Maintenant #11 – Ruxandra Novac
There is some sort of love-hate relationship with the city as I see it in what I write… Bucharest, in fact, is the perfect city to inspire this reaction. It’s a strident, hysterical place and at the same time, very drab, very inert in its hysteria. I tend to see it as a place in which power and control schemes are very tangible, both in a social sense and in a psychological one, and I believe this is essential for one’s (artistic) view. It can also be a key-place for someone with identity problems, feeding paranoia and reclusion, nervousness, exhaustion and all this kind of odd states of mind, but also a place of bovarian schemes, where everyone is trying desperately to be something he / she may not necessary be: socially, artistically etc… It’s a very sad city… I haven’t been living in Bucharest for a few years, so a strange nostalgia also occurs, which enhances this emotional mixture. I continue to see it like this, even more acutely: a place I wanted desperately to leave, but also a psychical place, an electric point in my mind, impossible to erase.
In the eleventh of his Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Romanian poet Ruxandra Novac.
Two Poems (excerpts)
Bucharest opens like a huge syphilitic flower
and I know that nothing, nothing can any longer prevent the disaster
of the rags of my twenty three year old mind
Neither the holiness of Tanger, nor the narcosis, nor the butterflies
groping their way in slaughterhouses, terrifying the workers.
None of all these
Neither the training, nor the small churches, nor the sex of the city
raping the night
nothing
Only the silence of a drowned dog
floating down the river, in the sun…
By Ruxandra Novac.
Chaos Rising
Chaos Walking begins with Todd Hewitt walking a dog that he doesn’t want. He lives in a small town on a planet recently colonised by space-travelling humans. Go back and read from the beginning, if you haven’t done so. There’s something in the planet’s atmosphere that makes thoughts visible. Walking back into town, Todd is engulfed by the maelstrom of Noise: dreams, memories, fantasies, plans, the whisper and babble of id and subconscious all around him in a great formless mess. The typography of it splatters across the page.
Max Dunbar reviews Patrick Ness‘s Monsters of Men.
The Missing Links
An interview with William T. Vollmann. * Is Martin Amis the saviour of modern literature? * Yoko Ono collects rare books. * Trick with a Knife on Darran Anderson‘s Tesla’s Ghost. * Cormac McCarthy doesn’t know the American South. * “Imaginary Cormac” * John Kennedy O’Toole & Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the the unknown unknowns. * The […]
3:AM Reloaded
What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently: Poetry: Poetry: In the tenth of his Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Lithuanian poet Donatas PetroÅ¡ius; ‘Three Poems’ by Donatas PetroÅ¡ius Fiction: ‘Enlightenment’ by Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss Non-fiction: In his Japananerica column for 3:AM Asia, Roland Kelts looks at manga on the iPad; Julian […]