Letters from New York

And my jumbled thoughts on Mircea Cartarescu's Columbia courses

I have spent the last two years working on a book project related to the Romanian communist dictatorship with my father. When we first started the Tismaneanu & Tiramisu Substack, we aimed to post whatever we’d like on our Substack, from quick thoughts to full pieces and collaborations. With the conclusion of our book project approaching and due for publication next year, I hope to get back to writing more of these types of pieces. I sometimes wonder what to post — I have followed American politics very closely since 2015, which is usually what I write about here — this will be a little different (and longer). Last month, once we submitted our first manuscript for review to our publisher, I made my long-awaited and overdue move from Washington, DC (where I had resided since graduating from Northeastern University in 2018) to New York City. I had far overstayed my welcome in Washington, DC, though my parents would never have told me to leave (in fact, I know they still feel empty-nest syndrome even with my old age). I often say since I am an only child, I have always had a close relationship with my parents, who often took me around the country and globe, introducing me to their friends from many different places. Of course, throughout the years, I have made plenty of friendships on my own (including my current roommate and childhood pal) and was happy to see him and others upon my arrival in the Big Apple. As I would write on Instagram though, it was one of my oldest friends and a class he was teaching at Columbia University that made my first month in New York fly by.

To many reading this, particularly Romanians, the name Mircea Cartarescu needs no introduction. But for some of my American friends, I have tried to explain just how big of a deal this man with a mustache (formerly) is to Romanian culture — and literature and poetry worldwide. While I am still only slightly familiar with this work, having read translated excerpts from many of his acclaimed novels and poems (as I also make my way through Solenoid), I am biased — this is someone I associate with childhood memories both in Washington and Bucharest — all that said, I believe it is only a matter of time before he wins the Nobel Prize in literature (not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, as an author from South Korea won the award last week — nevertheless his international recognition is ever growing so we will see what happens next year). His current writer-in-residence position at Columbia University is also further proof of this. Before departing for New York City, my father had been encouraging me to contact Mircea and ask if I could attend at least one of his classes. While I remembered Mircea well and fondly, it also had been many years since we had last seen each other. The last time I saw his son Gabriel, I was still in high school (I would doubt he even remembers) — now, a decade-plus later, I found out he is in college in Bucharest and I am still trying to navigate the world in my late 20s as a Washingtonian-turned-New Yorker. 

I sent an email to Mircea’s Columbia email address, unsure if he was actually checking it. A few hours later, he responded and arranged for me to get passes to attend his weekly Thursday courses. I was excited to attend, but also nervous. It was my first full week living in New York City, a place I had visited countless times in the past but never had spent more than a couple weeks at a time in. I looked up the price of an Uber from my home in East Village to Columbia’s campus in the Upper West Side and could not believe my eyes. While I was aware Manhattan is a big place and the subway would be more efficient (plus much cheaper), the price and time still managed to completely floor me. Truth be told, the commute was not a worry, it was more so reconnecting with someone who only knew me as a child and wondering if he would even notice that I was there. So, the first Thursday came around, I woke up and left my home rather early to make sure I had time to make mistakes on the subway (only one small one) and to navigate Columbia’s campus. Almost assuredly the fallout from the pro-Palestine protests has made Columbia’s campus security far too heavy-handed and unnecessary, where one needs to show an ID and a visitor pass to even walk past the library. It’s rather sad to see, but that’s also not what this is about. 

As I got some directions from one of the security guards and made my way to the building where Mircea’s course would be held, I realized I had made it there with about 15 minutes to spare. Upon walking up to the classroom, I wondered if he or his wife Ioana, a prolific Romanian author in her own right, would even recognize me — after all, it had been at least a decade since I had seen them. Then again, my father is an avid Facebook poster, so maybe that’s how Ioana immediately recognized me when I walked in. As I was there early, the room was almost empty considering it was still a morning class. After speaking briefly to Ioana, Mircea walked over to us and greeted me, remarking how long it had been since we had seen each other. That said, it was his first class and I did not want to be a distraction in any way so I got myself settled and watched as at least 30 students packed the classroom. Shortly before the lecture started, as I was seated near Ioana, another woman entered and spoke with Ioana in Romanian and sat next to us. Ioana said to her in Romanian that I was the son of Vladimir Tismaneanu and the woman, who I would learn after the lecture was Daciana Branea, told me that she had not seen me since I was a small child. Funny enough, Daciana published a book of essays, Letters from Washington, from my father in 2001 where the cover was a picture of a self-portrait I made as a 5-year-old. 

To my surprise, the first lecture was full of material I was largely familiar with (as I should be, considering I had just finished coauthoring a book related to much of what he discussed). He ran the class through a history of Romanian communism under Ceausescu and what it was like to be trying to be a free-thinker in that society, listing off dates that I also knew, but at times made me question, “I hope we didn’t put the wrong year in the book.” About three-quarters of the way through the class, he moved away from discussing a more general description of Ceausescu’s dictatorship to himself and his peers of the 1980s, “the Blue Jeans Generation.” While this was not a topic I had studied closely, I was somewhat familiar. What I was not truly aware of was how important Nicolae Manolescu was to Mircea and the other young writers trying to stay open in a closed society. I had always known the man as “Nicky” and a friend of my father. Similar to Mircea, I knew Nicky was important in Romania, but as a child, he was just another one of my father’s famous Romanian friends. And in recent years, my father had not talked about him much. Mircea described how Nicky allowed this younger generation of Romanian writers to break away from Romanian literary and poetic traditions. They viewed the old poetry as boring and focused on banal things like the countryside or the highway. The new poems were comedic — people would laugh while reading and dark comedy was encouraged. 

At the end of the lecture, the entire class applauded and Mircea stayed for a while to meet with the students and attendees. I was impressed by two things: 1. the amount of Romanians attending Columbia and 2. even the non-Romanians who were clearly fans of Mircea’s work. After taking some photos and chatting with students, he and Ioana invited Daciana and me to the top floor of their apartment building (owned by Columbia). On the walk there and later on the rooftop, I found myself in a familiar spot to when I was a child — surrounded by Romanians speaking Romanian. When I was younger, I could never truly speak Romanian. When I was a very small child, my Bunica (my father’s mother) lived with us and that was probably the peak of my Romanian speaking ability (the problem was I still had to learn English). As I got older, there were summers that I would spend in Romania, I took language classes, but unlike my father, I have never had a gift for languages… besides English, I guess. That said, I was always able to understand much more than I could speak, constantly being in the presence of Romanian speakers for months at a time over the years. However, in recent years, I had not been exposed to listening to much Romanian — but hearing Mircea, Ioana and Daciana discuss things and then look over to see if I understood or if they should translate for me, again, brought back some old memories and also made me realize I still knew a bit more than I had expected. We stayed at their place for about an hour, and they remarked about how skinny I was and encouraged me to eat more of the pastries they brought out. Remarks like these are something I’ve grown accustomed to throughout my life, plus there are definitely much worse traits to be observed about one’s body. Also having seen pictures of Mircea and my father from when they were my age, I didn’t think I was that much skinnier, something Mircea himself agreed with (still, I can’t grow a killer mustache like the one he had). Going into the first class, I was not sure I was going to be able to attend the second because I was going back to DC for a wedding that weekend (and I was considering going back that day to possibly save money on a train ticket). After the first class though, I was hooked and was committed to attending all four sessions. Daciana and I were among the few of those from outside Columbia who would end up attending the lectures. 

If the first class was a broad understanding of the factors he and his colleagues came up under in communist Romania, the second was an actual examination of the work. Mircea started by reiterating Nicky’s importance to all the young writers at the time and how he would give his thoughts at the end of each literary circle meeting as his word was “valued above all.” Breaking from the previous great Romanian poets, Mircea explained that his generation rejected metaphors. The aim was simple: poetry that used casual language abandoned gravity and adopted irony, humor and sarcasm, these were “the most important political tools of this new generation.” I learned of Mircea’s infatuation with Western rockstars, particularly The Beatles, who helped inspire the name of a volume he published with his collaborators (Traian T. Cosovei, Florin Iaru and Ion Stratan), Air with Diamonds. On the back cover of the book, the four of them are featured on a broken-down locomotive. Mircea pointed out how they are all trying to look like cool rockstars for the photo, each with a different choice for a pose. The question many have, including myself, is how were Mircea and his collaborators, colleagues and friends able to travel down the road of post-modernist literature in an increasingly repressive society under Ceausescu. The only vanity publishing house was “Literara,” as the state-controlled ones would not dare to dabble in the world they were exploring. We went on to read various Romanian poets throughout the second class, with students offering their interpretations. Probably the most compelling for me and the entire class was the work of Mariana Marin, who Mircea described as the “purest poet of our generation,” likening her to Sylvia Plath. While I had not read much of any Romanian poets besides Mircea himself, attending this second course gave me a taste of what was to come during the next two classes.  

So the next week I returned, looking forward to reading more poetry and learning more about the environment in which it was produced. As I commuted from East Village to Columbia, my train rides could range anywhere from 35 minutes to an hour, so I would try to get to the class a bit early to account for that, usually being among the first to arrive. Each time, I was one of the first people there. Each time, Mircea and Ioana would take time to talk to me at the beginning of the class as students would filter in. This week, Mircea asked me how I liked the poetry, noting that I had left very quickly after the second session. I explained this was unrelated to the class as I had met a friend for lunch in midtown and needed to finish up some things before leaving for the wedding. He asked me if I liked poetry and I responded as honestly as I could, “I like hip-hop music.” The truth is, I don’t dislike poetry at all, but like many things in the internet age, I feel as though poetry has almost fallen by the wayside. The only contemporary American poets I can think of write and read poems tailor-made for politicians and not many others. Therefore, I think hip-hop fills this void in many, but obviously not all ways. I, of course, didn’t say all of this to Mircea but my comment about hip-hop elicited him to tell me a story about when he saw slam poetry for the first time at a festival in Rome. Apparently, he had to follow someone who just delivered an epic slam poetry reading, feeling as though there was no way to match the energy and performance — he would go on to share this same story with the class, with many laughs during his retelling.

The third lecture was much more focused on Mircea’s work than the previous two. Yes, he had offered plenty of his own insights and experiences before, but this time he was much more forward with displaying his work, going into how he used layered meanings and unconscious irony. For him, poetry is not so much a piece of literary work but rather a spiritual or “zen” experience, taking inspiration from Nabokov’s view that good poetry resonates physically (“in the spine”) and Arthur C. Clarke’s view of technology as “magic.”  He explained that, for the most part, he did not enjoy the “classics” in poetry, saying, “they thought they could write poems with a recipe … romantic poets were very boring, they used much more words than necessary in their poems.” The class would go on to read and discuss Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” which embodied many of the themes Mircea had discussed. As Mircea posed questions to the students about their interpretations of the poem, I was impressed with their analysis — there were some things they said that I was thinking about, but other things I completely missed. 

For the fourth and final lecture, I arrived early as usual, this time Mircea sat next to me in the mostly empty room and asked, “did your father ever tell you about the first time we met?” I wasn’t sure, which is what I said to him. I always call my father a “walking encyclopedia” but he’s also a walking storybook (occasionally with embellishments), so when Mircea began the story with, “I was in the hospital to remove my tonsils,” I immediately remembered that my father had told me this story a couple of years back, so I was curious how Mircea remembered it. A condensed version goes something like this: both of them were in the hospital and shared a room as teenagers, having never met before. I forget what my father was in there for (possibly the same procedure). They spent hours every day talking, but once they were released, they never saw each other again until many years later in Washington, DC when my father and mother hosted Mircea a few years before I was born. The key piece to this story is that my father had a portable radio that was virtually impossible to get in Romania. Years later, they discussed those moments in the hospital and both remembered the radio. An unbelievably poetic story of two young boys who had no idea who they would become and how their paths would eventually cross again. This had me reflecting on the fourth and final class of Mircea’s before it was even finished. We went on to read and discuss more Western post-modernist poets and the class ended the same as the first one and all the others with everyone applauding. I went into the course with a completely open mind and ready to scribble notes on my iPhone, simply wanting to hear one of my father’s most interesting friends speak. I learned more about Romanian history, post-modernism, and the true meaning of poetry from just these four classes than I could have imagined, inspiring me to write down these jumbled thoughts in this extended blog post. Thanks, Mircea!