I'm going to read three more.
This next one has yet another problem with the title.
This is becoming a theme.
It's called "Year Zero."
And I read it for the first time last December.
And after I read it, some extremely nice person
came up and said, that's a lovely Millenium poem.
Which left me completely sort of dumbfounded since it
didn't mean to be a Millenium poem at all.
It's set in 1920.
And, you know, my bad.
I mean, obviously, it's going to be read that way.
It's called-- "Year Zero" is actually
a fairly traditional move by revolutionaries.
They really like, why a revolution works.
And the revolutionaries seize power for a while.
They like to take over time.
It's sort of part of the deal.
So you know in 1789, France, they renamed all the months.
In 1848, in Paris, during -- when the first hours
of the revolution, a bunch of people went out and started
shooting at the clock tower, trying to knock the hands off
and succeeded in doing so.
And the big thing with 20th century is to--
is to say that the old calendars have started again
in Year Zero.
This isn't a particularly proud tradition.
Pol Pot did Year Zero, and he started at Year Zero.
But this is also what the Soviets did,
and particularly, there was a region of the Soviet Republic
which was led by this general named Nestor Makhno.
He was a great guy.
For one thing, he wasn't--
he was neither a communist nor was he a tsarist.
He was just-- he liked to fight.
He was one of them real generals.
So he'd been a general in the White Army
because that was at the time the only army there was,
and he ran around, I don't know, repressing
Cossacks or whatever.
And then the Russian Revolution, the big one, the big part,
broke out, and there was something, the Red Army,
the communists.
And he-- well, the communists are probably
better than the tsarists.
They have a very groovy platform, you know.
Communism, woohoo.
And so, so he started fighting with them.
He was a brilliant general.
He won a lot, beat the White Army over and over again.
Realized he didn't like the communists either.
He wasn't-- they had a big program.
Just like the tsarists.
He was against programs.
He was an anarchist.
So he said, well, okay, I'll just fight.
I won't really be on anyone's team.
So he took his army.
They were fiercely loyal to him.
And he ran around obliterating every army who
he ran into and eventually carved out
a region in northern USSR, and the comments at one--
he basically said, well, fine, have your Soviet.
This is going to be Anarchist Republic.
He declared it, so it was.
Year zero, there they were.
And he was lovely in many ways.
He printed money, and it was for the Republic,
and he wrote directly on it that it
was just phony and counterfeit.
In fact, he recommended it highly.
[LAUGHTER]
This is why we like anarchists.
They know enough just to, like, screw with the essential shit,
you know.
And anyway, in that Republic, one of the great art movements
in the 20th century happened, which
is the Russian Supremacists, often confused
with the Constructivists.
And this is set in that time, in the "Year Zero."
"The clock into which you stared as into a mother's face
now seen as a time-factory under winter.
Year Zero the mistakes have yet to be invented, and music--
well, it comes down to inventing flowers.
This they do down at the flower factory over the bridge
from the factory where cherries tumble
from the cherry-making machinery.
Nothing is true everything is the case."