Eugene Ostashevsky : infinite recursor or the bride of dj spinoza

(STUDIORADIA / Ugly Duckling Presse)

Dramatic Persons

DJS : DJ Spinoza, philosopher
Bride : The Bride of DJ Spinoza, mathematician
MC2 : MC Squared, E
AM : Andrew Marvell, English Poet, 1621-1678

Nurse : Nurse to the Bridge
OB : Old Believer, opponent of seventeenth-century liturgical reform in Russian Orthodox Church

Woodchuck
Woodpecker
Page
Troops
Infinite Recursor

@

Eugene sent me this beautiful "chapbook" -- although calling it a chapbook does not do justice either to its size (the page is about as large as a splayed hand) or the production values, which are really top-notch. It is difficult to exceprt this work, since it's splayed, like the hand, in different typefaces and sizes, surrounded and penetrated by line drawings.

So instead of the usual rhubarb excerpt, I've taken the dramatis personae from the title page as a way into a discussion of this work. Is it a dramatic form? Perhaps, but I think the collage of the pages means that it can't really be understood as a linear narrative with a three act structure.

If I had to provide a critical backstory, I think it would be to read this work as the montage not of individual images but rather of clips, a kind of surfed You-Tube dense site of presence -- for those of an earlier computer age, it is somewhat like the dissociated press output of the EMACS program. And there, I think, is the key, which is that the work is about the sudden appearance, the feeling of unexpected presence that hits you when you encounter the text.

DJ Spinoza has made an appearance on rhubarb before; that poem in the apparently now-defunct Germ was my introduction to Eugene's world. If I had read the text under discussion now earlier in the year it would without a doubt have appeared in my essay on anarchism in the first absent.

Because the dramatic -- the melodramatic -- gestures of this text are large and unapologetic. The rote speech of the characters resonates with a kind of populism and exuberance that is rare:

Bride Och! You are so shallow. What do you know of love? All you can think about is yourself. You are such a... man! What can you possibly know of love? Love has to do with other peoepl.

That ellipsis is I think a perfection, the nudgy way it tries to force the reader into a certain vein of reading is so self-undermining that the text far from constricting around cliché rather opens up into the generous spaces of the page.

Eugene pulls in not only the opera seria (and this invocation is pitch perfect, with textual arias and asides spread across the page in a form that reminds me of the visual depictions some contemporary composers have used instead of the usual stave), but the science-pulp fictional, whose instability leans it gently into the world of real mathematics:

Bride You're finished, dyspeptic duo! I'm gonna freeze-dry the both of you with my Infinite recursor!

MC2, AM What's an infinite recursor?!

Bridge It's a machine that generates infinite processes.
If I point it at you all your processes will become infinite.

Again, that pitch perfect ?!, but also the way the cliché of the Saturday-morning Batman slides invisibly, like a molten egg, onto some new plane: the loud Kapow of the opening quotation suddenly effacing itself in silence with those long repeated infinitudes.

This book stuns with its ability, but it is not an intellectual performace. It is a raw, uncooked work -- which clashes beautifully against the solidity and perfected lines of the art that appears marginally and interlinearly. There are apparently 749 copies out there in the wild (mine is safe at home), with about 10% of that stock available at SPD. I just can't get over this book right now. It's December 21st, and a work of poetry has finally brought tears to my eyes for the first time this year.