Larissa's Blog

NEWSLETTER: READINGS, REVIEWS, ANTHOLOGIES, AND MORE!

Dear friends:A sad time as we say goodbye to two beloved Steves, steve dalachinsky and Steve Cannon. Vechnaia pamiat’, eternal memory for these remarkable poets, whose inspiration and support for my work was incalculable.• I am reading my translations of Maria Galina on November 2 at the Tompkins Square Library, 331 E 10th St, New York at 2:00 pm, for the special Russia issue of The Café Review with editor Anna Halberstadt, Philip Nikolayev, Anton Yakovlev and others.• My essay, “I Blame Louise Hay for Trump” is included in the anthology Sensitive Skin Selected Writings 2016-2018 edited by Bernard Meisler. Read it here: https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/i-blame-louise-hay-for-t…/• You can read the great Rain Taxi review by Jefferson Hansen of my new novel, Sly Bang, here: http://www.raintaxi.com/sly-bang/• I am delighted to be on two panels for AWP20 in San Antonio next year. I will be moderating a reading of international experimental poetry, “Translating the Untranslatable,” with Hélène Cardona, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Michele Gil-Montero, and Marc Vincenz; I’ll be a participant on “What Kind of Times Are These: Immigrant Poetry and the New Politics of Resistance” moderated by Olga Livshin, with Mariya Deykute, Anna Halberstadt, and Valzhyna Mort. Detailed outlines of these events are now available on the AWP website, so please check them out and include us in your AWP planning.• If you missed it, read over 30 contemporary and historic voices in From Pushkin to Pussy Riot: Russian Political Poetry and Prose at www.mattermonthly.com in this timely anthology co-edited by Philip Nikolayev and me. Don’t leave the colluding to the Trumps and Putins!Hope to see you all soon!Love,Larissawww.larissashmailo.comLARISSASHMAILO.COMLarissa Shmailo

GREAT REVIEW OF SLY BANG IN BOOKS FOR READERS

Read Meredith Sue Willis's great review of SLY BANG in Books for Readers #204!And now for something completely different-- a new novel by Larissa Shmailo, continuing her themes that include feminism, female sexuality, power struggles, and a family that may have collaborated with the Nazis, but also suffered hugely themselves. She writes again about a powerful, debilitating combination of sex addiction and sexual abuse. This time she does it with a rollicking, often comic (and comic book style) fantasy/science fiction story.Her main character is Nora, a psychologically damaged but uber-resilient hero who spends a lot of time in a coma, drugged, or otherwise disabled-- because the bad guys and the good guys are all and constantly aware of her power and trying to channel it, or kill it, for their own purposes..The neat psycho-spiritual trip here is that Nora remains through all the abuse and danger and rising one more time to rejoin the battle--a deeply Christian character--that is, not that she particularly practices Christianity or even believes in God, but she is committed to forgiving and loving. Her special bailiwick is vicious serial killers like her sometimes charming. occasional savior Michael, whose idea of a special treat is sex with dead, young vaginas. But he is NOT, he insists, a pedophile. Michael is, like Nora, a multiple personality.This novel, not surprisingly, has some of the quality of a fever dream, and one could imagine at any moment being awakened and told it was, indeed, all a nightmare, but that is never the point. The point is the ride, the changes, the themes played and dropped and played again. It picks up momentum throughout, and the final section moves into even faster changes, ending with short dispatches from an action packed summary, with more flips and twists. Nora triumphs in the end, offering us a poem in which she entertains Satan himself.https://www.amazon.com/Sly-Bang-Larissa-Shmailo/…/ref=sr_1_1?AMAZON.COMSly BangLarissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battle....

On NOT YOUR MOTHER'S POETRY Sat at Noon!

I am delighted to be featured on the radio this Saturday with Mary Pinkoski and Leighton Watts on NOT YOUR MOTHER'S POETRY www.ckxu.comSaturday 12 PM EST, 10 AM Mountain TimeThanks to host and producer Blaine Greenwood!

FROM PUSHKIN TO PUSSY RIOT: RUSSIAN POLITICAL POETRY AND PROSE

It's here! The special issue of Matter, FROM PUSHKIN TO PUSSY RIOT, RUSSIAN POLITICAL POETRY AND PROSE, guest edited by Larissa Shmailo and Philip Nikolayev (Филипп Николаев) with work by Alexander SkidanMaria Galina, Inna Kabysh, Dennis Novikov, Tatyana Shcherbina, Maria Alyokhina, Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Olga LivshinKatherine YoungMichael T. YoungIgor SatanovskyKatia KapovichPolina BarskovaAnna HalberstadtIrina MashinskiDmitry Kuzmin, Lev Rubinstein, Alexandar Mihailovic, Olga Florensky, Alexei Tsvetkov Алексей ЦветковAnatoly Kudryavitsky, Olga Chugai, Dean KostosAlexander Veytsman and many more! Special thanks to Matter editors Virginia Konchan and Glenn Shaheen, with additional thanks to Jonathan Penton for invaluable assistance!MATTERMONTHLY.COMMatterA (somewhat) monthly journal of political poetry and commentary

BEHIND ALZHEIMER'S

I am looking at Alzheimer's disease and behind it is still the person I love, my friend through thick and thin. Glad we still have this time, this day together. Our bond was forged by shared memories but has become something stronger, more eternal and of the soul. She is my sister, chosen, not born, and what we share transcends appointments, dates, and factoids. Love is still here.

RACIST CUTS FOR RACIST WALL

Trump's cuts to planned military construction projects for his racist wall steals $400 milllion for 10 projects desperately needed for jobs and infrastructure in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. Schools and day care centers for our service peoples' children have also been axed across the country. All this is in clear violation of the Constitution, which states that only Congress has the power of the purse. Will Congress takes this lying down? Sadly, its belly-down supine posture says, thanks, sir, please give me another.

AMERICAN VS IMMIGRANT

I am the child of immigrants interned in camps by Hitler and sent to Siberia by Stalin. I am always amazed by the entitlement of Americans and some foreign nationals not blessed with this authoritarian pedigree. I worry if I don't have my prescription number when I call the pharmacy, if I've gotten ahead of anyone on line and am terrified of any government letter. But at the slightest slight, Americans will hold a roomful of people up to get what they think is their due, and their due is always ten times what I would ask. And they expect good treatment, even when they are in the wrong, always ready to defend their bad behavior. I was born apologizing. Needless to say, some poets are immigrants, and some (you know who) are as American as Donald Trump.

JEFF HANSEN'S REVIEW OF SLY BANG


SLY BANG
Larissa Shmailo
Spuyten Duyvil ($18)by Jefferson HansenLarissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang is written with tremendous energy and moves at an exhilarating pace, yet it dwells on depraved characters and actions. Almost nobody is nice in this novel about serial killers, mad scientists, FBI agents and evildoers.The plot centers around Nora, an FBI agent with telepathic and scientifically grounded superpowers, who is hunted by Ouspensky, a scientist, satanist, and Nazi who wants to destroy the world using nuclear colliders. Among Nora’s defenders are Michael, a serial killer, and Andrew and Aubrey, fellow FBI agents who seem to be the only characters without obsessions, perversities, and obscene desires.Indeed, the book reads like a psychotic episode. People die and come back to life. The line between dream and reality is not entirely clear. Mind-reading is possible. Strange, advanced technologies propel the action at times. Some characters have superhuman abilities: Most of the men have extraordinary strength and beat up a slew of other people to prove it. They can even break their way out of manacles.And that is where the satire lies. The book, while it portrays horrific actions, makes fun of superhuman male figures and the traditional ideal man. Their activities are so outlandish that readers may find themselves laughing out loud and cheering as Nora outlasts most of them through her grit, pluck, and resilience. As she contemplates being saved by a man, she writes “hey, this damsel in distress thing really turns them on . . . subconscious hostility that they want me to be harmed?” The book takes direct aim at the fantasies of some males, making them so extreme that their absurdity becomes crystal clear.Sly Bang’s satire on the whole is extreme—it begins with a scene of Nora masturbating under command while being remotely surveilled. She is alone, sleep deprived, and very scared. Serial killers lurk blocks away, pretending to be friends, and attempt to confuse her through remote communications. She needs to fight the depravities of the males, who are lampooned in their aggressiveness and inability to treat Nora straight. And Nora has her own issues. She treats men badly by manipulating their feelings, loving them and leaving them, cheating on them, and so forth. It may be a kind of visceral revenge.To top it all off, Nora and her “friends”—neither she nor we are entirely sure who is or isn’t on her side—need to save the world from Ouspensky’s attempt to destroy it just for kicks. The comic book element makes war itself seem cartoonishly absurd, driven not by a desire for territory or money or power, but to dominate women in a psycho-sexual manner.This is a hilarious and horrifying novel. It depicts the worst humanity is capable of, but what keeps Sly Bang from becoming overwhelmed by the depravity it describes is the writerly energy of Shmailo. Wise cracks and madcap scenes burst one after another in a buoyant fashion—so it goes down easy in spite of the horrors it describes.Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

MY ESSAY ON HYBRIDISM AND SEXUAL SADISM IN DAVID FOSTER WALLACE NOW IN DISPATCHES FROM THE POETRY WARS

The Hybrid Female No - Sexual Sadism in David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Menby Larissa ShmailoAugust 5, 2019  |  in CommentaryDispatchesDispatches NewsShare
The key to sexual sadism is the sadist’s belief that his victim needs the rape, grope, incest, assault, slut-shaming, domination, objectivization, catcall, invalidation, humiliation, cop, do, make, feel, frot, fuck.  For “wanting the rape,” we have the mythos of hypersexualized underage Lolitas seducing hapless middle-age men; sexual assault victims wearing (or not) any random article of clothing deemed by male perception as desirable and therefore dangerous are per heteronormative convention “asking for it.” Many Bible Belt zealots affirm that a rape cannot occur without consent, that “good” women have the capacity to “shut down” an attack through pheromonal signals. There is a contract fully executed in the mind of the sadist unknown to most victims, an unfortunately mainstream contract that informs the violence of sexual assault. It is the doctrine of the hybrid female “no”, the No that means Yes in a perversion of the Nietzschean maxim.And if, to the perp’s surprise, “no” does turn out to mean “no,” male domination in the form of law, custom, or divine writ proclaims that the man may again hear the word “yes.” Because she (the bitch) “had it coming” and deserves punishment through sexual pain. Perceived to be sexual, a state expressly forbidden and demonstrated to the edification of all women by the gruesomely violent deaths of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, women deserve to be raped, groped, incested, done, made, even killed. Again, “no” in the male mind, means “yes” and is a hybrid, dually valent noun.We live in the main in the male mind. In “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” David Foster Wallace makes this point in extremis by eliminating the female voice completely. Using the hybrid form of fiction masquerading as the creative nonfiction of an interview series, the “interviews” feature only the answers of men and none of the questions of women. Where an apparent female interlocutor is inferred to speak, only a blank, voiceless capital “Q” appears on the page, furiously followed by a voluminous series of male explanations for versions of rape. The female is absent entirely and only the men speak. What we know of the women in their lives is entirely contained in the men’s minds, through their perceptions, their wants, their desires.From bondage to emotional abuse, Wallace demonstrates the thrill of non-consent and the balm to conscience of a perceived acquiescence. Ignoring and overcoming the subject’s will while hiding behind a mock or defrauded “yes” is the name of the game. This tension, the hybrid yes-no is encapsulated by Wallace’s sadist who ceremoniously and loquaciously describes how he manipulates female consent to be tied up and then used for nonconsensual ulterior needs. For these hideous yet familiar men, it is licit to obtain yes through manipulation and lies, like Bundy waving a fake broken arm before his murder victims. An informed woman is a woman who might say prevail in saying “no.”Wallace’s huge and rococo mansplaining in the face of unrestrained male sexual adventurism, and the voiceless trapped abused females, seen only through the eyes of perps, engendered a genuine terror in me. The hybrid interview format contributes to the viscerally frightening reality of these men. This is especially true in Wallace’s interview with the man who falls in love with a woman determined to love and console her serial killer rapist. In exception to the other female objects in the stories, there is a detailed portrait of this woman who achieves the affections of her perp. For only when the female gaze adheres to the requirement of universal compassion and kindness in the face of the most extreme abuse is a woman loveable. Indeed, Wallace’s description of the female orgasm in this interview was akin to death throes. We are to die beaming and bestowing grace.In the “Hideous” interviews which draw a direct line between the make, the lying about love to a woman in order to use her, to the hatred of a serial killer for women, we never leave the male mind. Sexual violence, physical and emotional, is the main driver of Wallace’s hideous men and they are ubiquitous in their MAGA hats and endowed professorial chairs.  The hybrid form brilliantly depicts the reality of unbridled joy in female pain and the violent convolutions of toxic masculinity.And was the suicide Wallace a hideous man? I must say I suspected it for a moment in the interview in which a man asserts that a woman who is raped has an important knowledge of herself, a gnosis that is unattainable any other way. The acquaintance is either suspicious or genius. The “Hideous” interviews are a spectrum of sadism, an orgy of perverse male needs, of ratiocinations and hatreds. In this culture of torture and death, women become real by disappearing and dying, emotionally and physically. Need I say that the interview with the perp who “loves” ends with the obligatory chant of BITCH CUNT SLUT DYKE GASH? With hyperrealism, the hybrid interviews depict the imminent threat of death with which all women, if truth be told, live.

THE NEW COLOSSUS

The sonnet that once defined our nation.

THE NEW COLOSSUS
BY EMMA LAZARUS
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The American Culture of Sadism

With the advent of Trump, we live in an age of cruelty-child abuse, bullying, vicious ad hominem attacks, racism and misogyny construed to create maximum hurt, maximum shame. Nazis troll and shoot; the Klan sheets are out; the meanest forms of discourse are employed. Honor, concern for the humble and weak are gone; these now have targets on their backs. We have become the Roman circus, but instead of gladiators, small children are torn apart for the spectacle to satisfy the bloodlust of the Trump supporter, who must be defeated in strength, the only coin of the realm they understand.

TWO PANELS ACCEPTED FOR AWP20!

Thrilled that BOTH AWP panels I am participating in have been accepted for the 2020 San Antonio conference! I will be moderating "Translating the Untranslatable: A Reading of International Experimental Poetry" with Marc VincenzHelene CardonaJennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Michele Gil-Montero. I will be a panelist on moderator Olga Livshin's "What Kind of Times Are These? Immigrant Poets and the New Politics of Resistance" with Valzhyna MortAnna Halberstadt, and Mariya Deykute. See you in San Antonio!!!!

NEW TRANSLATIONS IN THE CAFE REVIEW

I am pleased to have new translations of contemporary poet Maria Galina in the special Russia issue of The Cafe Review edited by Anna Halberstadt!

"ACCUSE YOUR ENEMY OF WHAT YOU ARE GUILTY"

One of Josef Goebbels's propaganda principles was "Accuse your enemy of what you are guilty." As Congress investigates Jared Kushner's substandard Baltimore "Kushnerville" rentals, Trump lashes out in racist attack upon Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings, representative of Baltimore. Now Trump is attacking whole ciites. You would think people would rise up and vote against him in the next election, but the tactic worked as voter suppression in Detroit in 2016: See, the subtext of his message ran, the Democrats have left you in poverty, have left you in the lurch, why vote for them? I hope the consciousness raising by the Baltimore Sun and the black Obama officials helps, but Trump is a master at propaganda and must never be taken lightly.

NAZISM IN A NUTSHELL

Nazi theorists followed by Bannon and Miller advocate creating a feudal state - literally. The "deep state" they wish to destroy is education, social services, envionmental protections, anything that impedes the ruling class's amassing of wealth and power. Race wars keep people preoccupied, divided, and disempowered. Believe these people when they tell you who they are.

In Memoriam Steve Cannon

Rest in peace, poet and mentor Steve Cannon, the gatherer of tribes, the "blind guy" who saw so much.

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