Andrej Tomažin
Updated: Apr 6, 2020
ANDREJ TOMAŽIN (1988) is a writer and theorist, based in Ljubljana. He has four books published in Slovenian: two short story collection, a novel and a poetry collection Baselines. His latest is Anonymous Technology, a short story collections. It was nominated for the kritiško sito (critics' sieve) Award presented by the Slovenian Literary Critics’ Association for the best book of the previous year and the novo mesto award for the best short story collection of the previous year. He is also a part of the editorial board of Šum, journal for contemporary art criticism and theory.
Dedications
I.
For Belkis Ayon
People set themselves to destroy the fascist
forest with their fingers. The short cellulosic fibers of the pines
are aligned with the undulations of securities
in the Chinese stock market. You were
moved when you heard the roots
tremble in the trot of a bullish
trend. The white faces rendered
the global economy’s lengthy cycles. The fingers
began to remind of lengthy willow
branches, submerged in a quick river stream.
The nails, along with the errors of K-waves, gradually
peeled off. Usernames are random and passwords adequately
complicated. The archetypal war of memes doesn’t end
with a bang, but with the gentle breeze of local TEDx
conferences on the necessity of a solution: the necessity
of change on the level of an individual tree.
II.
For Amy Ireland
Artificial island between Helsinki
and Tallinn has no space for a
folk celebration: the mechanized limbs of former
people persistently roll up their sleeves. The deceitful
harvest of squids has pushed many a them
over the fence. They knew it
all began with the Russian occupation of the
Crimea. One base for me, another—also:
but foremost a base. The liberated areas
of the former ice belt on the Arctic Ocean
became the hatcheries of Tesla’s suped-up subterranean machines.
“Davay, nalivay.” “ And the winner gets—access.”
Raise your hand and rotate a few degrees
to the right. Iceberg no more, but the
cloud, a datahaze: the vantage point of winners.
III.
For Sylvia Plath
All great poets lie, she said,
as she stepped through the door of her bedroom.
They lie to people
so that they don’t have to lie to fingers.
It’s difficult to utter the truth of everyone, I
said. She was left hanging in one of the
seasons and the day after filled her lungs with
monoxide. Has your uncle ever
advised you to write like Tomaž Šalamun?
With wine and Camels, try it that way,
that’s how he wrote until he got jazzed
up for politics. An old one, this whore[1].
When you become famous, they disable your
pacemakers through the wireless.
Every death is lied, she said, and
laid her marzipan head inside the stove.
[1] A corruption of politics is in Slovenia (and some other Balkan countries) often described through gendered metaphors like this one: ‘politics is a whore’.
IV.
For Pier Paolo Pasolini
At half past seven, shortly
before dark, I was stopped
in the dangerous part of the
town by a stranger
with Mickey Mouse's ears
and was told that it is possible to read
all books with the aid
of a nightingale’s shadow. That
each of his twists
above the beech tree in
the park is already drawn, that
the distance between
a bird’s silhouette and
the earth has been accurately
measured. Nothing else
but architecture.
V.
For Taja Kramberger
Dogs are dancing to the tune by Kafka's
band. Separated from its source
it's just an aural trace in an empty
room: it's impossible to say it's not a
cave, it's a labyrinth, extended in width,
where sickly flags hang and foothpaths
run into a terrain, full of greasy shafts—extended
enough for the gnarled trunks of the
pears to be crumbling by the
pale humility of pure surface.
Even lines can no longer be erased.
[____]
A parody of one’s own noon:
who will promise to make the solar
economy Keynesian
once more?
Logistics
I.
To follow Hapag-Lloyd’s
shipments until the containers
on the horizon unite into a long
queue of boxes. The first sprouts
of an artificial world grow
on small islands. Logistics;