The History Department and the University of Alabama Libraries will be sponsoring a lecture and exhibit on the 1989 and the fall of the iron curtain.
The exhibit will feature items related to the fall of the iron curtain from the private collections of UA History faculty Dr. Margaret Peacock and Dr. David Michelson as well as items loaned by Dr. Paul Michelson, Huntington University, and by Romanian-American residents of Tuscaloosa.
There will be a public lecture in conjunction with the exhibit:
“The Fall of the Iron Curtain: Reflections on the Romanian 1989”
Lecture by Paul E. Michelson, Huntington University
Monday, October 19, 4:30 PM
Gorgas 205
Dr. Paul E. Michelson, Distinguished Professor of History at Huntington University, was a Senior Fulbright Research Professor in Romania in 1989-1990 when the Romanian Communist regime was overthrown. He is President of the Society for Romanian Studies and author or co-author of four books on Romanian history, including ROMANIAN POLITICS, 1859-1871: FROM PRINCE CUZA TO PRINCE CAROL (1998), which was selected by CHOICE MAGAZINE as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1998 and was awarded the 2000 Balcescu Prize for History by the Romanian Academy. He was also a Fulbright fellow in Romania in 1971-1973 and 1982-1983, and was the Academic Program chair for the 2007 Fifth International Congress on Romanian Studies in Constanta, Romania.
You can download the lovely flyer right here. Or you can view it below. Let it never be said that I don't favor choice.
The last time I spoke to Bobita, this past June, was pleasant. He agreed to answer questions for an interview to be published on this website. Things were going well. He preferred not to be called "Bobita" anymore-- Virgil wore better. He seemed at the top of his world.
The last time I saw Bobita, I was at the bottom of mine. And he was still Bobita.
I was in Europe, savoring the days lived from a backpack. After spending a summer in Krakow, my cousin whisked me back to Romania on a long, beautiful, broken train ride. Once in Bucuresti, there was little to stop me from exploring the dark alleyways and haunted crannies of Romanian life. It was the early 2000s; every moment milked for its vitality and generosity.
My cousin and a few of his friends threw an all-night party at a Bucharest apartment-- a party which mixed poetry, wine, tuica, Aristotle, Cioran, and Marilyn Manson (the latter would not have been Bobita's choice for music). Among the ten of us laughing and arguing was included the gentle presence of Bobita. When he spoke to you, there was nothing else more ravishing than the sounds coming from your mouth. As in his poems, Bobita's words came slowly and softly, yet so powerfully one couldn't help but marvel. I remember being impressed by his talent, his interest, and the scent of angels than seemed to surround him.
Speaking to my aunt in Bucuresti yesterday, our Skye connection fuzzed by storms, she told me that "Busnadms" (covered by storm fuzz) had taken his own life. I knew before she repeated it that she was talking about Bobita. There were no more angels in the room, the light wove its own texture.
Constantin Vigril Banescu was 27 years old when he took his own life. Or rather, he took what was left of his life after the medications treating his alleged schizophrenia made peace with the difference. In those 27 years, Bobita emerged as an exceptional talent, winning the coveted Prize of the Bucharest Young Writers Association and the international Hubert Borda Prize for Young Poets. He had a 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. And when he read his poems aloud, every single word was a song. But in the last few months of his life, Virgil seemed to lose his voice.
My worst disease is the fact that I am still alive.
So read the note found by his mother in the room with empty pill bottles and a body empty of Bobita. Family and friends knew he was depressed, but everyone hoped the medicines would work. In a blog conversation early this summer, Bobita told Mugur that he couldn't sleep and he "didn't see a sense to life anymore", though he admitted that he would like to "escape to a hospital where he could read and write". Even as Bobita's taste for life diminished, his desire to put his words on paper did not.
Mugur Grosu suggests this may have been Bobita's last poem. My translation, of course, has that heartless aftertaste that translations tend to spread like a virus, but I wanted to share it. Somehow. To convey the place he left as he saw it-- heavy, tiresome, and thick with dread.
sufletul meu se odihneşteMy soul is resting
văd un copac înalt strălucitorI see a tall, sparkling tree
înfăşurat în toate culorileWrapped in a rainbow of colors
apoi o fântână micăThen a small fountain
din care se ridicăFrom which there rises
odată cu fiecare trecere puternică a vântului With every powerful passing of the wind
un bulgăraş de apăA tiny lump of water
cerul s-a desfăcutThe sky has opened
dintr-odată mai e atît de puţinSuddenly there is so little
până mă voi treziBefore my waking
şi iarăşi voi ieşi de sub pleoapeAnd again I will emerge from underneath eyelids
ca să mă îndur pe mineOnly to endure myself
printre măştile realuAmong the masks of the real.
Before I finally got around to sending those interview questions, Bobita (or Virgil) finally renounced his masks. May his soul find the sleep he sought. His touch will be missed.
A link tribute to Bobita plus a video in which he reads in May 2009 at the Writer's Union meeting:
Zgaiba died Wednesday at 17:26 – his head smashed in. A car travelling at speed killed him in the middle of the street. The sound of the blow kept ringing in Vivi's brain. The driver never stopped. He must have heard a thud under the body of the car, there under the right front wheel. He floored the accelerator, and remoteness swallowed him. Vivi lost track of the car at the end of the street. Tsak tsak tsak: He went on shooting the images reflexively. That was the thing. Horrified. Zgaiba. Images on the sidewalk. The dog didn't drop right away. He was hurled a metre along the curb. He didn't bark. He didn't yelp. He didn't let out a sound. Time stood still. It took Vivi a moment to come back to his senses. Zgaiba: images on the pavement – his eyes fogged over; his big eyes, stunned. In a state of shock. His tail lowered, his ears pricked. Vivi went on looking at the dog's coffee-coloured spine there among the iron spears of the fence. Tsak, tsak, tsak. Zgaiba had started heading back to the gate that had let him out earlier. He had crossed the street. He had nearly slipped into the courtyard. He gazed into the familiar place without understanding what hit him. From dying to collapse, the whole scene lasted an instant. Right before Vivi's eyes.
Vivi had been taking a cigarette break. Between smokes, he went on snapping pictures of Zgaiba, who he'd spotted down in the street. His favourite character. He had hundreds of clichéd snaps of the dog. Vivi himself was up in the attic at the time. He was looking at the cold weather, the cornices across the street. He'd been developing yesterday's pix for an hour. Failures, without éclat, flops, dumb mistakes: he had spoiled ten rolls of film.
For something by way of plot and resolution, follow the end of Stelian Tanase's story here.
"Unusual Imports" by Paul E. Richardson from the brilliant Russian Life (PDF).
An excerpt from Diane P. Koenker's article, "Whose Right to Rest? Contesting the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union", Comparative Studies in Society and History, April 2009.
Speak of the devils, Romaniuc reports that the Strigoi (i.e. vampires) are "getting out of their graves" and harassing the humans in Mogoseni-Dambovita.
The medal to the right, officially known as the "Fitter Family Medal" awarded by the American Eugenics Society, reads I have a goodly heritage. These medals were regularly awarded in the early and mid 1900s at various social events and family fairs, especially in the midwestern states. Is it smug on my part to prefer my good heritage-- my decent, quaint, non-eugenic heritage-- to the possibility of a "goodly" one?
The Romanian dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s was both less well-known and markedly different from its counterparts in Czechoslovakia and Poland.Mihail Neamtu, a Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar, discussed the case of Romanian intellectual Andrei Plesu who chose to exercise dissent by immersing himself in classical languages and culture, and by withholding the benefits of his intellect from the state.
Upon his graduation in 1971 from the University of Bucharest with a degree in art history, Plesu was confronted with a crackdown on intellectual freedom in the form of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s “July Theses” banning ‘cosmopolitanism’ as well as capitalist artistic models.
To cope with this increasingly constrained intellectual environment, Neamtu explained, Plesu surrounded himself with like-minded mentors and friends and immersed himself in the study of classical philosophy, as well as renaissance art.
Plesu’s growing expertise in these fields earned him the opportunity to study in West Germany from 1975-1977 and again from 1983-1984. Here he learned German and became acquainted with international politics as they were viewed outside Romania. As his prestige rose abroad, he faced constant pressure at home and was repeatedly demoted.
Following his return from Germany, Plesu began to focus on the “moral condition of Romanian intellectuals.” His 1988 monograph Minima Moralia hypothesized that Romanian intellectuals had shirked their moral responsibility to oppose Ceausescu’s regime by focusing on the natural sciences and thereby contributing to the communist leader’s efforts to “modernize” Romania.
In 1988, Romanian poet Mircea Dinescu took a public stance (in Moscow) in support of Gorbachev’s reforms and criticized Ceausescu’s cult of personality and lack of respect for human rights at home. As the secret police and the state mobilized to silence Dinescu, (unsuccessfully) Plesu and several other intellectuals signed a letter decrying the abusive treatment of their peer. This dissident act earned him exile in a Moldovan village until the December 1989 ouster of Ceausescu.
Starting in 1990, Plesu combined his carreer as a professor of philosophy in Bucharest with public service, first as minister of culture in the first post-89 government led by Petre Roman, and then as Foreign Minister from 1997-1999..
Plesu’s pre-1989 life prepared him for his unique dissident role after 1989, Mircea Munteanu argued. An important voice for the intellectual and political modernization of Romania after the Revolution, Plesu actively participated in government and public life while other former dissidents, disenchanted with the resurgence of reformist communists in post-Ceausescu Romania, chose not to engage in public service.
And that's just the "Summary" of this intriguing event at the Wilson Center...
The wall in my head, that wall I've never quite been able to surmount with the assistance of economic or political theory, the wall made crooked by tinkering, the wall which crumbles best in poems... and now, a book admits the way we manage to misunderstand the wall. For there is the wall of the exiles, the wall of the witness, the wall of the believer, the wall of the monarch, the wall in all the hues with which we adorn it.
The Wall In My Head, published by Words Without Borders to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the something-like-a-fall for the Berlin Wall, is an anthology featuring fiction, essays, images, and original documents from writers and authors who witnessed the fall and made their own personal claims on the ruins.
The Wall in My Head provides a unique view into the change, optimism, and confusion that came with 1989 and examines how each of these has weathered the twenty years since that fateful year.
Highlights within include seminal excerpts from the work of Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin and new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple, and a host of others.
Read an excerpt here. Or buy the book and read whatever you want whenever you want.
How long have we been so utterly alone together? We’ve been speaking the same shifting language for twenty centuries, yet it’s as if we’ve always needed translation: trading traditions with others yet foreigners to ourselves. I’ll take you home, feed you to my land. We’ll meet there in the earth and talk—my Daco-Roman words for hospitality and hostile army are nearly the same. You can be my brother in the mountains, the two of us the only anti-Soviet partisans in the bloodthirsty gorges, putting out moons in our comrades’ eyes, naming once more each moss, each dense trail. You’ll grow up in the new Byzantine empire, the wooden heartfelt prayer of day and night—just like me, a solitary fir on a barren rock-sharp wall, the kind the shepherds around here talk and sing to before felling when someone young and single dies.
The poem caught my eye on Guernica.... The author, Chris Tanasescu, is a Romanian poet, academic, critic, and translator. His poetry-performance/action painting rock band Margento won the 2008 Romanian Gold Disc. His third poetry collection, Hermaia, was published in June by Vinea Press.
A new film, Tales From the Golden Age, promises a wry look backwards at Romanian communism in the 1980's. The film's title, somewhat lost in translation, is a pun-laden reference to the "Gilded Age", or the Belle Epoque. American critics haven't exactly taken to the film so far, but it takes a Titanic sometimes to get American critics going. For those who don't need a Titanic, here's the trailer:
