THE BELIEVER READER

Recalling Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge, the haunting portrait of the 1914 Mayakovsky has an unsettling, eerie, charged power to it. Almereyda says the later portraits taken by Aleksandr Rodchenko "display a kind of proto-punk ferocity," but I would argue that all that ferocity is in the former, ready to burst from beneath that ascot at any moment (I could not find an image online that would stand in for the one I refer to, so, to understand fully, you may just have to buy yourself a copy).

His finery belies his absolute rage. He looks like a leader of the disaffected. As though he might incite a riot and then lean back in a stiff chair to watch everything be dashed to pieces, howling with delight. "Russian Futurists were enraptured by city life, by machine-age energy and speed, and they matched a hunger for new forms with a well-publicized contempt for artistic tradition, for contrived sentiment, for bourgeois complacency and decorum," Almereyda says. It sounds beautiful, completely savage and entirely dangerous.

It's hard to believe then, looking back, that Mayakovsky could have had any great bearing on such a movement as a poet. Or that there would have been a "link in Mayakovsky's mind, between printed matter and high-stakes consequences, between language and action." In a time when just about anyone anywhere can publish himself on the internet (The Believer Reader), it's almost preposterous that writing could have such an effect. Perhaps the effect continues in countries with oppressive, suppressive, censorial governments. But here, I doubt anyone even knows who our Poet Laureate is (Charles Simic), or that we even have one.

Writers — artists of any kind really — are impotent as far as affecting change, never mind broad social movements (except maybe propagandists). Is there nothing left to fight for? Are we too free? Or is American culture so devoid of culture that the few visionaries able to catalyze others are simply preaching to an ever-shrinking choir?