Reactor

Dear Mr Todorovic,

I’m writing to send my most sincere thanks to you for your work. As a Canadian born Serb who deals with her own struggles within these two contexts, it was deeply gratifying to find your writing represents so eloquently Serbian experience abroad during the NATO bombing of 1999.

I don’t mean to take your time up with a long introduction, but I feel compelled to share a bit of my story by way of explanation of context. At the time of the bombing, I was a television producer. I worked very hard for the production of a documentary on the Serbian experience in the diaspora during the strike. My timing was off for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the concurrent production of “Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War.” My project was set aside, but my questions regarding media representation were not. The fact that I worked for an Aboriginal production company and would go on to do two documentaries on retention of cultural voice within this community did little to quell my politics. When I discovered that it was getting more difficult rather than less to bring attention to Balkan questions as they related to Canada, I went back to school. The great irony of this is that Lloyd Axworthy is the current president of the university that I am attending and where I am currently doing the work detailed below.

I am about to complete a second B.A. in International Development and am beginning my Masters in the Fall. The work I will be doing focuses on Serbian art in the diaspora. The broader context of the work, however, is intended to challenge the current development paradigm which is limited primarily to anthropological, economic, and political inquiry. My argument is that development as an endeavor is responsible for the inclusion of discourse analysis of the art of a culture as a means of learning the landscape of the people before engaging them in the development process (here conceived as participatory, people-centered development – not the development of the IMF and World Bank). As an academic, it is difficult for me to leave this statement as unadorned and brief as it is, but will only say, if you would like clarification on this point, let me know. Otherwise I won’t bore you with the details.

The key reason for writing you was to let you know that your work does not stop with your readers. I use your work liberally within my writing and it is being read and absorbed into the discourse of development within our program as a result. The ICJ ruling last week has only strengthened my work in the eyes of the program, and I am about to begin a paper analyzing your work as it reflects on the multi-cultural paradoxes of being a Serb in Canada, a Serb in the Balkans, and a Serb in the world. The work I’m currently engaged with will look at Serbian art writ large as it comments on representation of Serbs in the 90’s and the history of the Balkans as a whole. Artists who are central to this examination are, of course, Abramovic and Pavic, but I will also be looking at lesser known artists portrait artist Bojan Otasevic (Kragujevac). Your work, however, continues to serve as the anchor for my understanding of their works.

This, in the end, is why I felt compelled to write you. While one might argue that the undergraduate essays of a student from Winnipeg may mean little in the big scheme of things, the ripples are in effect, and your work has had an impact that extends far beyond your initial readership base or the work I myself am doing. It has already engaged students and professors alike with interests as diverse as India, South Africa and the Middle East. So, as a woman proud of her heritage, and proud of the works of the people from whom her father comes, I just wanted to write and say thank you, and congratulate you on your recent Writers Trust Award win. It is the first of many, I am sure.

Kind regards,
Milana

Writing the other day about Martin Amis’s future appointment as the professor of creative writing in Manchester, The Guardian used phrase ‘Britain’s greatest living author’, which prompted some readers to react. I presume that many of his colleagues reacted as well, but kept it private. His work had been dissected in the recent years, and I cannot help but think that this has to do with the public perception of the person, not the true quality of the writer.

Of course, who is the greatest is a silly question. It belongs more to the sphere of Top 10, something that works primarily for recording industry, not so much for the artists. It is a promotional trick, but the one that can be dangerous if applied to arts. As an avid consumer of all things artistic, I believe that the beauty lies in many different views on the same object, and crowning one artist at the expense of others can narrow that view. These are fast times, and I’ve heard more than once people craving for a definitive guide of what they should read, listen, see. In small cultures such guides often exist: if one particular magazine gains prominence, its readers will be lead to believe that its arts section is the guide. But pay attention to the ’small’ part – such guides tend to make the artistic community a family thing, a closely knit circle of a few recognized artists in any given area, which is the shortest cut to keeping that particular culture small for indefinite time.

Someone’s greatness cannot be judged easily. What makes an author great? His/her themes, approach, readiness for polemics, courage, singularity of vision, bravado with language, an ear for present times, or something else? I would say: all that, and something else, something that we often cannot describe. But, even without being able to catch that particular thing, we do know if someone’s great: we need that person’s work. Simple as that. We keep coming back for more. I must have read Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita some fourteen times, and I believe I will read it many more times in the future. When I am moving, that book is among the first things I pack – and I move a lot. Do I think that Bulgakov is great? I don’t know. All I do know is that I need his work. After several readings, that book made its own world that resides in my head and comes back to life every time I start reading the first page again. That world is comforting and disturbing at the same time, but it evokes passion in me, and that passion creates a need. Once we start sharing a particular world with an author, and once we start carrying that world inside us, we just know that he or she is great.

The Guardian article

Mikhail Bulgakov on Wikipedia

The other thinkers on this page are probably equally interesting, but I wanted to share the Hauser’s note with you. In general, pay attention to this site.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

It is not a question of choice: everyone reads what they have to.

Reading about the arrest of the alleged Russian spy Paul Hampel (operating from Montreal), I have found in one of the articles a note that among other activities he used to produce his ‘legend’ was taking pictures and publishing them. Further research on some Belgrade media sites uncovered the name of the book - “My Beautiful Balkans” - and this site to which you can find the link below.

I visited his site and found a set of nice pictures (a very good training, indeed - I wonder if someone would one day be able to collect and publish the best spy photos through the ages). But it’s not so much their quality that prompted me to write something here, as the atmosphere in them and the themes that he was interested in.

Hampel, in his brief notes (I hope, for the sake of his career, that he was more detailed in his official writings), talks mostly of the beauty of Balkans, the place he apparently fell in love with, but majority of his images show, between the shapes, the author’s craving for normality. In Belgrade, he takes photos of young couples kissing, a small girl on the street (with somewhat Russian features), an old woman walking in the snowstorm, a dog lying in the dry leaves (this photo he named ‘Old Age’). I can see longing for family in these. I can see his concern for the future - what do old spies do when they retire? Are they thrown with dry leaves to the garbage of history? Church towers from many angles. Lots of snow scenes without people in his pictures - solitude, reminiscence, peace. In his Moraca Note, from Montenegro, he claims he felt ‘uplifted’ standing by the old monastery. This prompted me to think he, perhaps, was just another ‘Slavic soul’, and in love with all things Orthodox, but he has equally telling pictures from Albania, for example.

At this point in time I don’t know if he was a spy or no. There are not many details published from the court proceedings anyway, and they probably will never be made public. I certainly hope that, if he’s been a real spy, his actions did not cause someone’s suffering or death. But from the artistic point of view, I would buy him a beer if we met. Surely, many of his images are made to look nice next to a meter of red books and two meters of blue ones on the shelf made to measure in a nouveau rich house, but the feelings in them are another story.

My Beautiful Balkans [note: the site has been removed!]