answers. Those who read this announcement and remembered it, let them keep quiet. The rest - into battle:
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Self-advertisement
As you might guess, my small participation in the last edition was explained most of all by the fact that the Moscow Film Festival absorbed all my energy. half articles on Pole.Ru. The result was a dozen and a Of these, three are especially dear to me
"Dancer in the Dark" - best film of the festival
"Devils on the Doorstep" is the second best film of the festival
"South Park" is a so-so film, but what a review!
Feedback
As for the quite numerous letters from readers, this time there won’t be any of them: I left Moscow on vacation and for some reason forgot to take them all with me. That’s why today’s issue is somewhat shorter than usual - well, that’s okay, I’ll catch up when I return to Moscow. In the meantime, a break for two weeks. Yes, August 15, dear readers!
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