Russian lit

Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.

The poem above was found among Vladimir Mayakovsky’s papers after his suicide on April 14, 1930. The middle section, with modest revisions, served as an epilogue to his suicide note. Yes, plagued by critics and disappointed in his personal relationships, the poet, who had criticized poet Serge Yesenin for committing suicide, took his own life: You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts.

Mayakovsky was the pre-eminent poet of the Russian Revolution and its immediate aftermath, maintains Huck Gutman, Ph.D., a professor at University of Vermont. Listen to the Real Audio presentation of Gutman's one-hour lecture on the self-dramatizing and accessible poems of Mayakovsky, "one of the great 'undiscovered' poets, though he is undiscovered only by English-speaking readers." The lecture features Gutman's oral interpretation of nine poems, including "How I Became a Dog," "On Being Kind to Horses," and "It's Already Past One."
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I already mentioned that we've been reading and discussing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Well, the serendipity that leads from one book to the next brings us to The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave his was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. "How good and how simple!" he thought. "And the pain?" he asked himself. "What has become of it? Where are you, pain?"

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Since all of that is a little heavy, a little heady, may I just say that the Real California Cheese commercials make me ache from guffawing? (Click around until you arrive as "Happy Cow TV.")

Do you want to marry a cow?