Lev Pirogov. Paper suffers from 2.10.: about aristocracy, politeness and culture

Paper suffers from 2.10.: about aristocracy, politeness and culture
Lev Pirogov

Date of publication: October 2, 2000

2.10. 00:13

How to distinguish a solid paper publication from a lightweight one?

A reputable e-version appears in a month, and a sub-version (as Dima Kuzmin would say) pops up on the Internet before a serious person like you and me has time to spend a little of his money on it at a kiosk.

Why is that? Firstly, a respectable guy does not need advertising and is not afraid that “you can’t put a link to him.” If they want, they will install it. Here Yevtushenka himself is published. Secondly, it is only the plebeians who are always in awe of technological progress (ah, nylon, nylon, cream, ah, electronically verified) - respectable aristocrats prefer wool and bull bladder.

So it turns out that the most professional ones are “ Ex Libris ” and “ New World ”, and the most respected ones are “ Literary Gazette ” and “Book Cart”. Which, if you haven’t forgotten, doesn’t have a network version at all.

This last circumstance allows some unscrupulous business owners (here we have to keep in mind Kuzmin again) to rob a well-deserved newspaper with impunity. Although what kind of impunity is there!..

Sasha Privalov, a well-known provocateur and Kuzminsky recruiter, tried to mediocrely attack my beloved sister: “ Now KO, like any self-respecting publication, has a columnist, and this honor fell to Olga Slavnikova. What did she want to tell the city and the world literary lady in her personal column “A fly, enlarged to the size of an elephant”? Is it really about something new? Wait! We are talking about “thick magazines”.

First, you only have to be what you need to be to be published in the Literary Diary to decide that my sister needs a day job as a columnist, or even needs it at all. Our family (Olya, Roma Arbitman and a couple of other secret people), of course, controls this newspaper at their leisure, but for free, and we receive money directly from publishing houses, which pay us bribes for our kindness.

Secondly, for saying “literary lady” I will cut off someone’s butt with a rusty saw. Not a lady, but a girl. With opposing opinions, please contact me. Seriously.

Thirdly, who is it that is actually against the fact that magazines are the salt of literary life? Personally, I'm for it. And if the watchman does not allow Dima and his pioneers to go there, this does not mean that the salt of literary life has been thrown out of the window for them.

Not a damn thing. Even “Volga,” lamented the week before last, is full of literary salt (meaning Masha Galina’s story “ The Veil of Avvadon ”), it’s very good, and if anyone doesn’t like it, I’ll rip my jaws out, because Masha and I are also relatives, from Odessa).

Everyone is relative in Odessa.

2.10. 00:49

And the slightly protracted introduction is due to the fact that they didn’t bring me the “Ex Libris” (paper) again - apparently, they think that I will crawl to them on my knees and survey everything for myself. Wait a minute.

They think I’m going to break my eyes on the monitor, reading from the Internet their pathetic lisps with the out-of-mind Erofeev , who, however, as he gets worse and worse with “this matter”, becomes even somewhere slightly tragic (with Komi-Permyak accent) figure.

Yes. Boris (here we mean the editor of the “Circle of Reading”, who convincingly asked Lev Pirogov not to resort to medical terms to describe the characters in “Paper.” - RJ ) will now wince again, but I’m like Tolstoy, I’ll tell the whole truth. Having reached the age when young girls are no longer interested in you, and older ones (who are the same) reach the peak of activity and, roughly speaking, fuck you to a heart attack, Vitya switched all his fervor and soul to symbolic satisfaction in the text. He collects from the trash heap the same Symbolists who are unsettled due to bad ecology and publishes collections about how they would if...

Justifying his shameful activity, Vitya amusingly paraphrased a well-known Harvard joke (allegedly in the toilet on the wall they had written: “God is dead. Nietzsche,” and below: “Nietzsche is dead. God,” and so: “ Maybe anatomy , but healthy, without psychoanalysis. And if Nietzsche said that God died, then, finally, we can say that grandfather Freud died. The sexual torment so characteristic of the twentieth century is ending, we are entering a post-sexual time. If it used to be: a restaurant, disco, sex - now: sex, disco, restaurant. From a specialty, sex has turned into foreplay ."

My weather has approached ideals,
But before she was, well, very far away.
Or have my ideals disappeared?

Look at your passport, Vitya, and don’t disgrace yourself with philosophy.

Be that as it may, Erofeev is still my friend, and I was tolerant of his advertising. But Glebushka Shulpyakov, who took away two of the most potential lovers of poetry from me, an old man, at his huge readings, now let him not count on anything. I won't make candy out of his boring interview . I won’t even say with whom. And generally speaking.

Igor! Either your eagles put a fresh issue on my table every Thursday at 12 noon, or don’t expect mercy. You will be on the sidelines of life.

2.10. 01:19

Now that we have dealt with the “Ex Libris”, we can joke about our internal family affairs. By God, I didn't want to. When Slavachka Kuritsyn, whom I remember as a plump Mongoloid toddler, wrote some kind of crap about me in the last week , I didn’t want to swear at him. But the good people from the site : LENIN: said that it couldn’t be left like that. And since there is a Party there and everything is very serious, I will fight back against Slavachka.

In a family way. I mean, I won't say anything at all. Except for one thing: the next time you want to use the word "traverse", call me and ask me what it is. Agreed?

2.10. 01:23

We continue our showdown. Eleven thousand letters came with requests to tell us the correct theories of the origin of culture (seethe issue before last ). Either this idea is now relevant in connection with the release of Baudrillard’s “Against Foucault”, or people do not have enough vitamins in the fall.

Okay, I'll tell you, just quickly. There are countless hypotheses for the separation of culture from the animal world, but all of them can be roughly divided into two. The first half follows the Latin etymology of the concept of “culture” (from “to pick the ground with a stick”), the second half follows the Chinese etymology: the character “wen” originally meant “decoration of the body” (including with a stick).

According to the first half, man invented culture because he really wanted to eat. In desperation, he grabbed a stick with his teeth, but since the stick was hard and it was inconvenient to gnaw on it, he either accidentally dug up and ate a worm (communion with meat, which Engels insisted on and which is described in the Bible under the guise of a “snake apple”), or he kindled a fire with friction, which burned the entire forest, and he had to start walking upright, howling with shame and leaning on this very stick.

Actually, Engels, being a sausage-and-sour-cabbage man, did not know how delicious worms can be, and he also insisted on fire. On this matter, I will remain silent and give the floor to my scientific consultant, the famous sushi eater Yatsutka :

As I understand it, Engels is reproducing Morgan's point of view. I want to disagree with these illustrious men. When I lived in Vsevolozhsk, my neighbor and friend was my owner’s cat Dashka, with whom I shared food, shelter, time and bed. When I was preparing food, Dasha walked from corner to corner of the kitchen, strenuously pretending that she was not at all interested in what I was doing: she knew perfectly well that she would definitely be offered some portion of each dish, and did not humiliate herself by begging . But when I was cutting up raw fish, Dashka lost all concept of dignity and etiquette and begged me for a piece of raw fish, standing on her hind legs and howling loudly. Having received what she wanted, she turned from an intelligent domestic animal into a wild beast - she ate fish, purring, pressing her ears and looking around predatorily. I have observed similar behavior in other representatives of the cat breed. This power of attraction of raw fish interested me (Dashka reacted no more actively to fried, boiled and canned fish than to various types of dry food or borscht), and I decided to try it myself. I tried raw hake, raw pollock, raw herring and raw flounder and I will tell you, gentlemen, that it is really very tasty, and after that I did not reject heat treatment of the fish at all only for sanitary and hygienic reasons. And Engels (or Morgan) forgot that fish is not only boiled and fried, but also salted and dried, and this does not require fire.

A convincing criticism, isn't it? Without leaving any stone unturned from the worm-thermal concept, let us move on to consider the next one, which in some scientific schools is called the “concept of the instinct of decoration.”

According to it, it is human nature to decorate himself within the limits within which he has control over himself (first the belly and muzzle, then clothes, then tools, homes, space rockets and all that). This is done supposedly for the sake of showing off - like grasshoppers, which, of course, is not an option for Yatsutka and me. We believe that the mechanism that triggers the “decoration instinct” can be calculated. Roughly speaking, we adhere to the totemic theory.

Take primates. Yes, take any normal animals, for example, lions. How do they live? The most important, fattest and most beautiful primate (or lion) lies and sleeps. The rest are busy hunting and harvesting bananas. They are controlled by the main female, whom the main primate (or lion) loves in her free time from sleeping and eating. In addition, he loves all the other females in the pride.

But for young lions (or primates) - God forbid they fall in love with someone in the pride! Do you know that cats sometimes eat kittens? Do you think it's from hunger? No, this happens when the cat cannot provide guarantees of fixed paternity. We are terribly jealous. But more on that later. Now imagine what it would be like for you if you were a young, mature lion or a primate. Leaving the pride is a dubious proposition. (You could die of hunger: you’re too lazy to hunt.) Surely, like a real man, you will try to wait until the leader gets sick or falls asleep, and give him a health-improving Oedipus complex.

After which, naturally, you will devour all the kittens (what for Tsarevich Dmitry), and to replenish the population, use the entire better half of the pride, including your dominant mother, for their intended purpose.

However, this practice is destructive. Don’t forget that you will also need to sleep and get sick. What to do? Let me remind you where our favorite book by Fraser, “The Golden Bough,” begins.

When a stupid young Etruscan wants to become a Lucumon, he does not rush at the old king with a brick. He waits for a special day of the year when he can go to the sacred grove and delicately break a small, pretty twig from a special tree. Broke, and you are the king. Of course, on this day the old Lucumon will be in place in the morning - with his largest and most grippy ax. And, of course, they will still fight. But - note! Not rudely: “I am against you,” but culturally, indirectly: “ for the branch .” As they say, "nothing personal, buddy."

A twig is the notorious “digging stick” or, scientifically speaking, a “totem”. What is its origin?

When the old evil primate sees that the young, healthy and stupid one has the same... well, in general, not like Vitya, he begins to beat and bite him. And then the young primate, full of vitality, switches his manual-genital activity to the stick. He no longer abandons her after digging up the worm, but continues to carry her with him, stroking her and all that. Be in love. This is how it becomes a tool of labor.

Honestly, this is a very funny theory. I myself don’t believe in it, because God created all people. But after a primate (not to mention lions) has learned to masturbate a stick, writing arises, and after writing arises, you can forget about the primates and calmly compose your own mediocre poems, like Kuzmin’s. That's all culture for you.

And it's time for me to sleep.