#Sebastian Radu

[psikonauti]

Radu Oreian (Romanian,b.1984)

Study of a Saint, After St Sebastian, 2022

Oil, impasto on canvas

[mioritic]

If they mean Romania, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Călinescu is in translation through NYRB.

Thank you! I've never read Matei Călinescu's own work, just some of his translations of others'.

Assuming that person meant Romania (where I live, granted, but I'm not Romanian), list incoming, off the top of my head:

Some Romanian authors I like and who have been translated:

Max Blecher is wholly unpopular in Romania, and died at 28, so did not write a lot... but he is my favourite Romanian author (or maybe just author in general). He was from Botoșani, a Jewish writer who suffered from spinal tuberculosis, which his writing mostly reflects. Despite being seemingly-unknown here he is one of the few Romanian interwar authors that been translated into English. His Întâmplări din irealitatea imediată is excellent and has been translated multiple times — it is available on the Internet Archive as Adventures in Immediate Unreality (trans. Jeanie Han). Inimi cicatrizate is also great, a novelized account of his time in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and is available in English as Scarred Hearts. There is also a film by Radu Jude based mainly on this book (with other writings), although it is a bit abstracted from the text and has a subplot about the rise of Legionarism etc. The Czech press Twisted Spoon has been working to translate Blecher's other writings to English and print them in very beautiful editions, with The Illuminated Burrow released last year and Transparent Body forthcoming. Overall: very sickly writings, very physical, often revolting, maybe akin to Bruno Schulz... I like Blecher a lot.

Paul Celan probably counts, as he was from Cernăuți, but he is not very popular in Romania and mostly wrote in German. I don't know too much about translations of Celan but Poems of Paul Celan (trans. Michael Hamburger) seems like a good place to start for a bilingual edition, and there's Breathturn into Timestead (trans. Pierre Joris) for his later poetry. Celan's Romanian language poems have also been translated (with facing Romanian text) as Romanian Poems.

Benjamin Fondane / Fundoianu I have not yet read much of, but his writings are available in English: NYRB published some of his essays as Existential Monday, and an anthology of poems as Cinepoems and Others.

Mihail Sebastian has been translated several times. I find his novels a bit wandering and aimless — which may be because he was very good at losing his manuscripts — but his journals are a must-read (I read them twice a year and always find something new). For novels, Women (Femei) is available through Penguin or Other Press; For Two Thousand Years (De două mii de ani) is available through Penguin; and Aurora Metro published a translation of The Town with Acacia Trees (Orașul cu salcîmi) a couple of years ago.

Some of those old fascist poets like Lucian Blaga, Octavian Goga, etc. are available in translation. As is national poet Mihai Eminescu. They are all perfectly readable. I like Eminescu's poem "Copii eram noi amândoi..." — in fact, many of these poets you can probably understand even through Google Translate. I scanned/uploaded a nice Eminescu volume illustrated by Jules Perahim here.

Authors that I like that have *not* been translated (or poorly translated):

Ionel Teodoreanu, who writes a lot of frilly things about children in Moldova growing up and being very elegant and charming and entering relationships with older men and dying ("toate cărțile lui sunt despre minori care fac sex"). I liked Lorelei, and I'm worming my way through La Medeleni. The latter has actually been translated into English but not only is it hard to find, it's nearly unreadable, and the person who initially released the translation was charged with all sorts of heinous sex crimes in Romania - great. Teodoreanu is hard to read as a foreigner and likely hard to translate, but I find him charming. His wife, Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu, was also a writer in her own right... I have a couple of her books, but have only read Ursitul (a book about her relationship with Ionel, which I enjoyed reading and was very funny, but also one of the most violently lustful things I have ever read.)

I liked Marin Preda's autobiographical Viața ca o pradă, which I have been chipping away at translating myself. He is one of the few post-WWII writers I have read.

Throwing out some other standard names, on the off-chance they might have been translated: Camil Petrescu, Cezar Petrescu, Gala Galaction, Tristan Tzara, Ion Creangă, I.L. Caragiale, Panaït Istrati, Geo Bogza, Tudor Arghezi, Mihail Sadoveanu, Cella Serghi... and so forth.

Authors that I read and didn't personally like, or have not read at all, but are available in translation:

Norman Manea was too "post-communist irony and grumbling" for me, but his Captives was recommended very strongly to me several years ago, and most of his work is available in English. Mircea Cărtărescu and Herta Müller are probably in this same category, and their books are everywhere (in English too) but I've never read either.

Mircea Eliade, better known for his writings on religion, but also a novelist. I read Youth Without Youth and other novellas (translated by the above-mentioned Matei Călinescu) a few years ago. I'm not sure if his other work has been translated into English (La țigănci - "With the Gypsy Girls", Maitreyi/La nuit Bengali - "Bengal Nights", Romanul adolescentului miop - "Novel of a myopic adolescent", Domnișoara Christina - "Miss Christina", Huliganii - "The Hooligans", are all probably popular enough to have been translated....?)

Emil Cioran is widely-read and widely-translated, if you like aphorisms about suicide.

Liviu Rebreanu has occasionally been translated, but I still have never read him in any language... unfortunately. Gabi Reigh recently translated Cuileandra, and it was published through Cadmus Press. His Ion is standard reading, but I'm not sure if it exists in English (...?!)

Eugène Ionesco is another standard name but admittedly I haven't read anything of his since ninth grade.

There are probably several I'm forgetting that I like to read... but maybe this is a starting point?

(I don't really know why the only Romanian writers who get translated are interwar Jewish authors that almost nobody cares about in this country, or post-communist writers.)

[filmografie]

Favorite films watched in June & July 2022:

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), dir. Terence Davies

Great Freedom (2021), dir. Sebastian Meise

Întregalde (2021), dir. Radu Muntean

'night, Mother (1986), dir. Tom Moore

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995), dir. Maria Maggenti

Museum Hours (2012), dir. Dem Cohen

Mississippi Masala (1991), dir. Mira Nair

Under the Volcano (1984), dir. John Huston

[jcmarchi]

Google at EMNLP 2023

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/google-at-emnlp-2023/

Google at EMNLP 2023

Google is proud to be a Diamond Sponsor of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023), a premier annual conference, which is being held this week in Sentosa, Singapore. Google has a strong presence at this year’s conference with over 65 accepted papers and active involvement in 11 workshops and tutorials. Google is also happy to be a Major Sponsor for the Widening NLP workshop (WiNLP), which aims to highlight global representations of people, perspectives, and cultures in AI and ML. We look forward to sharing some of our extensive NLP research and expanding our partnership with the broader research community.

We hope you’ll visit the Google booth to chat with researchers who are actively pursuing the latest innovations in NLP, and check out some of the scheduled booth activities (e.g., demos and Q&A sessions listed below). Visit the @GoogleAI X (Twitter) and LinkedIn accounts to find out more about the Google booth activities at EMNLP 2023.

Take a look below to learn more about the Google research being presented at EMNLP 2023 (Google affiliations in bold).

This schedule is subject to change. Please visit the Google booth for more information.

Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs Jiefeng Chen*, Jinsung Yoon, Sayna Ebrahimi, Sercan O Arik, Tomas Pfister, Somesh Jha

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies Alon Jacovi*, Avi Caciularu, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Bernd Bohnet, Mor Geva

1-PAGER: One Pass Answer Generation and Evidence Retrieval Palak Jain, Livio Baldini Soares, Tom Kwiatkowski

MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering Soravit Changpinyo, Linting Xue, Michal Yarom, Ashish V. Thapliyal, Idan Szpektor, Julien Amelot, Xi Chen, Radu Soricut

SDOH-NLI: A Dataset for Inferring Social Determinants of Health from Clinical Notes Adam D. Lelkes, Eric Loreaux*, Tal Schuster, Ming-Jun Chen, Alvin Rajkomar

Machine Reading Comprehension Using Case-based Reasoning Dung Ngoc Thai, Dhruv Agarwal, Mudit Chaudhary, Wenlong Zhao, Rajarshi Das, Jay-Yoon Lee, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Manzil Zaheer, Andrew McCallum

Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Abdou Aziz DIOP, Claytone Sikasote, Gilles HACHEME, Happy Buzaaba, Ignatius Ezeani, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Albert Kahira, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Akintunde Oladipo, Abraham Toluwase Owodunni, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Akari Asai, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Ayodele Awokoya, Bernard Opoku, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Christine Mwase, Clemencia Siro, Stephen Arthur, Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Boyd Sinkala, Daniel Ajisafe, Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Mofya Phiri, Orevaoghene Ahia, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Sonia Adhiambo

On Uncertainty Calibration and Selective Generation in Probabilistic Neural Summarization: A Benchmark Study Polina Zablotskaia, Du Phan, Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Jie Ren, Jeremiah Zhe Liu

Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation Markus Freitag, Behrooz Ghorbani*, Patrick Fernandes*

Sources of Hallucination by Large Language Models on Inference Tasks Nick McKenna, Tianyi Li, Liang Cheng, Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Mark Johnson, Mark Steedman

Don’t Add, Don’t Miss: Effective Content Preserving Generation from Pre-selected Text Spans Aviv Slobodkin, Avi Caciularu, Eran Hirsch, Ido Dagan

What Makes Chain-of-Thought Prompting Effective? A Counterfactual Study Aman Madaan*, Katherine Hermann, Amir Yazdanbakhsh

Understanding HTML with Large Language Models Izzeddin Gur, Ofir Nachum, Yingjie Miao, Mustafa Safdari, Austin Huang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Noah Fiedel, Aleksandra Faust

Improving the Robustness of Summarization Models by Detecting and Removing Input Noise Kundan Krishna*, Yao Zhao, Jie Ren, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jiaming Luo, Mohammad Saleh, Peter J. Liu

In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors Roee Hendel, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

Pre-training Without Attention Junxiong Wang, Jing Nathan Yan, Albert Gu, Alexander M Rush

MUX-PLMs: Data Multiplexing for High-Throughput Language Models Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Carlos E Jimenez, Izhak Shafran, Mingqiu Wang, Yuan Cao, Karthik R Narasimhan

PaRaDe: Passage Ranking Using Demonstrations with LLMs Andrew Drozdov*, Honglei Zhuang, Zhuyun Dai, Zhen Qin, Razieh Rahimi, Xuanhui Wang, Dana Alon, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum, Donald Metzler*, Kai Hui

Long-Form Speech Translation Through Segmentation with Finite-State Decoding Constraints on Large Language Models Arya D. McCarthy, Hao Zhang, Shankar Kumar, Felix Stahlberg, Ke Wu

Unsupervised Opinion Summarization Using Approximate Geodesics Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury*, Nicholas Monath, Kumar Avinava Dubey, Amr Ahmed, Snigdha Chaturvedi

SQLPrompt: In-Context Text-to-SQL with Minimal Labeled Data Ruoxi Sun, Sercan O. Arik, Rajarishi Sinha, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Pengcheng Yin, Tomas Pfister

Retrieval-Augmented Parsing for Complex Graphs by Exploiting Structure and Uncertainty Zi Lin, Quan Yuan, Panupong Pasupat, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jingbo Shang

A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection Tao Li, Gang Li, Zhiwei Deng, Bryan Wang*, Yang Li

Pragmatics in Language Grounding: Phenomena, Tasks, and Modeling Approaches Daniel Fried, Nicholas Tomlin, Jennifer Hu, Roma Patel, Aida Nematzadeh

Improving Classifier Robustness Through Active Generation of Pairwise Counterfactuals Ananth Balashankar, Xuezhi Wang, Yao Qin, Ben Packer, Nithum Thain, Jilin Chen, Ed H. Chi, Alex Beutel

mmT5: Modular Multilingual Pre-training Solves Source Language Hallucinations Jonas Pfeiffer, Francesco Piccinno, Massimo Nicosia, Xinyi Wang, Machel Reid, Sebastian Ruder

Scaling Laws vs Model Architectures: How Does Inductive Bias Influence Scaling? Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Hyung Won Chung, William Fedus, Jinfeng Rao, Sharan Narang, Vinh Q. Tran, Dani Yogatama, Donald Metzler

TaTA: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages Sebastian Gehrmann, Sebastian Ruder, Vitaly Nikolaev, Jan A. Botha, Michael Chavinda, Ankur P Parikh, Clara E. Rivera

XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages Sebastian Ruder, Jonathan H. Clark, Alexander Gutkin, Mihir Kale, Min Ma, Massimo Nicosia, Shruti Rijhwani, Parker Riley, Jean Michel Amath Sarr, Xinyi Wang, John Frederick Wieting, Nitish Gupta, Anna Katanova, Christo Kirov, Dana L Dickinson, Brian Roark, Bidisha Samanta, Connie Tao, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Vera Axelrod, Isaac Rayburn Caswell, Colin Cherry, Dan Garrette, Reeve Ingle, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Panteleev, Partha Talukdar

q2d: Turning Questions into Dialogs to Teach Models How to Search Yonatan Bitton, Shlomi Cohen-Ganor, Ido Hakimi, Yoad Lewenberg, Roee Aharoni, Enav Weinreb

Emergence of Abstract State Representations in Embodied Sequence Modeling Tian Yun*, Zilai Zeng, Kunal Handa, Ashish V Thapliyal, Bo Pang, Ellie Pavlick, Chen Sun

Evaluating and Modeling Attribution for Cross-Lingual Question Answering Benjamin Muller*, John Wieting, Jonathan H. Clark, Tom Kwiatkowski, Sebastian Ruder, Livio Baldini Soares, Roee Aharoni, Jonathan Herzig, Xinyi Wang

Weakly-Supervised Learning of Visual Relations in Multimodal Pre-training Emanuele Bugliarello, Aida Nematzadeh, Lisa Anne Hendricks

How Do Languages Influence Each Other? Studying Cross-Lingual Data Sharing During LM Fine-Tuning Rochelle Choenni, Dan Garrette, Ekaterina Shutova

CompoundPiece: Evaluating and Improving Decompounding Performance of Language Models Benjamin Minixhofer, Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulić

IC3: Image Captioning by Committee Consensus David Chan, Austin Myers, Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan, David A Ross, John Canny

The Curious Case of Hallucinatory (Un)answerability: Finding Truths in the Hidden States of Over-Confident Large Language Models Aviv Slobodkin, Omer Goldman, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Shauli Ravfogel

Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma

Ties Matter: Meta-Evaluating Modern Metrics with Pairwise Accuracy and Tie Calibration Daniel Deutsch, George Foster, Markus Freitag

Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute Yi Tay*, Jason Wei*, Hyung Won Chung*, Vinh Q. Tran, David R. So*, Siamak Shakeri, Xavier Garcia, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Jinfeng Rao, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, Slav Petrov, Neil Houlsby, Quoc V. Le, Mostafa Dehghani

Data Similarity is Not Enough to Explain Language Model Performance Gregory Yauney*, Emily Reif, David Mimno

Self-Influence Guided Data Reweighting for Language Model Pre-training Megh Thakkar*, Tolga Bolukbasi, Sriram Ganapathy, Shikhar Vashishth, Sarath Chandar, Partha Talukdar

ReTAG: Reasoning Aware Table to Analytic Text Generation Deepanway Ghosal, Preksha Nema, Aravindan Raghuveer

GATITOS: Using a New Multilingual Lexicon for Low-Resource Machine Translation Alex Jones*, Isaac Caswell, Ishank Saxena

Video-Helpful Multimodal Machine Translation Yihang Li, Shuichiro Shimizu, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi, Wei Li

Symbol Tuning Improves In-Context Learning in Language Models Jerry Wei*, Le Hou, Andrew Kyle Lampinen, Xiangning Chen*, Da Huang, Yi Tay*, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma*, Quoc V Le

“Don’t Take This Out of Context!” On the Need for Contextual Models and Evaluations for Stylistic Rewriting Akhila Yerukola, Xuhui Zhou, Elizabeth Clark, Maarten Sap

QAmeleon: Multilingual QA with Only 5 Examples Priyanka Agrawal, Chris Alberti, Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Ji Ma, Sebastian Ruder, Kuzman Ganchev, Dipanjan Das, Mirella Lapata

Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision Eugene Kharitonov, Damien Vincent, Zalán Borsos, Raphaël Marinier, Sertan Girgin, Olivier Pietquin, Matt Sharifi, Marco Tagliasacchi, Neil Zeghidour

AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System Jeffrey Zhao, Yuan Cao, Raghav Gupta, Harrison Lee, Abhinav Rastogi, Mingqiu Wang, Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, Yonghui Wu

Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions Jeremy R. Cole, Michael JQ Zhang, Daniel Gillick, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Bhuwan Dhingra, Jacob Eisenstein

PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs (see blog post) Rahul Goel, Waleed Ammar, Aditya Gupta, Siddharth Vashishtha, Motoki Sano, Faiz Surani*, Max Chang, HyunJeong Choe, David Greene, Chuan He, Rattima Nitisaroj, Anna Trukhina, Shachi Paul, Pararth Shah, Rushin Shah, Zhou Yu

LM vs LM: Detecting Factual Errors via Cross Examination Roi Cohen, May Hamri, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

A Suite of Generative Tasks for Multi-Level Multimodal Webpage Understanding Andrea Burns*, Krishna Srinivasan, Joshua Ainslie, Geoff Brown, Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, Jianmo Ni, Mandy Guo

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Seid Muhie Yimam, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Meriem Beloucif, Saif M. Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Alipio Jorge, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Davis David, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu-Bello, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Wendimu Baye Messelle, Hailu Beshada Balcha, Sisay Adugna Chala, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Stephen Arthur

Optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Reader Models via Token Elimination Moshe Berchansky, Peter Izsak, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Moshe Wasserblat

SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation Elizabeth Clark, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Gehrmann, Joshua Maynez, Roee Aharoni, Vitaly Nikolaev, Thibault Sellam, Aditya Siddhant, Dipanjan Das, Ankur P Parikh

GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong*, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebron, Sumit Sanghai

CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontanon, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai

Improving Diversity of Demographic Representation in Large Language Models via Collective-Critiques and Self-Voting Preethi Lahoti, Nicholas Blumm, Xiao Ma, Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, Sahitya Potluri, Qijun Tan, Hansa Srinivasan, Ben Packer, Ahmad Beirami, Alex Beutel, Jilin Chen

Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (see blog post) Xingchen Wan*, Ruoxi Sun, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Sercan O. Arik, Tomas Pfister

TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models Zorik Gekhman, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Chen Elkind, Idan Szpektor

Hierarchical Pre-training on Multimodal Electronic Health Records Xiaochen Wang, Junyu Luo, Jiaqi Wang, Ziyi Yin, Suhan Cui, Yuan Zhong, Yaqing Wang, Fenglong Ma

NAIL: Lexical Retrieval Indices with Efficient Non-Autoregressive Decoders Livio Baldini Soares, Daniel Gillick, Jeremy R. Cole, Tom Kwiatkowski

How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages? Ronak Pradeep*, Kai Hui, Jai Gupta, Adam D. Lelkes, Honglei Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler, Vinh Q. Tran

Make Every Example Count: On the Stability and Utility of Self-Influence for Learning from Noisy NLP Datasets Irina Bejan*, Artem Sokolov, Katja Filippova

[artthatremindsmeofhannibalnbc]

Radu Voinea, Carioca Studio, Still from Death by Diamonds and Pearls, 2014 Video still

[rosereview]

Top 7 Favourite Fictional Siblings

Out of all the books and series I’ve read, I’ve always loved to read about siblings and their relationships. Being an older sister myself, I always thought it was fun to see the relationships of different characters and how family plays a big role in many books and stories. This post will also probably contain minor (or major) spoilers so be warned. Here is a list of my favourite siblings and their relationships with one another. 

7. Vivienne, Jude, Taryn, and Oak Duarte

From the Cruel Prince, or Folk of Air series, by Holly Black, this is the main character and her siblings, both biological and adopted. Jude is the main character while Taryn is her twin sister, Vivienne is her older half sister, and Oak is their younger step brother (which you later find out is actually adopted and you see why in the books). First off, I love Jude and that’s mainly why she and her siblings are on this list. I also love Jude’s relationship with her foster father, definitely more than with her siblings, but that’s for another list. So at the start and end of the series, Jude is really close with all of her siblings, but during the whole middle when I like Jude the most, her siblings anger and annoy me. As an older sister, Vivienne does not do much to protect her younger siblings especially when they need it most, also mostly looking out for herself and failing to even try and understand the situations they go through to stay alive in Faerie. That always made me resent her a little bit because both Jude and Taryn could have used a lot of advice on how to survive in Faerie from their part Fae sister, but all Vivienne focuses on is getting out of Faerie and leaving them behind. Of course she makes up for it at the end and isn’t as bad as Jude’s next sister, Taryn. Now I’ve read every book Holly Black wrote related to the Cruel Prince, even the short story from Taryn’s point of view, but I still dislike her very much. She backstabs her twin sister with Locke and later, when she sees how much of an asshole Locke is, she runs back to Jude asking for her help because she’s scared of him. And Jude actually helps her! Ugh! Taryn is just so stupid and needy and so unfair to her sister who does everything for her. Even when she redeems herself at the end, I still hate Taryn and the way she treats her sister, so that’s the main reason these siblings are so low on my list. The last one is Oak who is the baby of the family, and sometimes it bugs me that he doesn’t help Jude out as well, but I can also understand his side and he’s just too young to grasp what’s going on. I agree with all the characters that Oak needed to be protected at all costs because he’s precious, but he makes Jude’s life hard at points, which upsets me. 

6. Nesta, Elain, and Feyre Archeron

From the ACOTAR series by Sarah J Maas. I love this series and I love Feyre, so this one might sound very familiar to my feelings on Jude and her siblings too. At first, you hate Feyre’s sisters, and so do most of the other characters too, but they do get a sort of redemption arc which satisfies you at the end. But I gotta say the feelings of dislike were strong at the start of the series. It all starts off with Feyre, her OLDER sisters, and their father being very poor because of some bad deals he made and lost all their money. Because of this, they are struggling to survive, and Feyre (the YOUNGEST SISTER) does all the work to keep them alive. That frickin bugs me how Feyre does everything for her father and sisters when she’s the youngest, the baby, of the family. She has TWO older sisters who just sit on their asses and do absolutely nothing to help their own family (both waiting for their father to take control because he made the mess in the first place but he’s frickin depressed and injured!) Anyways, Feyre’s sister’s do help her out in the end, but I can’t help but still get really mad when thinking back to the very beginning of the story. Nesta was too upset with their father to do anything, and honestly I don’t even know what Elain’s problem was. She was just the good sister, who was too pretty and proper and nice to do any work whatsoever. Again, I now like them as characters, even though Nesta sometimes still makes me mad, but I also can’t wait for her new story to come out next year! (Sarah J Maas did say she was almost done writing it and that it was super personal to her, so for that reason I can’t wait). Also though, I think I am due for a reread of all her books because there are some details that I forget and I would love to be in her world again. Anyways, I can’t wait to read more from the Archeron sisters in future books and negative feelings toward the characters usually disappear when I read the latest books, so that’s good. 

5. Helen, Mark, Julian, Tiberius, Livia, Drusilla, and Octavian Blackthorn

From the Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare, this family was my favourite family to read about, although, like the previous two sibling groups, I have a lot of positive and negative feelings about how all the siblings treated each other and so on. Like Jude and Feyre, Julian is my favourite Blackthorn sibling, and my feelings towards the other ones are based on the way they treat Julian. Now I do understand how the whole novels and series show all the hardships that the Blackthorns go through, which is why some characters act the way they do, but it still makes me frustrated. To start off, I do love each sibling individually and I thought Cassandra Clare did a good job in giving each character their own distinct personalities, but in relation to Julian, they made me upset, specifically Ty, Livvy and Dru. Tavvy is honestly too young for me to get mad at and that’s probably the only reason why he doesn’t annoy me too. Firstly, Ty, Livvy and Dru all look up to Julian, which I understand, but they totally depend on Julian, and when something doesn’t go the way they want it to, they honestly kinda blame him. This was evident when Mark first came back to the family (I also love Mark), and he came from years of living with the Fae and doesn’t even remember how to function in regular society. But the kids still expected him to be the new big brother even when he can’t function and literally get mad when Mark doesn’t fill in Julian’s role. During this time, they just dismiss everything Julian has ever done for them and say that Mark can take care of them from now on! Like… WHAT? How could you expect that from Mark and how could you take that away from Julian? Furthermore, when Helen comes back and tries to repair ties with her family and truly take over for Julian because she feels like she should have done that since the beginning, FRICKING DRU IS A BITCH TO HER! Honestly I do not really like Dru. Cassandra Clare got her preteen attitude spot on which especially makes Dru a bitch because she’s young and learning. I remember those years, but that doesn’t make me like Dru. The whole time she’s whining and complaining that no one treats her like an adult but at the same time gets mad when Helen doesn’t make her pancakes for breakfast. IF YOU WANT PANCAKES, MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN PANCAKES! That’s when I started to love Aline though, Helen’s wife, because she stood up for Helen and then Dru started to like her big sister again. Lastly it annoyed me how much the kids depended on him. Like Tavvy I understand because he’s a baby, but the rest of them… UGH! They all demand his attention 24/7 and Julian has his own life to live! Like Julian watches horror movies with Dru, and picks bugs with Ty, and does spy shit with Livvy… like give the man a break. You watch your own horror movies Dru! You don’t need Julian to watch with you and then get mad at him for not fully paying attention! Honestly most of my problems stem from Dru, but the rest of them are just as annoying, including Emma, but we won’t get into that here. Last thing I want to mention (which is a major spoiler!) is that Livvy was the only decent one and then she died. She literally died just after talking to Julian about how much he does for them and how she wanted to help more so he could live his life. I got mad to say the least. 

4. Lada and Radu Dragwlya

From And I Darken series by Kiersten White. These two are definitely different from the other siblings I’ve talked about, and that’s mostly because I don’t dislike them as much. It’s kind of weird, but Lada and Radu had a worse relationship from the beginning but I loved them as siblings more than other siblings. I was actually rooting for them from the beginning, wanting them to finally get close and show their love and understanding, and by the end they were practically there. They honestly always had lives separate from each other, especially in the later books, but the whole time Lada always wanted to care for her brother and have him by her side, even if he didn’t want the exact same thing. Although I do believe that Radu loved his sister, but he had to take his own journey through self-discovery and learn to love who he was and realize he deserved more than Mehmed. Honestly both Lada and Radu deserved better than Mehmed. Anyways, I think that the two of them had a strong bond that couldn’t be broken no matter everything that happened in the books and the way they both started, disliking each other. 

3. Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred, George, Ron, and Ginny Weasley

You can’t have a list of favourite siblings and not include the Weasley siblings. You just can’t. If you don’t know, this family is from the Harry Potter series and they are the best. All of the siblings are super close and love each other and they are a beautiful family to read about. Even Percy, who can be an asshole, is still part of the family and in the end, shows his love for his siblings. Fred and George are my favourite by far, and they are such good older brothers to Ron and Ginny, and when we finally meet Bill and Charlie too, they are such sweethearts. There’s not many specific things I have to say about the Weasley’s, except that I love them.

2. Alec, Isabelle, Jace, and Max Lightwood

From The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, these guys are like the OG Cassandra Clare siblings. They’ve been with us from the start and have gone through so much as a family and characters, that I feel like I really know them and feel for them. Technically Jace is not a Lightwood by birth, but I still consider him a part of the family. I loved watching them all grow together and one of the saddest parts in the whole series was when (SPOILER) Max Lightwood died in the third book. He was just such an innocent boy that tied the family together, and honestly when he died, the family kind of fell apart (mostly the parents). For the name Max to live on with Alec and Magnus’s son is just wonderful and he’s definitely my favourite character. Watching Alec, Jace and Isabelle together as siblings, with their banter and sass, makes me happy and brings me in a good mood. You can just tell how close they are from the way they fight together and laugh together and are in sync with each other. I will forever love the Lightwood family and the ones who I met first. 

1. Jonathan and Clarissa Morgenstern

Also from the Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare. Most people will be surprised that this is my top but I never said that this list was made up of the healthy types of siblings. I honestly love Jonathan and Clary as siblings because they are the whole reason for the series and I think that both characters have so much depth to them because they are siblings. (SPOILER) But one of my favourite scenes from the whole series, and actually of all the Shadowhunter books, is when Clary is in the demon realm and is shown a vision of what she most desires in her life. And it shows Jonathan being a normal older brother that loves her and wants to protect her (which he sort of wants to do anyways) and how life could have been if Valentine hadn’t been a psychopath and infused Jonathan with demon blood. Even at the end when he dies and is laying there with his normal green eyes, Clary and her mom mourns him. They mourn the boy he could have been and I thought that was really powerful. Even with Jonathan as a demon crazy person, he still only wants love in the world and someone who would understand him. He thinks that biologically, Clary has to feel that towards him so he fixates on her, which is bad, but you can see what he wanted. You can kind of see his side, which I always thought made a good bad guy. Although Jonathan was still bad in every way because he was literally a demon inside, but I always loved reading about his character. 

Thanks for reading my rants and until next time!

~Rose Reviews

[badmovieihave]

Bad Movie I have Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave 2005

[jurnaldeoltenia]

Clubul Sportiv WU LONG Craiova a participat la Cupa Tellur. Tudor Sebastian a obtinut locul 1 la categoria de varsta 6-7 ani.

Clubul Sportiv WU LONG Craiova a participat la Cupa Tellur. Tudor Sebastian a obtinut locul 1 la categoria de varsta 6-7 ani.

Cupa Tellur DFS BUCUREȘTI a fost organizată de clubul Scorpions și de Cătălin Moroșanu , fiind cea mai puternică competiție la care am fost prezenți ,cu peste 700 de sportivi ce au participat de la cluburi din țară și Republica Moldova. Clubul Sportiv WU LONG Craiova a fost prezenta si nu doar atat . A avut si cateva victorii importante . Tudor Sebastian a obtinut locul 1 la categoria de varsta…

[daikenkki]

US Open 2024 - Men’s Singles Draw:

Jannik Sinner (1) (ITA) vs Mackenzie McDonald (USA)

Eliot Spizzirri (Q) (USA) vs Alex Michelsen (USA)

Mattia Bellucci (Q) (ITA) vs Stan Wawrinka (WC) (SUI)

Christopher O'Connell (AUS) vs Nicolas Jarry (26) (CHI)

Arthur Fils (24) (FRA) vs Learner Tien (WC) (USA)

Jaume Munar (ESP) vs Gabriel Diallo (Q) (CAN)

Max Purcell (AUS) vs Aleksandar Vukic (AUS)

Lorenzo Sonego (ITA) vs Tommy Paul (14) (USA)

Stefanos Tsitsipas (11) (GRE) vs Thanasi Kokkinakis (AUS)

Nuno Borges (POR) vs Federico Coria (ARG)

Tristan Schoolkate (WC) (AUS) vs Taro Daniel (JPN)

Jakub Mensik (CZE) vs Felix Auger-Aliassime (19) (CAN)

Flavio Cobolli (31) (ITA) vs James Duckworth (AUS)

Zizou Bergs (BEL) vs Pavel Kotov

Fabian Marozsan (HUN) vs Hamad Medjedovic (Q) (SRB)

Dusan Lajovic (SRB) vs Daniil Medvedev (5)

Carlos Alcaraz (3) (ESP) vs Li Tu (Q) (AUS)

Denis Shapovalov (PR) (CAN) vs Botic Van de Zandschulp (NED)

Facundo Diaz Acosta (ARG) vs Hugo Gaston (FRA)

Zhizhen Zhang (CHN) vs Jack Draper (25) (GBR)

Alejandro Tabilo (22) (CHI) vs David Goffin (BEL)

Borna Coric (CRO) vs Adrian Mannarino (FRA)

Fabio Fognini (ITA) vs Tomas Machac (CZE)

Corentin Moutet (FRA) vs Sebastian Korda (16) (USA)

Alex De Minaur (10) (AUS) vs Marcos Giron (USA)

Otto Virtanen (Q) (FIN) vs Quentin Halys (Q) (FRA)

Mariano Navone (ARG) vs Daniel Altmaier (GER)

Daniel Evans (GBR) vs Karen Khachanov (23)

Matteo Arnaldi (30) (ITA) vs Zachary Svajda (WC) (USA)

Matthew Forbes (WC) (USA) vs Roman Safiullin

Constant Lestienne (FRA) vs Jordan Thompson (AUS)

Timofey Skatov (Q) (KAZ) vs Hubert Hurkacz (7) (POL)

Casper Ruud (8) (NOR) vs Yunchaokete Bu (Q) (CHN)

Gael Monfils (FRA) vs Diego Schwartzman (Q) (ARG)

Jan Choinski (Q) (GBR) vs Roberto Carballes Baena (ESP)

Juncheng Shang (CHN) vs Alexander Bublik (27) (KAZ)

Ugo Humbert (17) (FRA) vs Thiago Monteiro (BRA)

Dominic Stricker (PR) (SUI) vs Francisco Comesana (ARG)

Albert Ramos-Vinolas (ESP) vs Matteo Berrettini (ITA)

Camilo Ugo Carabelli (ARG) vs Taylor Fritz (12) (USA)

Holger Rune (15) (DEN) vs Brandon Nakashima (USA)

Arthur Cazaux (FRA) vs Pablo Carreno Busta (PR) (ESP)

Yoshihito Nishioka (JPN) vs Miomir Kecmanovic (SRB)

Reilly Opelka (PR) (USA) vs Lorenzo Musetti (18) (ITA)

Francisco Cerundolo (29) (ARG) vs Sebastian Ofner (AUT)

Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard (FRA) vs Tomas Martin Etcheverry (ARG)

Alexandre Muller (WC) (FRA) vs Adam Walton (AUS)

Emil Ruusuvuori (FIN) vs Alexander Zverev (4) (GER)

Andrey Rublev (6) vs Thiago Seyboth Wild (BRA)

Christopher Eubanks (WC) (USA) vs Arthur Rinderknech (FRA)

Hugo Grenier (Q) (FRA) vs Mitchell Krueger (Q) (USA)

Marton Fucsovics (HUN) vs Jiri Lehecka (32) (CZE)

Sebastian Baez (21) (ARG) vs Luciano Darderi (ITA)

Sumit Nagal (IND) vs Tallon Griekspoor (NED)

Rinky Hijikata (AUS) vs Alejandro Davidovich Fokina (ESP)

Kyrian Jacquet (Q) (FRA) vs Grigor Dimitrov (9) (BUL)

Ben Shelton (13) (USA) vs Dominic Thiem (WC) (AUT)

Luca Nardi (ITA) vs Roberto Bautista Agut (ESP)

Alexander Shevchenko (KAZ) vs Dominik Koepfer (GER)

Aleksandar Kovacevic (USA) vs Frances Tiafoe (20) (USA)

Alexei Popyrin (28) (AUS) vs Soonwoo Kwon (PR) (KOR)

Pedro Martinez (ESP) vs Maks Kasnikowski (Q) (POL)

Laslo Djere (SRB) vs Jan-Lennard Struff (GER)

Radu Albot (Q) (MDA) vs Novak Djokovic (2) (SRB)

[rudyroth79]

Știri: Teatrul Național „Radu Stanca” din Sibiu redeschide spațiile de joc indoor   Spectacolele programate în aer liber se mută în interior. Programul actualizat Teatrul Național „Radu Stanca” Sibiu redeschide spațiile de joc indoor, miercuri, 9 septembrie 2020, cu o prim…

[yanderepuck]

@spoopy-fish-writes

I talked about Nicoleta being in the mansion BUT WHAT ABOUT RADU

Sebastian is like "okay. He's from the 21st century, there's a good chance he knows English no matter where he is from"

And bc Radu was knocked unconscious, Sebastian had the curtains closed so the sun wouldn't wake him up

So they have Arthur go talk to him when he wakes up, and funny enough, bitch really only knows German. So Arthur is talking to him and Radu is just spitting out gibberish in German.

So Arthur walks out and is like "I don't know what's he's saying. But he sounds like Wolfie"

MEANING THEY HAVE RO MAKE MOZART TRANSLATE FOR THEM. Only bitch is from Prussia so...probs not the same German.

Sebastian: what's he saying?

Mozart: that Arthur has a stupid accent.

He starts to get hungry, but doesn't know what to do about it, so just goes hungry for a day and a half. Until Comte is finally like "so we're all vampires"

And Radu is like "OH THANK GOD"

Comte has never looked so concerned

OKAY. BUT FUNNY ENOUGH THE KING OF PRUSSIA AT THE TIME MET MOZART AND COMMISSIONED HIM TO WRITE SOMETHING. SO IN MY LITTLE WORLD I COULD EASY MAKE THAT RADU AND IM KACKLING.

Radu: I know you

Mozart: *doesn't know that Radu knows anything, ex. Vampires and time period* I assure you that you dont.

Radu: no. I'm pretty sure I know you from somewhere.

Mozart: look I have to go-

Radu: what's your name?

Mozart: .. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Radu: OHMYGOD WE MET

Mozart: w h a t

Radu: 1789!

Mozart: I was-

Radu: IM THE KING OF PRUSSIA! I HAD YOU WRITE SOMETHING FOR ME

Mozart: *life is flashing before his eyes*

Mozart: wait- how are you-

Radu: oh I'm a vampire too. But I was born one.

Theo coming over like "wtf is up with all the yelling" and Mozart just looks up at Theo, still p shocked at what he just heard "he's a vampire....and a king"

Mozart had enough for one day and goes to bed.

Radu is like "damn. There goes the only person I can really talk to" so he goes to find Sebastian or Comte and Theo is standing there like wtf did I just hear.

~

Radu: I'm happy to hear that Mozart is still making music. Being able to hear him play again is wonderful

Sebastian: again?

Radu: yeah! He came to Prussia in 1789 and I asked him to write me a few pieces

Sebastian: Herr Mozart wrote you something? How?

Radu: I mean. I was the king so I kinda asked, gave him some money and he did it

Sebastian: *pulls out his notebook and a pencil* continue

~

Comte in his office trying to connect the dots bc he knows Vlad at a brother named Radu, rather and just asking Radu is last name or if he has siblings.

[kuro-morale-events]

A super old Headcanon I used to have for Sebastian, actually linked up with another anime I adore "Hellsing".

I headcannon that Sebastian was actually Vlad Tepes' brother, who was known as Radu the Beautiful.

They were both given to the Turks as children, to keep peace between the countries. Radu stayed when Vlad left to take his father's place, and became a soldier in the Turk army when his brother declared war against them.

But upon hearing his brother was on the verge of loosing his life, Radu made a sacrifice he'd one day regret. He summoned a dark force, a demon, and pleaded with it to give his brother the power to overcome his enemies. And in return he promised the Demon anything he could possibly give.

The Demon took him, as his new demon child.

And Vlad was transformed in to a raging beast, a blood thirsty vampire, the first of its kind. The vampire Alucard (... Dracula).

(The fun fact - that lead to me this one... The Turks wore heeled shoes when riding their horses, to keep their feet in the stirrups.

Seb was wearing his when he was turned. Hence why Seb's true form has heels...)

Oooh that's super cool!

Also I really like the idea of cowboy Seb.

Great HC! And thanks for the submission!

-gabedemon

[iulia-enkelana]

Clipește / She blinks / Lëviz / Sie blinkt

written and directed by Iulia Enkelana * cinematography: Ioan Alexandru Sîrbu * assistant cinematographer: Daria Gizdavu * editor: Patricia Sas * sound: Daniel Patrick Cohen * music: Horia Constantinescu * assistant producer: Dragoș Bucătaru * cast Ileana Benec, Ioana Belu, Eduard Crucianu. Andrei Pleșa, Cristina Bordeanu, Steve Teers, Paul Sebastian Popa, Sara Pongrac, Dragoș Bucătaru, Dan Chiorean, Alesia Gabriela Cioruța, Radu Trică

watch the short film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TMDMeLvCDM&ab_channel=IuliaEnkelana

(English, Albanian & German subtitles available)

[thefudge]

Do you have any Romanian (language or just content-wise) media recs? Particularly novels and poetry but really any must-sees/must-reads are welcome!

uuuu! 

my brain is too fried right now to do any kind of exhaustive list so i’m gonna rec a few things that i know you could get your hands on/available in translation:

for two thousand years, by mihail sebastian - really heartbreaking yet also lucid, adventurous and darkly humorous memoir of a Jewish writer in his youth at the height of nazism in romania (there’s even a Penguin classic of it)

diary of a short-sighted adolescent by mircea eliade - a funny and bittersweet bildungsroman about a bookish teenager who wants to read everything now and be the cleverest person alive while also struggling with being super lazy and unmotivated because he’s young and restless, it’s very #relatable. but it’s also fascinating to read this in opposition with “for two thousand years” because eliade entertained legionnaire nazi sympathies at one point. (also, you should check out his novellas too, especially the fantastic ones)

anything you can find in translation by gabriela adamesteanu - just lovely, delicate prose about growing up, being an adult, inhabiting your body and your feelings in an oppressive world 

the hatchet by mihail sadoveanu (apparently, there is a translation) - a lot of people give this novel flak, mostly because we had to read it in high school, but it’s a great and deceptively simple little novel that says a lot more about people than it cares to admit. the action takes you through several villages in the East-Carpathians, where a peasant woman goes in search of her missing husband. it’s a fascinating mixture of crime and folklore and mythology. 

any novella by costache negruzzi, but especially “alexandru lapusneanu”, another classic we had to read in school and which gets a lot of flak. it’s so bonkers and #quality-trash. let’s just say there’s a scene where the power-hungry voievod/prince lapusneanu enacts a red-wedding situation and builds a pyramid of freshly severed heads to impress his lady wife *swoon* 

the forest of the hanged by liviu rebreanu - i know people argue this isn’t his best novel, but it’s got the most heart. it’s the story of a soldier/philosopher in WW1 who falls in love with people again. that’s it. he falls in love with people, and the war and everything in between doesn’t matter anymore. or it matters only as it pertains to people, and people alone. 

gallants of the old court by mateiu caragiale - a bizarre gem of early 20th century Romanian nightlife, a wonderful, orgiastic fugue, feverish and infuriating. it’s mostly about rich men and social-climbers getting into existential trouble, but also into real trouble. normally, because the action takes place right before WW1, this would signify the end of an era. but we don’t really have a beginning or end. we are part-balkan, part-french imitators, part-whatever-sticks. nothing moves us, and everything does. and that’s why it’s a sort of love/hate letter to romanians 

in terms of poetry, some personal faves:  nichita stanescu, ana blandiana, monica pillat, marin sorescu,  a.e. baconsky, lucian blaga, emil brumaru, nora iuga, marta petreu, nina cassian. and yes, mihai eminescu, our national poet, though i’m often in two minds about him.  

poetry in translation is really hit and miss because of the “untranslatable”, so here’s two lines from a poem by nina cassian, because i want to show you what i mean:

            De când m-ai părăsit mă fac tot mai frumoasă             ca hoitul luminând în întuneric. 

this roughly and poetically translates to:

          Since you left me I’ve grown more beautiful

           like the corpse lighting the dark 

and this is sort of lovely on its own, but you’d need to know and hear and taste the word “hoit” in romanian to really feel the abjectness, because “hoit” is a smelly, ugly yet also alluring, already decomposing version of “cadavru” aka cadaver/corpse. also “ mă fac tot mai frumoasă” cannot be accurately summed up in “i’ve grown more beautiful”. a literal translation would be “I make myself more beautiful”. in romanian, this is obviously idiomatic and not literal. and yet, these strange self-reflexive valences make these lines strong and eerie, as if the speaker were authoring her beauty, shaping it out of clay and darkness and “hoit”,  like a butterfly cracking the corpse’s shell to get out, but also retaining some of its mesmerizing stench. why did i pause to do a close-reading of romanian poetry??? anyway, you catch my drift

in terms of movies, a recent one i really loved was sierranevada by cristi puiu, which is a neurotic family drama that drains you but also lifts you up 

and yeah, the hype is real, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days by cristi mungiu really is that good (about two young women trying to get an illegal abortion in communist romania. it won the palme d’or for very legit reasons. it breaks you in small ways. the very last shot of the film you’ll carry with you forever). i also liked graduation by cristi mungiu, where a young overachieving girl is about to graduate high school and go on to study abroad, until a terrible event unmoors both her and her family. the movie turns almost hallucinatory at one point, filled with ambiguity and a kind of sleep-walking quality 

tales from the golden age by cristi mungiu (him again!) is also fantastic for anyone who wants to get a taste of communist romania and the sad-funny absurdities of everyday life. this movie is split in 2 parts and the format is that of an anthology, almost like watching several short films at once. and there is one film in the anthology that always turns me inside out, and it’s really silly, it’s this bonnie and clyde type story about this girl and boy who meet at a party and devise an ingenious get-rich scam and just run around a few neighborhoods trying to put it into practice and it’s...the sweetest, most incomplete thing. there is such a strange, lovely connection there that never gets realized, and there is a MOMENT between them where he helps her step down from this ledge and he holds her briefly to him and i remember being in the cinema and thinking THIS, this is THE MOMENT where i felt these people were real. it was such an honest, lovely moment. like the equivalent of this song. ANYWAY, why am i rambling so much??? this ask was supposed to be SHORT. 

aferim! by radu jude is also a really neat movie and provides a look into the historical romanian/rroma relationship and why it’s so messed up, yet also so organic

the death of mr. lazarescu by cristi puiu is also a great little film about a man who gets sick and goes to the hospital. and...dies, as you can tell from the title. on the surface, he dies because of institutional ineptness and a broken healthcare system. at a deeper level, he dies because we no longer know how to help people. various hospital staff in the film do try to help him and fail for various stupid or quietly heartbreaking reasons. it’s a movie about being physically unable to care. there’s indifference, sure, but also this great exhaustion of the human spirit. but the movie is also darkly funny. might not be a great pandemic watch, but then again it might be exactly what you need 

there are soooo many other classics in terms of books (morometii by marin preda, for instance, about a patriarch in a small village in the South who slowly realizes the world he used to live in doesn’t have room for him anymore, and maybe it never had) but i’m gonna end on a quote from ion creanga, one of the most cryptic classics of romanian lit:

“Şi eu eram vesel ca vremea cea mai bună şi şturlubatic şi copilăros ca vântul în tulburea sa”

my translation: “and I was cheerful like the best weather and frolicsome and childish like the wind in its cloudiness” 

and again, the words in romanian and their particular sound and bite (”şturlubatic”, “tulburea”) immediately take me elsewhere. creanga writes about childhood, but it’s never really childhood. he writes as an adult who, in my opinion, was never really a child, but a weird, small god of the land. i mean the word “tulburea” can mean both “turmoil” and “muddiness”. the wind can be anguished, but also just a little cloudy, just a little hazy, shrinking its agony, howling it in the child. it’s eerie and gorgeous. so, that’s what he does: creanga writes about children as if they were wind-like spirits. he writes stories about devils and the peasants who trick them and school books filled with spit and flies, and warm eggs stolen from nests and fairy-tales of a world that is buried somewhere inside us, but not too deep, things hidden under our clothes or nails or even in our hair. and it’s all so physical and convoluted, just like his prose. and i don’t think anyone will ever make sense of him and that’s what makes him so discombobulatingly great.

anyway, this was supposed to be...like, really short! and not gassy! i’m sorry. i love waxing about all this gay stuff. i’m so gay about it. 

realistically tho, the nearest thing you’ll find in your local bookshop is probably books by famous ‘theater of the absurd’ playwright, eugen ionesco, or novels in translation by contemporary author mircea cartarescu. both are pretty good, so go for it! (if you want to start small, i’d recommend REM by mircea cartarescu, because it’s so trippy and meta and captures that summer holiday eeriness so well. it goes well with this romanian song sung in english)

okay byeeeee