In 1993 Alexander Floresnky nearly turned down the opportunity to illustrate the collected works of the great Russian humorist Sergei Dovlatov.

Of the Soviet writers who emigrated to the United States between the late 1970s and end of the 1980s, the Russian humorist and novelist Sergei Dovlatov probably had the most significant influence on the American reading public outside of émigré communities. Significantly, while several of his books have been translated into English, eight of his stories have appeared in The New Yorker. Indeed, Poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, called it about right when he said that Dovlatov’s popularity in the United States was “natural” and predicted that one day he would be just as popular in Russia.

Dovlatov, who was born in the Soviet Republic of Bashkiria in 1941, studied at Leningrad State University, served in the Soviet army as a prison camp guard, and worked as a journalist for newspapers in Leningrad and Tallinn. He began writing fiction in the early 1970s, but failed to get anything published in the Soviet Union—his first collection of short stories was suppressed by the KGB. In 1979, after being expelled from the Union of Soviet Journalists (for publishing stories abroad) and conscripted into military service, Dovlatov left Russia for the United States.

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What do contemporary art and raves have in common? According to Francesca Gavin’s E-Vapor-8, quite a bit.

E-Vapor-8, the recent exhibition at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn, borrowed its title from a 1992 track by the British rave band Altern8. Curated by Francesca Gavin, a writer, editor and curator based in London, the exhibition explores the relationship between contemporary art and rave culture. The exhibition continues a trajectory that was initiated at The New Psychdelica where Gavin investigated the aesthetic commonalities between the visual imagery of iconic sub-cultures and artists working in new media, digital and web-based art today. The influence of rave on this generation of artists, Gavin suggests, goes deeper than the purely visual and aural, and opens conversations surrounding community, freedom and rebellion.

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Greg Oden obsessive and avante-rock legende Neil Michael Hagerty chats up Jay Ruttenberg, editor of The Lowbrow Reader Reader.

Hi! I’m Jay Ruttenberg, editor of the comedy zine The Lowbrow Reader and its brand new book, The Lowbrow Reader Reader, to be published with great fanfare by Drag City Books on May 22. [Neil Michael Hagerty: Seems good so far, it’s good to promote yourself positively when no one else will. Maybe add a few more exclamation points. The “get” here is that we want the reader’s sympathy.] Recently, I took part in the below dialogue with one of the anthology’s most prolific contributors, Neil Michael Hagerty, who was recently interviewed by BOMB about his musical work in the Howling Hex, Royal Trux, and Pussy Galore. The editors of BOMB asked Drag City’s publicist to ask me to ask Neil to write an introduction; Neil asked me to do it, instead. That certainly seems journalistically inappropriate—and yet here I stand, an impartial observer. [NMH: Smart move to shift the blame here. It doesn’t hurt that your writing style is as brittle as Greg Oden’s knee.]

So allow me to state unequivocally that The Lowbrow Reader Reader is a Pulitzer-worthy canon of comedic essays, sharp illustrations, and rip-roaring interviews with the famous and the demented. If you read it and fail to laugh out loud, you are probably a racist. There is a long list of ridiculously talented writers and illustrators whose work is featured within the book’s pages, from David Berman to Shelley Berman. And those are just the people whose names are “David” and “Shelley.” Besides myself, however, the byline that recurs most frequently belongs to Hagerty, who contributed to “Lowbrow Reader #1”, in 2001, up through the most recent issue. [NMH: Again, good, staying positive; maybe move my name closer to the words “Pulitzer Prize”—let’s use a little neuro-linguistic programming like psychologists. Let’s try to normalize the association of “Pulitzer” with “Lowbrow.” We don’t want to push it too far, of course. That’s what happened with Greg Oden, the team psychologists pushed too hard on him and he got paranoid that they were telling his secrets to the owners.]

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It might be rainy today. It might be rainy tomorrow. But it might not be rainy tomorrow. Either way, go do something.

MONDAY

Brooklyn native and rapper El-P is holding a record release party for his next album CANCER4CURE at the Santos Party House. TONIGHT! QUICK!

TUESDAY

President of the National Book Critics Circle, Eric Banks, moderates a discussion about possible changes to the architectural plan of the New York Public Library.

WEDNESDAY

The opening of Common Ground, which brings together the work of an international group of contemporary artists, celebrates art in the public realm.

Mark Dery speaks about the publication of his new book “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams,” and more specifically discusses the relevant concept of “invisible literatures.”

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BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Laura Eve Engel and art by Coke O’Neal.

High-spirited though scarcely lighthearted, Laura Eve Engel’s poems are braced by a momentum of vivid conjecture and expanding conundrum—they gaze through themselves, through their maker, and set out for worlds by which the world may be voided or defined.

Inner Resources

It feels good to love our country.
We must not say so. I’m divided by a love
of our millions of brilliant inventions
and how I’ll dumbly sniff and rub each one
until I’ve figured out how I can use it for that
other thing. Just like a brilliant inventor I too
have a body so I know everything’s invented
to pleasure a body. I was born to this country
and all of it was entranced by my tiny fingers
and then I learned where I could put them.
Before I was born there was sniffing and rubbing
and it formed a tiny unity. Already it was getting
too big to call by one name. It was becoming
a collection of purposes. Which is like calling the sky
a collection of purposes because stars exist.
This is why I write little notes to myself
reminding myself to take all the notes out
of my pockets before sleep. The notes say look
at the sky and when I remember to do it I feel
very American. I feel American when I want
to be able to rub up against what I’m pretty sure
is that planet. Planets exist. They hold the names
we gave them inside them like a breath. I need
to remember to look up the names of the planets
I’m seeing. I’m fairly certain of what I’m seeing.
It’s too bright to be anything else.

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Don’t have a cow, man—there’s so much to do!

FRIDAY

If you’re feeling the need to traipse about the city, but with a little guidance, check out the 4th annual Hell’s Kitchen Studio Tours, an open house of sorts, where you’ll get to meet artists and see their work and workspaces. This goes on all weekend!

Come participate in a collaborative photo exchange. The artist, Kambui Olujimi, encourages viewers to bring a photograph of their own to swap with one of his. Show up and engage in some of that good old questioning of authorship! This event extends into Saturday and children are invited to participate.

SATURDAY

Honor the Lords of Literature on this day with several spectacular readings and events.

First, pop over to the Bowery Poetry Club for an installment of the Segue Reading Series, featuring Jena Osman, and one of our very own here at BOMB, Monica de la Torre. This series occurs every Saturday from 4-6 PM.

Then, continue on to the BookCourt for an evening of poetry, wine, and conversation hosted by the Pen American Center. This reading is affiliated with the NYC Lit Crawl, which also offers a wealth of information about literary events going on in the city.

SUNDAY

Head over to the Whitney Museum for a performance by K8 Hardy entitled Untitled Runway Show. No doubt this will be an entertaining and thought provoking multimedia event. Be sure not to miss it! And be sure to check out our article on K8 Hardy from the Spring issue of BOMB.

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Shifting Connections returns to the work of Fred Wilson, staring through the looking glass at a different facet of the artist’s creative practice.

In his recent exhibition at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, Sala Longhi & Related Works, Fred Wilson, a sculptor and conceptual artist, extended themes begun in Venice nearly a decade ago when the artist represented the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale with the exhibition Speak of Me as I Am. Returning to Venice in 2011, he created an installation inspired by Pietro Longhi’s 18th-century painting cycle in the Sala Longhi of the Palazzo ca’ Rezzonico in Venice. Wilson’s Sala Longhi (2011) was first installed in Glasstress during the 54th Venice Biennale. In a salon-like setting of twenty-seven artworks framed in gold, Wilson replaces Longhi’s genre scenes with sheets of black Murano glass graced with cutouts where Longhi had painted faces and masks. An additional central canvas is a cascade of glistening white leaves and flowers, an opulent sconce blossoming from the wall.

Fascinated with Western culture’s primacy of vision as a means of measuring worth, Fred Wilson recognizes both the seductive power of visual objects and their subtle influence on our psyche. With Sala Longhi & Related Works, including Iago’s Mirror (2009) and To Die Upon a Kiss (2011), Wilson intimates that splendor and magnificence are often matched by cruelty and intolerance.

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Jack Christian talks to Ben Kopel about Victory, an energetic, noisy book of poetry which turns it up to 11.

Ben Kopel’s Victory comes to readers as a collection of poems rooted deep in the artistic life-force. Their energy is their singularity. It is what causes their swerve. Likely many poets who have grown up with rock-n-roll can relate to the desire to make a poem that works like a guitar-anthem, or really that works not like the words the singers sings, but the noises he howls. That Kopel sets out to do this might not be particularly remarkable—he’s not the first to want to—but the way that he succeeds, over and over again, in various measures and phrasings, through seven sections of poems in this debut album, is what I’ve come to see as the victory implicit in Victory.

When I listen to a rock-god sing his or her guts out, then, later when I see the lyrics printed somewhere, I’m susceptible to a disappointment where the power of the voice seems not to be matched by the words sung. Kopel has written the words that I always wished were in the songs. These poems do a magical thing; they don’t fool around with aspiring.

Jack Christian How did the poems in Victory come together? What did you tell yourself were the parameters of the project? What did you think about as you tried to organize them?

Ben Kopel Victory was written over a five-year period, but it wasn’t until about two years into it that I even realized it was becoming something resembling a book. Some people have very specific ideas and instincts in place when they sit down to write. There is a whole to be achieved, and they sit and they write their way towards it. Others just write sixty to eighty pages of material, and ZAP! it’s a book. I’m personally situating myself somewhere in the middle.

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Ashley McNelis on Héctor Abad’s memoir, Oblivion.

Renowned Colombian journalist Héctor Abad’s Oblivion, a memoir on his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, is an honest and thorough reflection on a man’s life from his son’s perspective that also considers the private sphere of the family and the political turbulence in Colombia in the 1980s. His father, a public figure who, in addition to being a progressive university professor and a human rights and union organizer, opened the Colombian Department of Preventative Medicine and the National School of Public Health and served as an ambassador to Mexico.

Although the unresolved tragedy to come is hinted at, the memoir is more a celebration of his father’s life and progressive work than the reactionary political turbulence that brought it to an end; in 1987, Gómez was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries in broad daylight. For decades beforehand, tensions between the conservative and liberal parties flared violently despite many governmental actions such as the creation of the National Front where power between the two parties was passed back and forth. In the 1970s and ’80s, right-wing paramilitary groups’ cartels—including the cartel that reigned over the city of Medellín, the city in which the Abad family lived—reigned and terrorized the nation.

The clarity with which Abad writes is one that can only come with time and perspective after such a tragedy and years of journalistic and novel-writing experience. Abad, the only boy in the family, had an especially close relationship with his father. His mother and several sisters were more religious and traditional, while Gómez based his thought on the rationality and knowledge taken from books. In a way, they were best friends; Abad even relates that he found separating himself from his father difficult and painful in the early years of his adult independence.

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Legacy Russell Twinterviews performance artist Ann Hirsch about being scandalous, scandylicious, and the radical politics of the packaged female form in the sex-saturated era of reality television and social media.

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