As the great French literary critic Roland Barthes sort of wrote: The author performs a function, the writer, an activity. The author is more like a priest; the writer, more like a clerk.
Make, Fair Readers, of that lazy paraphrase from the great Frog Semiotician’s essay, “Authors and Writers”, what you will, even as the question of its relevance to the subject matter below hovers thinly and perplexedly in the ethers of your minds…
So, they went ahead and FIRED from The Kyiv Commix the writer who went by the sobriquet The Rational Man.
This transpired after just one Union Joker repeatedly raised a hue and cry for the said Rational Man’s head.
Now, as you may already know, a Union Joker’s job around here is simply to write Story Notices alerting Our Illustrious Readers to new reports the KC outfit, for which I have a grudging admiration and sympathy, painstakingly publishes to the Kyiv Unedited website; well, very much as this report, which you are reading now, has been published to that site (which is why you’re reading it), whether said outfit likes it or not.
But that, being as it may, as well as beside the point, I will from herein strive to cleave to and from the matter at hand; namely, to explain to you why this very report has gone up on the site, followed by the report itself – albeit, a reconstruction by me of what could have been, had The Rational Man been given the chance to finish his maiden work as a contributor to the Commix [see 4.8. KYIV COMMIX as well as 4.39. KYIV COMMIX].
It now behooves me to inform you that The Rational Man was none other than Steve Kowalski. Wanting to gain experience – as a writer, of course. Working it as a second job, supplementing his meager income from The Curmudgeon.
Well, I like Steve Kowalski and believe he was given a bad rap.
There is a bitter irony in all of this, in that Steve should have been fired for merely landing on the very rock upon which The Kyiv Commix was/were founded – namely, going after self-proclaimed “writers” (among a few other things, naturally) – which I personally find to be not only cruel and outrageous (I mean the firing, not the going after), but fundamentally unjust.
Therefore, In Memoriam:
I am The Rational Man.
WANTED, BOSS LARD:
A prolific (not in any good sense) Kyiv-based expat self-publisher, both in fiction and non-fiction, who reached the peak of his pontificating powers in Kyiv upon his fortuitous ascension, in the early teens of the new century, to the position of CEO at Ukraine’s only leading English-language newspaper (at that time), the proudly self-described second-rate weekly tabloid, the Kyiv Poster – asked onboard by the paper’s new pumpkin-headed Southeast Asian publisher, Moe Zaire, who knew nothing about the business – while heading up his own Boss Lard Group public relations firm. By this were the following crimes by said Lard both instigated and increased:
- This stroke of unsolicited good fortune gave Lard unlimited access to unfettered self-promotion on the Kyiv Poster’s raggedy opinion pages, which he regularly composted with hundreds of thousands of words addressed to his own ego; that is, when he wasn’t using the space to pursue the derivative activity of claiming to be a “writer”;
- Already witheringly and darkly brandishing unrivaled foreign-sourced cachet from the wuthering vantage of his eponymously named bloviating relations firm with the small raft of trembling and subservient vanity presses dotting the capital Kyiv, this statement not being a compliment, but rather, witness borne to Lard’s having harmonized his objectives with cross-sectionally dimensional emanations of dreadful powers;
- with the sinecure of Kyiv Poster CEO that Poster Publisher Moe Zaire (a real dummy in the news publishing business) handed him on a silver platter;
- Lard, it has been severally reported by reputable but unnamed informants, often laughed a good belly laugh under his vibrating suspenders every time he dispatched to the paper’s impotent, no-choice-in-the-matter, and quickly-exiting-late-middle-age chief editor, Brent Boner (seated in the newsroom a number of floors below Lard, lustfully eyeing captive journo ingenues he’d hired for their “teachability”), yet another endless piece all about himself and his books;
- the pathetic self-publication of which he was loath to admit, even when aggressively pressed on the question by the angered and indignant aspiring-writer attendees of his “Writing” Seminars, when it would finally dawn on them that they’d been duped into believing they were paying $1,000 each to listen to a seasoned and officially, traditionally published writer – yeah, right;
- The le coup de grace presque l’arc de triomphe, the self-publishing trick of all tricks, which Lard cooked up, that cleverly, cunningly, came the closest to making innocent outsiders, particularly bibliophile Ukrainians visiting bookstores in Kyiv, believe he was an author of some repute, whose books had previously been brought to market in their original English for mass consumption by legit traditional presses and publishers, rather than pushed out to suckers via sneaky and pathetic self-publishing efforts, was his magician’s mirage, facilitated by meticulously planned and well-greased subterfuge together with small-scale corrupt manipulation on the local book market, whereby Lard:
- Wrote a novel in English, which MS he made his talented secretary translate into Ukrainian;
- Got that Ukrainian MS published by one of the local vanity publishers he’d used in the past;
- Which, having paid for a sack-full of copies, he then brought to a single outlet of a bookstore chain operating in Kyiv, where he proceeded to bribe said outlet into stocking the book on its shelves under its “Foreign Authors” category, the obvious intent being to get the book’s potential buyers to think that in their hand they held a Ukrainian translation of a work by an established, if obscure, American writer of fiction;
- Which plot, ploy, and scheme utterly failed, the bookstore’s manager agreeing to sell the fraudulent item out of his store in consideration for the bribe, but only on the bookstore’s non-negotiable condition that the store sell the book under its “Ukrainian Authors” category, take it or leave it;
- An offer which, having gone through all that trouble, and with the threat of easy blackmail by the bookstore now hanging over his head and reputation, a broken and humiliated Lard felt forced to accept;
- Which denouement made a mockery of Lard’s original plan, for one cannot claim original authorship in a language largely incomprehensible to oneself; indeed, a language in which Lard, after all his years in Kyiv, was all but illiterate, thereby exposing him as the fraud he was.
- And furthermore, nobody bought his crappy, piece-of-shit book – because true writer, much less author, he was not.
It was following this blow to the most important part of him, his Ego, that Lard finally left the country, expunging himself, together with every trace of his existence, from Ukraine, performing his greatest trick of all – complete and total vanishment, into “thin air”, as they say, from a place where he’d seemingly and just minutes before taken up so much space – hightailing it, much like the lapdog Welsh Losser had been to him, to retirement in Florida, to where he’d been immediately and servilely followed by the said yes-man, by name Welsh Losser, and where he could lick his wounds, with the cycloptic Welsh Losser’s sycophantic company and obsequious help (and tongue), on a beach under the warm and pitying caresses of the sun (and Welsh Losser), convincing himself (and Welsh Losser) how he’d won. A punishment not equal to the crime (a punishment largely and timely escaped, granted him it be) but, say I, one that is better than none…
For I am: THE RATIONAL MAN…
Next up: Welsh Losser – a name, and criminal, upon which, unfortunately, I will be forced to end, insofar as that’s as far as Steve Kowalski’s notes go.
So, until next frame, this is your humble servant signing off, it being absolutely impossible for me to any longer hang around here. For now…
Filed by Saint Stephan, December 26, 2025 (imagine that…)
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O, gods, gods, GODS!!! Is there no way of stopping this?! Must we keep going through this again and again? This is all just so, SO stupid! So irrelevant and meaningless; so inane, and without value of any sort. What does it prove? What is it meant to show?
Are we truly only to await just one more – the heavens be blessed! – tortuous rap sheet of “crimes” in re Welsh Losser, and then that’s it? Because Saint Stephan will have run out of notes he’s scraped up by the recently fired Steve Kowalski to keep going in this profligate manner? What is it with him? Why does he insist on doing this? Yes, we acknowledge that we are forced to yield to Stephan, hate it though we do, we readily admit. Nevertheless, to waste our time and resources just because you can? We submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, is this not being done to simply humiliate us and, by extension, you, Our Gemlike and Peerless Readers? Yes – we do so believe…
Yet again, we raise our lament! Can anyone stop this? For how do you stop one who has become half-man, half ghost? Or some such freakish, scary thing. Moreover, his concatenation of this writer-criminal claptrap and junk is even worse than the fired Kowalski’s…
O, gods… gods…
Time was, we had such power, we could come down cruelly on anyone we wanted, and get away with it, and they couldn’t do a thing about it, but suffer. Those were the days. Days that are gone. And they were good.
For now – now look at us. What have we turned into; what are we become?
The Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board
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Man, you folks are kooky! Suck it up!
And in any case, you lousy, dumb dopes. Read your own website. Lard was murdered by Andrew Plumb:
see 158. KYIV COMMIX: Posthumous, Filed by Dirk Dickerson, for the Black Hole Dial, New Horizons Issue No. 74, December 13, 2013;
as well as 143. KYIV COMMIX: The Visitor, also Filed by Dirk Dickerson, stringing for Animus Rex Graphic Medias, Unlimited, November 3, 2013, for fun and comparison.
For I am: THE RATIONAL MAN…
Saint Stephan
PS: If you want this to stop, you had better bring back Steve Kowalski… I don’t need his notes to stop with just Welsh Losser. I can keep going… and going…