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GCC đã từng lèm bèm về nhóm Mở Miệng, về thơ Vàng Anh [nhờ vô Sài Gòn mà làm được thơ, và thơ được giải thưởng], về Nguyễn Khải, nhờ vô Sài Gòn mà viết được mấy cuốn quá bảnh - kể như trở thành nhà văn, kể từ khi 30 Tháng Tư 1975, trước đó, thì đều là kít đái cả, đúng như thế - … tất cả nằm trong câu Brodsky phán, về "biên cương vs trung tâm"

Thành ra thật khó mà tách riêng một Nhã Thuyên ra được. Và đây không phải chính trị, mà là cả 1 nền văn hóa, cố gượng sống lại từ điêu tàn, con phượng hoàng tái sinh từ tro than, cái con mẹ gì đó.
Một đề tài lớn, GCC tính viết, nhưng thấy thiên hạ theo đóm ăn tàn ghê quá, bèn né!
Khi nào đóm tàn, hết tàn rồi, thì GCC viết!
Hà, hà!

Bởi vì những văn minh đều có hạn kỳ cho nên sinh mệnh của mỗi văn minh đều tới thời khắc mà những trung tâm không còn trụ nổi nữa. Lúc ấy, cái giữ cho các nền văn minh khỏi bị phân hủy không phải là những đạo quân mà là những ngôn ngữ. Đó là trường hợp xẩy ra với La Mã, và trước đó nữa, với Hy Lạp Cổ Đại. Công việc trụ giữ vào những thời đó, là được thực hiện do những người từ các tỉnh, từ vùng biên. Trái với niềm tin phổ quát những vùng biên không phải là nơi thế giới tận cùng mà chính là nơi thế giới tan rã. Điều đó tác động lên ngôn ngữ chẳng khác gì điều tác động lên con mắt.

Because civilisations are finite, in the life of each of them comes a moment when centers cease to hold. What keeps them at such times from desintegration is not legions but languages. Such was the case with Rome, and before that, with Hellenic Greece. The job of holding at such times is done by the men from the provinces, from the outskirts. Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it unravels. That affects a language no less than an eye.

Joseph Brodsky: The Sound of the Tide [Hải Triều Âm: Dẫn vào thơ Derek Walcott, Poems of the Caribbean].

Liệu, có liên hệ “tình đồng chí” giữa Nhã và Pussy Riot?
The Putin regime "did not just make Tolokonnikova a star, it turned her into a saint," the writer Dmitri Bykov said during her prison hunger strike. "She is now the best-known Russian after Putin himself."
“Chế độ Putin không làm cho Tolokonnikova thành 1 ngôi sao, mà biến cô thành 1 vì thánh”
"Passion, honesty and naivety are superior to hypocrisy, mendacity and false modesty that disguises crime," Tolokonnikova said in court. These are words for a dissident to live by.

It was a striking moment in the history of Russian dissidence. On December 27, 2013, three days after their release from remote penal colonies, Nadezhda (known as Nadya) Tolokonnikova and Maria (known as Masha) Alyokhina were in a shiny Moscow TV studio, with Vladimir Bukovsky on the line from England. Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s and 70s as punishment for repeated acts of public protest. Since his release in a prisoner swap in 1976, he has lived in Cambridge. In their TV press conference Tolokonnikova named Bukovsky as her hero: a true defender of human rights who never abandoned political activism. In her 21 months in prison, she had read and reread his autobiography, she said, leaving it as a precious gift to a fellow inmate on her release. In Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina Bukovsky recognized his own kind. The elderly dissident spoke with them naturally, as equals. He told them "from the heart" that he knew how hard it would be to adapt to life outside prison, that freedom would bring a mass of cares. He wished them luck. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have confronted the challenges of freedom would bring a mass of cares. He wished them luck.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have confronted the challenges of freedom with the same cool demeanor that they displayed during their trial and imprisonment. In their tour of Europe and the US in the days before the Sochi Winter Olympics, politicians, human rights activists and rock stars lined up to bask in their moral authority. The young women make a good double act but Tolokonnikova is the true performer. She combines beauty and charisma with a remarkable mind, and knows instinctively how to take the high ground. The Putin regime "did not just make Tolokonnikova a star, it turned her into a saint," the writer Dmitri Bykov said during her prison hunger strike. "She is now the best-known Russian after Putin himself."

To capture imaginations is to be caught up in other people's fantasies and vanities. On an Irish chat show, the hapless presenter told Tolokonnikova that Madonna had described Pussy Riot as "fellow freedom fighters". Incredulous for a moment, she threw back her head and laughed. Again, she explained (as she had done to the judge who sentenced her in July 2012 for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred") that the "punk prayer", "Mother of God, Drive Away Putin", was not an attack on religion, but a political protest. Days later, at an Amnesty benefit in Brooklyn's vast Barclays Center, Madonna introduced Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina with a foul-mouthed speech about the dangers she herself had faced for the sake of freedom. In T-shirts decorated with the cross of the Teutonic knights, they thanked her graciously and proceeded to read aloud the court statements of Russia's May 6 prisoners, incarcerated for street protests since 2012.

Back home, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina face a tougher crowd. Many believe they are in the pay of the West. More sympathetic members of the intelligentsia cannot reconcile the dazzling moral clarity and erudition of their court statements with the antics in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, never mind Tolokonnikova's participation (with her husband Petr Verzilov) in a notorious sex protest in the State Museum of Biology in 2008. Others wait for the magic to wear off. "Why is everyone so obsessed with those stupid girls?" the Moscow TV anchor and socialite Ksenia Sobchak reportedly complained.

Other members of Pussy Riot have disowned Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina for succumbing to a cult of personality. Undeterred, the two showed up in Sochi in their Pussy Riot balaclavas. This is the kind of stubborn dissident persistence that Bukovsky taught. The local police obliged: they were first detained, then horsewhipped by Cossacks, creating another colorful spectacle for the assembled global media. They incorporated footage of it all into their song "Putin will teach you to love the Motherland".

In her excellent new book Words will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (Granta Books, £9.99), Masha Gessen finds evidence enough of genius in the "punk prayer" itself, which she calls "a great work of art ... a miracle". The dissident priest Gleb Yakunin regards the performance in the cathedral as a miracle in the full Christian sense of the word. Pussy Riot's words "black cassock, gold epaulettes" drove "to the very heart of Patriarch Kirill", he said. During their imprisonment, Yakunin composed a verse cycle in Pussy Riot's honor, The Pussiniad. He too did time in prisons and labor camps in the Soviet period. In 1993, five years after his amnesty, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him for exposing its infiltration by the KGB. Yakunin had unmasked Kirill as a high-ranking agent codenamed Mikhailov.

"Passion, honesty and naivety are superior to hypocrisy, mendacity and false modesty that disguises crime," Tolokonnikova said in court. These are words for a dissident to live by. Yakunin considers Tolokonnikova a person graced with "exceptional gifts". He believes that once they have established their new human rights group, Justice Zone, she and Alyokhina will found a political party-a "genuine Christian democratic party" -that will drive out Putin and trans- form Russia. That really would be a miracle.

Trong cuốn sách thật tuyệt “Những từ sẽ làm bể xi măng: Niềm đam mê của Pussy Riot”, Masha Gessen tìm ra đủ “dấu ấn” - thuổng của Sến khi viết về thơ Vàng Anh - thiên tài trong “punk prayer, chính nó – và tác giả gọi, "một nghệ phẩm lớn… một phép lạ”. Nhà ly khai thầy tu Gleb Yakunin coi cuộc trình diễn ở nhà thờ là một phép lạ với đầy đủ cảm quan, ý nghĩa Ky Tô của từ này.

Đam mê, chân thực, và ngây thơ tất nhiên hơn hẳn đạo đức giả, xảo trá, và khiêm tốn dởm, vốn được sử dụng để che giấu tội ác. Đó là những từ mà những người ly khai sống với chúng.