Land of the Broken
(An update in rap from the American gurney …)
Sheet pulled neat
Over face, past feet
Tie a tag to the national toe
Got the blues from the news
And I want to hit snooze
But I know just where to go
Sky hangs high
We’re the same in its eye
And they haven’t cut its budget yet
Hit the trail
Feet don’t fail
Peace of mind is the grail
Gonna see how far I get
Land of the broken
Free from the job
This one’s a token
That one’s a slob
I’m looking for the sense in the mess on the floor
Looking for the keys but I can’t find the door
Thought it was forever
But it never was for sure
Cut loose from my tether
Can’t fly anymore
I’m a thousand miles from CPAC
But the blade still cuts
Thinking positive like Deepak
But I’m falling into ruts
Got my self together running right
After all these years
Pulled my mind from darkness into light
Walking through my fears
Just another man, I’m doing work
Living it with love
And I learned where all the demons lurk
You know they’re up above
They got castles in the valley
They got castles in the sky
They got cameras in the alley
In your room they got a spy
They’re calling out for words
That I’m not gonna say
Their revenge of the nerds
Can wait another day
I got words of my own
I got bite in my jaw
Got my wild oats sewn
Got my fatal flaw
They can cut me loose
Kick me out of my shell
They can knot up the noose
But I’ll see them in hell.
– GBM February 24, 2025
The Head of America
The air is sick with byte and wave
Pre-empting every thought
Hate and covet, whine and crave
Become what you are not
It comes in through the eye and ear
It oozes through the skin
It tells you who to loathe and fear
It redefines all sin
Love thy neighbor?
Well, depends on who thy neighbor be
The stranger’s in our midst, they say,
Yearning to breathe free,
Wretched refuse, huddled mass,
From asylum gates they pour
Madmen from the underclass
Storm the golden door.
Asylum sought
Asylum not
Asylum caught
Asylum shot.
The only good stranger, say the waves and bytes
In the disrupted Head of America,
Is a dead one.
But I, too, was once a stranger in the land of Egypt.
And my days, too, are numbered.
– Greg Blake Miller, 2-10-25
“The Kuleshov Effect” (“Эффект Кулешова”): The Novaya Gazeta Review
Two days before Thanksgiving, I woke up to yet another reason for gratitude: A review of the Russian-language version of my novel, The Kuleshov Effect (“Эффект Кулешова”), had run in the great dissident newspaper (now operating in exile) Novaya Gazeta. The review was written by Andrei Khrzhanovsky, one of Russia’s greatest animators, who had gone to film school in the 1960s with many of the real-life figures who populate my novel. At the center of my book is the ingenious, mercurial, often joyful and ultimately tragic screenwriter Gennady Shpalikov. Khrzhanovsky was close friends with Shpalikov, and Shpalikov wrote Khrzhanovsky’s beautiful, almost hallucinogenic first film, There Lived Kozyavin (1966), as well as his second film, The Glass Harmonica (1968), a surreal allegory of greed, power, and the healing capacities of art. (The Glass Harmonica has now become a world classic, but only after it was banned for two decades.) In other words, Khrzhanovsky lived the worlds that I could only imagine and knew the people I could only re-invent. So his words are particularly dear to me. I have translated Khrzhanovsky’s review into English in the PDF below.
First, I also want to say a word about Novaya Gazeta, which for decades has been one of the great endangered bastions of true journalism in Russia, questioning power in the face of increasingly draconian repression. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the newspaper’s owners; the great investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya—who was murdered in 2006 for her truth-telling—was one of Novaya’s star reporters; the newspaper’s former editor, Dmitry Muratov, won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which Novaya Gazeta denounced, the paper was forced to move its operations to Riga, Latvia. There it has continued its tradition of boldness, critical thinking, and professionalism in its reporting about Russia, the war, and the world. Novaya Gazeta has also continued to serve as a island of safety and sanity for the best of Russian culture, carrying on the centuries-old tradition of the opposition intelligentsia not only in journalism, but also in literature and the arts. As a longtime journalist, magazine editor, and journalism teacher, I am awed and inspired each day by the work Novaya Gazeta does, and I am proud and humbled to have been mentioned in its pages.
I hope in the coming months to decide on an English-language publisher for The Kuleshov Effect. It’s odd, of course, for a novel to have been released first in translation, but it’s also somehow appropriate that my story should come first to those who knew its heroes, whether through their art or, as in Khrzhanovsky’s case, their direct friendship. I’m extremely grateful to the outstanding exile press Freedom Letters—as well as to the brilliant writer Dmitry Bykov, who championed the manuscript, and Ekaterina Kevkhishvili, who translated it beautifully—for the opportunity to share The Kuleshov Effect with Russian-language readers around the world.
Here is the translation of Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s review …
The Kuleshov Effect (“Эффект Кулешова”) … Behind the Interview
(Click here to watch the interview in Russian on YouTube.)
Last week, I was invited for an interview about my novel, “The Kuleshov Effect” («Эффект Кулешова»), with the outstanding Russian exile literary critic Nikolay Alexandrov. Nikolay’s show, “Not Just About Books,” is part of the YouTube channel “The Insider Live”—itself part of a remarkable dissident communication infrastructure cobbled together outside Russia by exiles in the wake of Putin’s war and repression.
I was nervous, naturally: a full hour in Russian taking questions from a very smart guy before an online audience that was probably wondering why on earth this American dude from Vegas has published a novel in Russian about the great cultural heroes of the Soviet Sixties, a time both heroic and tragic, when a seductive glimmer of hope and freedom appeared in the wake of Stalinist darkness … and then faded.
The interview was to be recorded Sunday morning and aired on Tuesday. I practiced on Saturday afternoon between stomach aches and then again very early on Sunday and then logged in for the Zoom call with Nikolay, who was in Europe, and the sound engineer in Tbilisi. Nikolay asked his first question and, as sometimes happens in sports, all of my tension went away and I was suddenly in a flow state, the proverbial “zone”. My Russian was still, of course, imperfect, but it felt (improbably, ten years after my last visit to Russia) like the best I’d ever spoken. Whatever corner of my brain I’d trained not just to speak a language but to BE in it had taken over.
And then, 50 minutes into the conversation, the sound engineer broke in:
“Guys, I’m very sorry, but the lights just went out in Georgia, and we lost the entire recording.”
Deep breath. Well, three deep breaths—mine, Nikolay’s, and the sound engineer’s.
I was given a choice to redo the interview later that day, sometime the next day, or, if I wanted, right now. I chose now.
I took a five-minute break, got a glass of water, rearranged my set-up because the sun was now blasting through my blinds and leaving strange stripes on my face, took yet another deep breath (you’ll see more of those in the video; one commenter wrote, “Greg even exhales in Russian”) and we began anew.
The result is posted here: My Russian was not nearly as clean, but I still was in the moment, being a Russian speaker rather than merely speaking in Russian. Sometimes my brain paused and buffered, but ever since my cage fight with Covid in 2020 it does that in English, too. And, toward the end of the show—the end of my second hour of being interviewed—I got tired … like, runner-at-marathon’s-end tired. At one point I rubbed my eye under my glasses, leading a conspiracy-minded commenter to ask what such a gesture symbolized. (I will tell him: Scratching my eye was a symbol for the fact that my eye itched.)
Nikolay was a remarkably good interviewer, insightful, challenging, empathetic, patient. His final question was a challenge to my linguistic subtlety and moral clarity: What would I want to ask of or say to contemporary Russian society?
Time was short, and I decided to speak not to those who have fallen in line with Putin’s war but to those left behind, trying to sustain life and hope while living under the suffocating weight of a government that has sacrificed the better angels of Russia’s nature on the pyre of national resentment, political opportunism, imperial delusion, and plain bloodlust.
I said that I know that the seed and spark of all that is best in Russian (and broader post-Soviet) culture remains, that kindness and humanity remain, that I know that these traits are aching to be seen and heard. I said that I have hope, a painful, halting, but real hope, that they will indeed be seen and heard. The kindness and genius I encountered among friends when I worked in Russia in the 1990s and among historical figures while I was researching the filmmakers of the 1960s for my dissertation and later for “The Kuleshov Effect” lives on, battered but but not fully defeated.
I am a romantic, of course; my brain senses the depths but my heart always insists there’s a way out. Within the course of my life, I said, we will see a better day. This, I said, is not simply my hope; it is my conviction.
A Mind in the Wake of the Storm: “My Intention” in Red Canary Magazine
(Click here to read the original essay in Red Canary Magazine.)
On the morning after the election a nation woke bleary eyed and beheld what it had wrought. Some despaired, some delighted, some turned over and went back to sleep, assuming they would wake to a different, less ridiculous truth. I typed. There was nothing normal about what wound up on the screen. “Why all the fire imagery?” my friends asked. I told them it was a Rorschach of my brain, which was apparently burning. But I think the better answer is that fire is a process, at the end of which which something qualitatively different remains. In the end, this is a prose-poem about not-knowing. And trying, just for a moment, to be OK with that. Here is the essay, or whatever it is, published in the wonderful Red Canary Magazine.
On November 1, 1974, the mercurial Soviet screenwriter Gennady Shpalikov is found hanging by his scarf in a Moscow apartment. Two decades later, American orphan Tom Benjamin sees the long-banned original cut of Shpalikov’s greatest film, The Ilich Gate,and declares “I know these people.”
At age 20, tormented by impossible recollections of Shpalikov’s death, Tom goes to Russia for answers. Lost on a milky night in 1995 Petersburg, he meets film student Kira Morozova. She, too, is haunted by inexplicable memories: a tsarist massacre, a husband lost to Stalin’s Gulag … and her own death.
But right now, she has work to do. On the set of The Ilich Gate. In 1961.
And she takes Tom with her. In the movies, anything is possible . . .
The Russian translation of my new novel, THE KULESHOV EFFECT — “Эффект Кулешова” — has been published by the dissident exile press Freedom Letters, publishers of works by Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin—who was released in the recent prisoner exchange—and the renowned Russian exile novelist and poet Dmitry Bykov.
“This is probably the best American novel about Russia in the past 50 years, if not longer,” Bykov writes in his forward to “Эффект Кулешова”. “And precisely this book reminds us of the country where we all once lived, and which was worth loving.”
Bykov has called the novel, which spans the 20th century but is centered on the cultural Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, “a brilliant farewell anthem for a dying Russian civilization.” The beautiful translation by Ekaterina Kevkhishvili perfectly captures the rhythms and moods of the original English. We decided to publish the novel first in Russian, at a time when an entire post-Soviet shadow culture—some of its members in diaspora, some in a sort of internal exile, many in stages of patient and unyielding resistance—has been created by authoritarianism and war. We are currently seeking the right publisher for the English version.
For readers of Russian, or even for English-speaking friends who would simply like to have a copy of the first published version of “The Kuleshov Effect”, here is the link at Freedom Letters. I should add that this publishing company is doing extraordinarily brave work. While my book is, at its foundation, a love story about a boy, a girl, and a remarkable moment in history, many of the works published by Freedom Letters are engaged in an epochal battle for freedom of speech, thought, and conscience, and to support Freedom Letters is to support this mission.
https://freedomletters.org/books/effekt-kuleshova
Many thanks!
– Greg
Ladybird Grove (Lana’s Song)
Recently published in Red Canary magazine, my story “Ladybird Grove” takes us deep into the forest, where human memory meets the rhizome …
I have no channel, no verifiable method, for communicating these words to you. The science of life has not yet decoded these wild spaces. I myself do not understand how I came to be here. This is a green and wordless place, shadowed and rainweary. When the sky yawns, light rushes in and drapes the canopy with diamonds and retreats as quickly as it came. So, I have peace and spectacle. Everything else, I am coming to understand, is far away and long ago. But even here the words remain within me, longing for you. All I can do is trust that they will leave my stillness and travel this loamy soil to find you, wherever you are. Read the full story in Red Canary magazine …
Double Duty: The Las Vegas Legacy of Herman Moody
Herman Moody, a pioneering officer who blazed a trail for African-Americans in the Las Vegas police force, died on February 25 at age 98. I had the privilege of spending time with him for this 2002 profile. I’ll never forget the richness of his storytelling, the strength of his values, and—on a personal note—the kindness and patience he showed as I sat literally on the edge of my seat, asking question after question, utterly absorbed in the story of his remarkable life. You can read the original story below.
The Joy of Magazine Cover Art
Since this past summer, I’ve been the editorial director of rjmagazine, the quarterly magazine of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Very proud of the first two issues we’ve released, the most recent of which just came out for RJ subscribers last Sunday. One of the biggest joys has been creating our beautiful illustrated covers (above). Hats off to artist Wesley Rand, art director Mark Antonuccio, and super-secret-weapon artistic advisor Svetlana Miller!
– Greg Blake Miller
Mikhail Gorbachev, Avatar of Hope, 1931-2022
A great man has died, the soul of an era of hope rather than rage, learning rather than willful ignorance, and faith in our shared humanity rather than the pitiful, vengeful fetishes of nationalism. Mikhail Gorbachev was imperfect, like all of us, and time and oppression would ultimately mute his message, but few men have done more, in the face of almost insurmountable odds, to strip the world of its hardened layers of inhumanity. He is not to be faulted that, in his country and elsewhere, those layers have grown back, hard as an ox hoof. May his memory inspire us, once again, to regard this earth as a common human home, salvaged only by liberty, learning, truth, tolerance and cooperation. If that sounds corny, it should be cause for concern, because such concepts once changed the world.
– Greg Blake Miller
Reentry Shock 