My “Loving Russia” was published earlier this summer at The Massachusetts Review, with an epigraph from Susan Sontag’s 2000 New Yorker essay “Loving Russia.” Though the essay’s done and out in the world, it’s still something I’m working on, or maybe working through is the better expression. As part of that on-going work, I presented,… Continue reading Dostoevsky as Problem
Month: August 2023
Insights and such
Boy No. 1, who is now twenty-one and knows more than his father about such things, says it’s all about the algorithms. I am still hoping that Crack: A Tone Poem has in fact reached the people SoundCloud’s insights page is telling me it has reached. They are… …in the US 53 listeners; in Australia… Continue reading Insights and such
Crack: A Tone Poem
I did a limited release of Crack: A Tone Poem on SoundCloud yesterday, which quickly had just under 50 plays. That by itself is not extraordinary, but I was surprised by the places where the plays came from: 6 from the the US; 3 each from the UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany; 2 each from… Continue reading Crack: A Tone Poem
Trusting Up to Thirty
Thirty is the number I have somewhat arbitrarily taken as my limit number for Introduction to Russian Culture for the coming semester: ten artifacts/episodes from “Old” Russian culture, ten artifacts/episodes from “imperial” Russian culture, and another ten from the (again rather arbitrarily designated) post-1917 to the present “period.” I say arbitrary, but there’s an organizational… Continue reading Trusting Up to Thirty
Squint Eye
I released a song on July 31, which seems to have pushed Ba.Ren.Chi above 14,000 plays on Jamendo. I still like that service because of how well curated it is, the simplicity of uploading and keeping track of content, and the fact that it’s free to anyone. SoundCloud shares some of these features, though it… Continue reading Squint Eye
Russell Scott Valentino 