K. G. SUBRAMANYAN & GYARSILAL VARMA Untitled (Dog Stapler)

Prince of Gosplan (Viktor Pelevin) My opinion was that early Pelevin is great, but late Pelevin is terrible. I used to wonder whether it was the case of a writer regressing or just the same tricks leading to diminishing returns. But that misunderstood Pelevin's trick as writing vaguely deep-sounding mysticism steeped in zeitgeistiest of pop-culture mixed with a wide array of surface-level esoterica. Having read this compilation of his earlier short prose, it becomes apparent that he started out as actually something totally different, that only superficially looks like his later postmodern mysticism: he was the Russian version of Phillip K. Dick.

What I mean by this is that Dick's stories mostly all depend on one fundamental question: what if the world as we perceive it is an illusion, a simulacrum of a second, realer world that we only rarely can access. For Dick, this question serves as a grand overarching metaphor for his experience with schizophrenia. And he uses death, dreams, drugs, extraterrestrials, artificial intelligence, military subterfuge, fundamentalist religion, etc., etc. as particular, specific metaphors to get at the grand one. Pelevin's early stories and novellas compiled in this volume are also about this question. And again, as specific versions of the metaphor, he uses death, dreams, drugs, espionage, secret subterranean civilizations, and, in the titular novella, a particular highlight of the volume, the Prince of Persia video game. Fortunately for Pelevin, but unfortunately for us his readers, he is completely sane. So instead of the experience of schizophrenia, the central metaphor that all the specific ones reference is the Iron Curtain. It works surprisingly well. But the problem is that once this central metaphor that sustains all the rest stops being relevant, Pelevin needs to do something else. What he chooses is to abandon the central metaphor without replacing it, and so hist stories and novellas become a series of exercises in "wouldn't it be fucked up if...". In this volume of short prose, you can see that transformation happen in real time.

FWIW, I don't think it's particularly fair to say Pelevin's mysticism is "vague", I'd say it's a rather concrete, and not very postmodern, worldview, only steeped in varying levels of irony. But the Philip K Dick comparison of the early stuff is pretty poignant.

What I mean is that I read the esoteric content of his books (at least of the middle section of it, the contemporary stuff is its own bag of worms) as entirely sincere and revealing a deep level of engagement with the relevant philosophical discourse; though perhaps that falls a little flat if you're not a nerd about Buddhist/Jainist movements and philosophy.

You might be right. I am definitely not an expert on Buddhist or Jainist thought at all. My impression from reading Pelevin's "Chapaev and Void" closely followed by Yuzefovich's "Cranes and Pygmies" is that it seemed very clear that the latter was deeply knowledgeable about Mongolia in a way that the former isn't. In the same book, I was annoyed by his portrayal of Japanese culture as well. And his main interest in revolutionary Petrograd seemed to be entirely in how much cocaine people were using. So he does not engender confidence in his reader. Of course, it's totally plausible, in a book that's primarily a statement of Buddhist philosophy to be careful about that and then fast and loose with the other stuff. But if so, then perhaps the Buddhist philosophy itself is the thing that's vague?

I'm also curious how you would demarcate the periods of Pelevin's career betwen early-middle-late? (For me Life of Insects is the transition point, and I haven't read anything more recent than "Helmet of Horror" based on how viscerally I hated it).

I think unless you are doing actual political organizing or at least leaving the house to go to political events, you are better off conceiving of oneself as "not particularly political". like, what's the point. its just a particularly righteous way of being mad on the internet

The reason people are not doing this is that claiming oneself to be "not particularly political" is stigmatized (online).

quotes and excerpts float around on tumblr that are like "stories make us human! the most important thing is stories. stories can change the world!" and it's very compelling until you remember that writers, who are broadly (but not universally) revved up about stories, are broadly (but not universally) good at writing

i went to a talk tonight that was being given by a food person, and they were like "food and cooking make us human! the most important thing in the world is feeding people. home cooking can change the world!"

(nearly verbatim but rearranged)

so i'm glad it's not an affliction unique to writers

@sungodsevenoclock: I've mentioned this on tumblr before, but I did have a quantum mechanics prof who said "quantum mechanics is what separates us from the animals"

were they usually really funny or

My Applications of QM prof was mostly charming and occasionally funny in a self-deprecating way, but oddly enough in saying this, I think he was basically being sincere.