Infinite Recursor or the Bride of DJ Spinoza

by Eugene Ostashevsky

Poetry. Drama. A verse-drama, Eugene Ostashevsky's INFINITE RECURSOR OR THE BRIDE OF DJ SPINOZA is a polychromatic collaboration with the New York visual artist Eugene Timerman, and the duo's answer to artist-and-poet books of 1920s European avant-garde. With a cast of characters as various as Woodpecker; Infinite Recursor; MC Squared, E; Andrew Marvell; The Bride of DJ Spinoza; and DJ Spinoza himself, Ostashevsky's latest work is part absurdist theater, part verse experiment, where language and image collide in a raucous and unpredictable tessellation of puns on "The bride of DJ Spinoza/ has an absolute cleavage/ like that between natural numbers and Aleph-null"--from INFINITE RECURSOR OR THE BRIDE OF DJ SPINOZA. Eugene Ostashevsky's describes the DJ Spinoza "The project is essentially about the shortcomings of rationalism, and was inspired in equal measure by comic books, Spinoza and Goedel's incompleteness theorem. I started working on it after I read Spinoza's Ethics, whose project of constructing an axiomatic system that would be a theory of everything, and of doing so in natural language with all its inconsistencies and ambivalence, I found to be very funny."

36 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American writer, poet, translator and professor at New York University. Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad and then immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 11 years old where they settled in New York City.

Ostashevsky has a PhD from Stanford University.

His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series.

He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.

Reviews

[Nate D]

A hyper-linguistic, pseudo-sophmoric extended rap battle between DJ Spinoza and MC Squared (equalling E, natch), fighting in partly for the hand of a mathematician. The way the typography and image collage (it's a writer-artist collab) cavort about the pages really ups the hyperkinetic pleasure where the "story" (or dada stage-play perhaps) as it is would otherwise be just an extendedly messy and perhaps exasperating gag. As it is, it's more one of those odd, charming artifacts of uncategorizable the zine/art-book universe. I wouldn't excessively exert yourself in finding one necessarily, but keep an eye out for it to turn up in one of those weird leaflet bins that turn up outside better bookstores.