Translated material
Trends 2016: telegram channels
Modern philosophy, literary criticism and bookseller revelations: the best in telegram
Recently, there has been a growing general concern about the dependence of Internet users on social media, which is taking up more and more time. And at the moment when it’s time to get rid of the string of Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, many suddenly willingly accept another virtual space for procrastination - Telegram, a messenger with the ability to blog without comments. In the past year, many people have settled on Telegram who are directly related to literature and bookishness and sometimes publish interesting notes and observations - Gorky has selected channels that are worth paying attention to.Last year, the ability to create channels appeared in Durov’s messenger - and, despite the fact that Internet users today clearly have no shortage of social media, many did not fail to take advantage of this option. Throughout 2016, channels are growing like mushrooms after rain, including those dedicated to literature, book publishing and reading.
One of the most interesting channels is dedicated to modern philosophy in general and speculative realism, which we have already written about in particular. It is hosted by Kyiv philosophers Alexander Geller and Anton Tarasyuk. The channel is an application to the public on Facebook, where translations of articles by modern Western philosophers and humanitarian theorists are published: Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Marcus Gabriel and many others. In the telegram, the creators of the public briefly retell the content of the translated articles.
Here, for example, is an overview of the debate about the religious position of the sociologist Bruno Latour in English-language philosophy blogs: “It all began with Graham Harman's reaction to an article that criticized his interpretation of Latour as a metaphysician. In addition to listing the main arguments for his position, he pointed out that Latour is a practicing Catholic, and this entails metaphysical commitments (belief in an omnipotent God, etc.), and this is not very easy to reconcile with Latour's theory of God (at least in Latour's later theory, God is a completely immanent actor, inseparable from the practices that make him present). Here it remains unclear how both of these aspects are combined in Latour (and whether they are combined). Harman doesn’t talk about it.”
For the Pastiche Project, Geller and Tarasyuk received the Andrei Bely Prize in the Literary Projects category - completely deservedly so, since the public and the channel allow live monitoring of what is happening in Western humanitarian discourse.
The channel of the executive director of the Association of Internet Publishers, Vladimir Kharitonov, is about electronic book publishing and the book market. You can glean a lot of informative figures and statistics: about the turnover of the book trade in China, webbook typography, online library news and digital book projects. Sometimes the news is quite unexpected: “They say that everything is bad with e-books, but everything is good with paper. Well, that’s good... Here is yesterday’s press release from the Association of American Publishers, which collects aggregated data from the 1,200 largest American publishers (more than 5 thousand active in the US). And judging by the data for May, sales of e-books from these publishers decreased by 18% (compared with data from May 2015), but sales in general - compared to May monthly sales a year ago - increased by 1.6% , and retail – by as much as 7.8%.”
Kharitonov’s column “Books, money, eight bits” recently appeared in Gorky - the first issue is devoted , in particular, to the recommendations of the European Commission to reduce VAT on digital books, a report on the European book market in 2015, and rising book prices in Russia.
Translator Alexey Polyarinov about “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, which he is currently working on, Wallace’s long friendship with another major American writer, Jonathan Franzen, about “ugly covers of Russian publications” and his book dreams:
“When I read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, for several nights in a row I dreamed of London destroyed by bombing, dogs walking through it, and even the sound of a V-2 rocket flying overhead. I rarely dream of books, and in general I can’t say that I’m particularly impressionable: the more you read, the more difficult it is to find a book that will really “stick”, but “Rainbow...” is a novel so powerful that it seeped into the subconscious quite quickly and buzzed in the subconscious for a long time. middle ear."
Translator and critic Anastasia Zavozova (runs the column “Mass Literature, Which Nobody Really Knows” on Gorky ) about her impressions of the books she read and thematic publications in Western media:
“I started reading Rüdiger Safranski’s book about Schopenhauer, which is called “Schopenhauer and the Turbulent Years of Philosophy.” (So far, the title surprisingly reminds me of that meme where four serious dudes sit around a table with laptops and a cutting machine and on top there is the inscription Party Hard, but this, of course, is because I am generally unfair to German philosophy.) The book is actually wildly interesting, because it generally tells not only about Schopenhauer, but also about what happened around: history, political processes, the economy of that time in relation to that section of Germany where everything is happening, and all this is written in human language in which the inexperienced a reader like me distinguishes not only individual words, but can also assemble them into whole sentences.”
Critic Konstantin Milchin (on Gorky he runs the column “Deservedly forgotten books, which, however, may be of interest to the reader and natural scientist”) about the books he read (mainly with links to his articles), as well as a fascinating account of his travels with English writers in Russia this fall:
“The expedition of English writers reached Kazan without losses. Having learned the Russian alphabet and some basic concepts along the way. The most difficult letter predictably turned out to be “Ш”, in second place are “Y” and, for some reason, “G”. The British have never heard of the concept “English woman shitting” and don’t know the “British scientists” meme, but they can guess why it might have appeared.”
Critic Anna Narinskaya * Recognized by the Russian authorities as a foreign agent. (author of the column “Old proven books”) about “books and non-books”, as well as “reviews, links and other holes bul schyl”:
“In the Israeli magazine “Zerkalo” three years ago I came across the publication of Igor Kholin’s diaries for 1966. Ideal spontaneous prose, after which everything else seems artificial: “A surprisingly smooth day. Didn't do anything. I went to the cinema - “Some Like It Hot” - America. Not bad. I called Kira Gurevich. I spoke with Heinrich, who happened to be with her. I called Kim Meshkov. I wanted to ask him to take my things to Iksha. He went south. I read Blok's notebooks. So-so. I read the magazine “Science and Technology”. Uninteresting magazine. I haven’t squeezed out a single thought all day, it’s Monday.”
As stated - monologues (and sometimes dialogues with customers) of the bookseller, a sort of television series Black Books, reformatted into the genre of a telegram channel. If you want to immerse yourself in the life of a bookseller, come here:
“The top 5 phrases that *****... tired any bookstore employee include the eternal “oh, you probably read there all day for free and you don’t need to buy books.” For fuck's sake, you're reading. Today I didn’t have time to change my shoes, the buyer was waiting before the opening, I really needed to. And somehow the second, third, op - and it’s evening, and you haven’t even sat down to read, yeah, three books a day.”
An anonymous editor of an unknown publishing house - about his work, that is, “about the books that I read, about the books that friends and colleagues publish, about the publishing house and its internal life, about how books are made in principle - from beginning to end”:
“At the stage of agreements, editors lure away desired authors from each other with a fury that few others have. Everything comes into play - once I lured dudes from Alpina with a very good offer, and at that time Alpina stole a well-known popular science video blogger from me with just the pulling power of her reputation (I wanted to write “we’re farting a couple of reputations,” but I thought it would make it worse) ), hardly even suspecting my existence. And you can’t imagine how many friendships were built and destroyed, and I can’t imagine, and no one, and never, and nothing.”
Regular author of “Gorky” Lena Makeenko “about books and everything connected with them, not without due tediousness.” You can read, for example, why the film adaptation of Vodolazkin’s “Lavr” is terrible stupidity, thoughts about foreign and domestic awards, as well as short reviews of publications about literature in RuNet:
“Everything is bad with the real British Booker in Russia. The current winner is a writer who seems to be discussed only by translators: Anastasia Zavozova is upset that this is the most boring of the nominees, Maxim Nemtsov laughs at the journalists who write Paul Beaty, and not Paul Batey, because they are narrow-minded (the surname is spelled Beatty, and it's cruel). Do you remember who got the Booker last year? Last season ended with the triumph of Hanya Yanagihara, a million reviews of her novel and generally all sorts of noise around. And Marlon James actually won.”
One of the most regularly updated literary channels about everything is from Egor Mikhailov from Novosibirsk:
“Everyone is sharing the final infographics from Goodreads, but I was somehow uncomfortable: the results were painfully modest, only fifty books. But then I thought - why not. This year I changed jobs and read a monstrous amount of everything on the history of communications; There are almost no such books among the 50.”
Before the New Year, the channel turned into a kind of “channel of channels” - under the hashtag #telegramreads, Mikhailov publishes book summaries of the year from the authors of his favorite channels: “Every day until the end of the year, these delightful people will praise good books, and I will praise these people themselves.” In this channel, however, there are also very dubious posts: for example, this fall the author advertised the channel of Christina Potupchik, who, in his words , “writes the best reviews of good non-fiction on Telegram.”
The channel of Gorky editor Ivan Aksenov, spun off from the public page “Phalanstera”, contains quotes from Ernst Junger, medieval mystics and recipes for vegetarian dishes (in particular, from the “Anarchist Cookbook”):
“I wanted to share with you the recipe for the most fashionable eggplant sauté, but I’m too lazy to write, so we’ll go back to discussing spiritual issues. Recently, an old book appeared in the Phalanster, published in 2007 by the Orthodox St. Tikhon University, called “The Sayings of Sextus.” This is an early Christian monument of the 1st-2nd centuries, it is a collection of aphorisms in which pagan material is processed and rearranged in a Christian spirit (and Christ himself is never mentioned there - apparently, so that it would be better understood by the pagans). I must admit, I don’t like any aphorisms, including those of Pascal, Nietzsche and Cioran, but these are not bad at all, and the publication itself is well done: the text of Sextus is tiny, everything else is articles, apparatus, commentaries and appendices.”
And, of course, subscribe to the Gorky channel !