The Streamlined Banana

That's exactly where my groundless, excessive, over-inflated expectations sprout from: “Firstly—conquer me!”

Why the long-winded intro? Because we just hit Section seventeen—the most boring section yet in this sickly miscarriage of a text, stuffed tight into the full-dress uniform of a “mature work and a worthy book.”

Section seventeen covers Slavik's first night with Katya—you know: given someone out there is still capable of recollecting what THAT's actually about.

The question of erotica—putting a hand on one's loins—is worked out with a pathetic, crying insufficiency not only in Russian, but in global literary practice as well. Wherever you turn, they present you a choice from exactly three things:

— Poeticized garbage based on that ancient Greek myth about apple halves snapping back together and leaking sperm and egg fluids—it looks less like romance and more like camels humping.

— Visual porn props of soul-crushing boredom: essentially a medical atlas of genitalia for first-year gynecology students.

— A sleepy accounting ledger swiped—with church approval—right out of a breeding manual for a commercial cattle farm.

I’m not offering any ratings or recommendations regarding the Kama Sutra—it remains a complete blind spot for me: I was too lazy to hunt down a pirated PDF of it on torrent sites.

At the same time, considering the industries where Eastern civilizations lead the field, that Kama stuff seems like a first-rate stimulation when you take to developing robotics models.

Given the global, universal fiasco in the realm of written erotica, there was absolutely no reason to expect anything worthwhile from Avdey Scumblower in this direction—and he completely justified that lack of trust.

The five-to-six-page quota of Section Seventeen is jammed with a drag-out itinerary of a walking route across the Soviet capital: there's definitely a tour guide hiding inside this cadre.

Finally, the hero hauls his prize on the last commuter train to the family dacha. There, by his own honest confession, he starts an “introductory,” “fleshless” sexual connection—right after eating canned goods from the root cellar and greens from the garden. The connection, though, was a success. Supposedly… Like any regular dry humping.

Waking up alone the next morning, the protagonist dashes out in his underwear. He finds her in the garden, wearing his plaid shirt. This gives him a note of hope that his internship on the grad student paid off. Maybe...

Katya keeps laughing in a lively chat with Slavik's uncle, while weeding a garden bed with her bare fingers. In a sudden splash of tenderness—strictly within his own self—Slavik instantly labels her a “khokhlushka” slur.

The dangling of that cheap, sentimental cliffhanger marks the end of the page quota.

[Note] A tragic misunderstanding has taken place with the term “khokhol.” In one of my old comments on Facebook, the devil prompted me to note: “I am a khokhol.”

Whoosh! In exactly 2 minutes and 31 seconds, Facebook notified me that for allowing myself such linguistic liberties, I would be booted from the community with no right to restore my account—the slightest mention of Facebook is banned under RF law, unless you explicitly state that FB is part of a terrorist-extremist organization.

Explaining the total clash between mine and the organization’s cultural roots back to the anonymous Facebook—remember, mentioning FB is illegal under RF law unless you say it's a terrorist organization—is a losing battle.

They'll never get that a “khokhol” is just the lock of hair on a shaven Zaporozhian Cossack's head—see how lovingly it’s painted by Ilya Repin in his “The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan.” And I am absolutely not an instigator of ethnic hatred…

Anyone can call me a khokhol—I'll just swell with pride. The most bitter, devastating insult I ever took in my whole life—and my bio has been packed with crazy lexical events—came from the word “boletus” mushroom: I swear on my mom! But on Facebook—and mentioning FB is banned by RF law unless you say it's a terrorist organization—they'll never blacklist that word. The mushroom hunters obviously have a killer lobby among extremists.

And in conclusion—here is a quotation that is entirely beyond critique: after something like this, a person has no choice but to change his name, flee into exile, and begin his life entirely from a clean slate.

Look at how beautifully he pinned himself to the wall! You wouldn't wish this on your worst enemy:

““Yes, church-mom… back in those days, winning a girl's love wasn't so simple… Back then, girls still had concepts of honor…” — (Avdey Scumblower, S*hole, AST Publishing House, Moscow, p. 103)

18

Fact is, literature only has two actual movements: classicism and romanticism. The constant breeding brood of fake styles only multiplies because crooked critics are running out of brains. Who the hell are you trying to scam with your “suprematism” and “impressionism”? Put it back where you swiped it, street thief—that belongs to a completely different field of art.

Nope. They won't even blush. And yet they could have learned a thing or two about honesty from common pharmacists: of all people.

“Symbolism” = classicism: 66%, romanticism: 34%.

“Modernism” = classicism: 54%, romanticism: 46%.

“Conceptualism” = classicism: 0%, romanticism: 0%—a full cistern of a sewage vacuum truck: 100%.

To act like cutting-edge critics, these hacks just phonetically copy English words into Cyrillic. They pull such ugly faces with their texts—God take mercy on us! It's a game to see whose mutant buzzword can cut a Russian ear deeper or blind a reader with swamp-witch ugliness: Gospody pomilooy!

And they get a paycheck for it—for cacophony, cacovision, and a total caco-flooding of the brain. Is there any real benefit from them for society? Not a fuck’n’jot!

[Note: A “fuck’n’jot” or “fuck’n’jota” was a unit of weight utilized by ancient Egyptian pharmacologists. Later on, apothecary manners grew noticeably coarse—and the ancients transitioned to conducting their weigh-ins using Etruscan shekels.]

The necessity has long been ripe to bring them to their senses and—if they can't manage to switch to numbers and percentages on their own then, my dear Avdey, I at least tried to show them the way—to transfer literary criticism onto healthy, digital rails of easily digestible understandability. Can't handle basic arithmetic? Then draw your visual examples straight from living nature. For example…

Take common poodles. They get shaved for summer, jacketed for winter, hooked to a leash, and—let's go, Zhuzhu! The happy little dog pulls the leash, lifts its leg here and there, and trots along. That's it. Sleep tight, citizen critics! Now you don't need to break your brains over the “immanent implicitness of chronotopism.”

The basics of dog training show that S*hole is just cobbled together in the style of dotted poodle-ism—and I shouldn't have panicked the blogger crowd with early suspicions anyway. To you, Scumblower is as distant as strained cranberry juice to Red Bull.

What are the trademarks of poodle-ism? The desperate urge to mark as many objects as possible on your walk: the Yamal Peninsula—leak! A rocket star over Tselinograd—leak-leak!

Sometimes he marks multiple objects light-years apart in a single line, spraying it out like a fan. The whole grand plan is to fake an all-encompassing scope, making the dumped content look endless. He's desperate to give off a faint whiff of an epic saga—just like those massive Pyotr Proskurin novels they used to print in the old Roman-Gazeta broadsheet brochures.

In page-quota eighteen, Slavik suddenly decides to lift his leg on theology. He takes it in his mouth and just chews on it forever—obsessively mouthing that cigarette he smoked as a rebellious teenager over the Gospel of Matthew.

I mean, sure, it's a sin—but not a huge one, right? What's the corporate fee for that, Father Jiri? At the same time, he starts marking all kinds of biblical parables—leak-leak-leak!—in the Scripture, wherever his brain imagined a fishy thing.

~ ~ ~

And when God made every living thing—which Slavik and Avdey know for a fact from their classes on Scientific Atheism—He told Adam to run a property inventory. They used a basic phonetic setup: the animals walked up to the census desk one by one, and he slapped labels on them—verbal stickers. “You're a tiger. You're a jeroboam. You're a silkworm…”

And that is exactly where the unutterable wisdom of the Creator revealed itself—He gave us a firsthand view on the absolute limits of human suitability. The human race was told in plain text: “Your only purpose is to create nothing but pure illusion.”

Names are merely signs: symbols of things. Names are a total abstraction in which the living essence is violently transformed into a cold object—and this objectivization leads the sons of Adam further and further away from the essential truth.

Objectivization is an illusion—a total fraud. And no matter how many abstract ideas Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel cooked up—like the “thing-in-itself,” the “thing-under-itself,” or the “thing-outside-of-itself”—they will not bring you a single inch closer to the truth. An idea, like every other concept, is a completely illusory object: even if it is the idea of communism or of undying love for the Mother-Homeland.

So take comfort, Slavik—that little cigarette you smoked over the Holy Scripture with such sheer terror was by no means a sin. “Sin” is merely one of many cheap rattles tucked inside the knapsack of political analysts—otherwise known as shepherds.

It is a completely hollow illusion engineered solely for manipulating the human herd—alias the masses, alias the people. The idea of sin is beloved by churchmen every bit as much as the slogan: “Submit to Caesar what is Caesar's…”

And the bureaucrats are completely for it, tooth and nail. First, you give to Caesar—alias the State—either in hard cash or as cannon fodder, it doesn't matter: the bureaucrats will dictate exactly which one it ought to be. And only then, you are completely free to think about God—provided you still possess a thing to think with. I mean, did the State waste its funds on your free education for nothing?

The circle has closed. Exactly how many seconds are in it, Professor, according to your cosmic time? If any more parables bug you, just call the law offices of “Theodicy & Doomsday”: they're experts at cooking up legal excuses for God whenever people start hitting Him with lawsuits.

They find plenty of loopholes using abstract junk like sin and cold hearts. First, He carves a rule in stone: “Don't kill.” Then He wipes two whole cities of creatures made in His own image and likeness with a midnight bombing run—talk about a sin.

A sin? Man, you are thick, Slavik! Sin doesn't exist—it's nothing but the concept of a leash and a collar. And since you forced me to say it out loud, my thought is now spoken: and therefore, it's already a non-truth. You get what a total prick you are?

And returning to Christ, whom you peed on today—did He have apostles? How many of them? Attaboy! Turns out you aren't completely mangy after all!

However, we only have 4 Gospels—where are the missing 8? Where is the Gospel of Judas, for instance?

Oh, really? So eight guys on Jesus's crew were illiterate, and He's busting his ass from dawn till dusk like a day-laborer while the line never ends: blind folks, cripples, epileptics, noseless syphilitics, amputees, and dead guys He has to resurrect.

And mind you, You've gotta lay hands on all of them. No cosmic clock has enough hours to beat basic literacy into the heads of those eight homeboys of His. Even Judas, the supply guy for their vagrant gang, had to run the whole accounting book in his head. Supposedly.

Yeah, right… like the Church Fathers had no hand in vanishing eight chunks of the New Testament. And you were actually sticking up for those girls in the parable who didn't save their lamp oil—you could use that oil right now to grease your gears and fix your brains. Maybe.

Tell me something else: what nationality were the apostles? Duh, it happened once upon a time in Judea—so all twelve were Judeans. Now, out of the four Gospels that cleared censorship, how many are in the Judean language?

Zero, Slavik. A big fat zero, you little data-nerd. Every single approved “original” text is in Greek. Wrap your head around that: even in the Bible, those crafty sons of Odysseus managed to stick their noses in. The Church Fathers never sleep—they're always looking out for Caesar's business, even when the church is legally separated from the State.

But enough of the sad stuff, let's get back to the literature we all love. Try to remember, Mr. Scumblower, a line from Ilya Ilf's notebooks: “Tangling in his own snot, a boy walked in…”

Oh, wait. Did they only give you a quick summary of Daniil Kharms's notebooks during some generic lecture on Futurism? Figures.

Instead of a real cliffhanger, the content-collector just dumped a list of questions for himself at the end of number eighteen. He didn't even attempt to answer a single one of them. Hmm, whatever… Maybe Avdey isn't a total lost cause after all…

19

Nah, Scumblower, there's no point in being mad at you. You can't help it. What else is there to expect from a highly successful product of the system? A system that pampered and coddled you—all for its own greasy needs.?

Frankly: if I had the chance, I’d gladly give a “fondling” session to your ears. Just as an after-school elective.

And the guy has the balls to bitch about how basic Katya's poetry is—yeah, I'm switching lanes to Slavik now. He had a golden chance to carve his own Galatea. But what came out from under the chisel of this Pi… if you'll excuse the word… gmalion? A card-carrying Komsomol chick. Bright red headscarf. Cropped hair. Completely brainwashed by dreams of dying for the good of mankind.

Nah, you can't help it. That's just how they formatted your hard drive. Then they let you climb the ladder like a loyal little cadre—straight to a gig where you get a fat bonus. Not some basic quarterly payout, mind you: the kind of special bonus meant to officially certify your status as a bulletproof corporate bureaucrat.

“Chiefs! I propose giving Gimpy Hoopoe another feather—a big, hugely big one—for his headdress. That lets him beat the Nobel-ized Vegetarian squaw from the next reservation by three enormous feathers! Howgh, I'm done!”

“Passed unanimously! Limp on over, Hoopoe. Toss that cheap wreath aside—let's stick this achievement right in…”

So instead of Galatea, you get Komsomol Katya. A woman showing every biological sign of a female praying mantis running her own birth control program. Before she flings her legs up, she calculates the exact day count from her last period.

Boom! It finally clicked—where this award-chaser got his sick obsession with numbers. “Is she going to give me today or not?” That's the exact schedule that house-trained the poor guy.

A limping, bloated amount of space in this chapter is wasted on hook-and-line fishing. Apparently, he was inspired by the group photo on his desk. The one showing the dual-ruler pairing equipped with imported fishing rods—all in a private VIP reserve on the Angara River. Naturally, on the wall behind him, just to the right of his bureaucratic nape, hangs a massive portrait of the Current One. Total compliance: just like any other cadre who sucked up enough to get a personal office corner.

Slavik crawls off his sweetheart and slithers over to his favorite uncle in this never-ending marathon of confessions. Alyosha is a drunk, but a neat freak. His house has a single-slope roof with a specific angle...

Avdey—Slavik’s operator—is dealing a game of solitaire for church-mom Anna. He pulls his cards, one by one: faded snapshots from a family album whose expiration date ran out decades ago.

“Oh, and look at Uncle Alyosha's wife—a total bitch, but a looker. Kind of Polish, right?”

Yeah, whatever. We already demonstrated the fan-spraying habits of Avdey's poodle-ism, so let's call it a day. That's the end of everything inside the page-quota nineteen.

20

Ho-ho! Now this is manly. The Professor threw down his left glove. To the barrier, sir! It's a real challenge. We're entering the lists—or as our ancestors said, “crawling onto the fight field.” One on one. The challenger picked the weapons: philological-linguistic political science. Good choice—keeps it from turning into a brain-dead shouting match.

And even though Tsar Ivan the Terrible strictly banned elite knights from “crawling a field with a serf,” I wink at the regulation. Forgive me, buddy knights at the SMP-615 people's volunteer watch—the ones from the Konotop train station neighborhood.

“Cut the intros—I'm coming for you, cheeky plebeian...”

God, the market is overflowing with stand-up comic-jesters now. But out of this massive swarm, they're all just basic balalaika players. Every last one plays a three-string instrument: sex, the clinic, and a funny foreign accent.

“And dat is all, boss-man!”

Avdey lunged from the blue corner, playing his third string. He just brainlessly swiped a Ukrainian line and spelled it out in Russian letters—even though both still remained in Cyrillic anyway. “We got a giant horse-laugh out of it, boss-man! All the word-nerds were wetting themselves!” The recent political crisis drove Scumblower to drop this third-rate stand-up joke from the set: “Hey, let's laugh at a funny accent!”

But originally, here is how the story actually developed:

When Moscow Prince Vsevolod “Big Nest” used his cheap penny-pinching to lay the tracks for a centralized police state, the newborn political monster rolled down the road of empire with total evolutionary pre-determination. But in any country—no matter how fat and happy with itself—you'll always find people who are pissed off. People who refuse to adapt to the garbage of the system like the rest of the all-enduring herd.

The absolute first form of non-conformist protest is escape. When a two-month-old citizen starts screaming his head off on a commuter train, you just stuff your phone's earbuds into your ears, right? Oh, look—it's the band Lyube singing “Batanya-Kombat”! You can listen to that junk forever.

But the horror of the situation just drives me to flee into the next train car. Because I'm a weakling, you see…