A witness-collaborator in his own life

Eight years after the previous one, it was published a new novel Vladislav Bajc Point blank shot. Due to obligations in "Geopoetica", the publishing house he founded, he says. He started writing this book three years ago, and it has been waiting for him for four decades, one gets the impression while reading it.

Exactly since in 1984, its main character V. went to New York with two other members of the TV crew to record 30 shows for Yugoslav viewers about the culture and media there, to meet Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Harry Belafonte, Miss Vanessa Williams, David Byrne, Leonard Cohen and the like. And there is the "Chelsea" hotel. And the feeling that at that time everything was available and possible.

Point blank shot was published by "Geopoetica".

"WEATHER" Whether Point blank shot a novelized autobiography told in the third person?

VLADISLAV BAJAC: Within the field of literary concepts, this question remains open. According to my understanding of the rules of literature, the answer should be somewhere between truth and falsehood, in the middle of it, with the associated common places: "Every book is autobiographical" or "A writer must never admit that he is a character in his own work." One thing is certain: for the sake of positive mystification, the book cannot do without the author's direct or indirect experience. But there is also that additional beauty of literature in which the reader is offered the possibility to understand everything he (reads) between the covers as - imagination. If the text is convincing, self-reflections and facts cease to be decisive. The same applies to the issue of genre. It is safest and best for the writer to keep the answer silent.

When it comes to the last point Shot at point blank range, the impression that remains is one of optimism, which is the complete opposite of what the title of the book says.

That's right. The book was written with the intention of bringing one of the happier decades of Yugoslav and American reality from memory into the present. Just because covering up this horror of the age we live in meant to me, I hoped that this picture of the world and topographical microcosms could also show the readers how the creativity of individual freedom was possible even as a mass and generational one. It is a utopian time (with the afterthought of an inevitable and unpleasant awakening from it), but it is his post fest seeing it doesn't mean it didn't exist. On the contrary. That was the era when Bill Clinton, who was hated by the Serbs, played the saxophone and believed in something (good).

I wanted to write the book at the price of making it "easy". I thought that the authenticity of the examples from it offered the possibility, especially for younger people, to enter into a realized romantic or at least romanticized period of Belgrade and New York, Yugoslavia and America. In doing so, I risked that the power of what was experienced and undoubtedly happened became more important even than the aesthetic value of the result. Although, frankly speaking, the writer cannot do without the latter and I don't know how he wants to. According to the first reactions of the readers, the most common epithet that reached me is that the text is fun. And even funny. I don't know if writers are ashamed if they find the reading fun (I have the impression that it is), but this time, as the author of not very easy literature, I am very happy about this visible simplicity. In the end, this "lightness of existence" does not exclude literary seriousness. I definitely prefer it to a novel that would be high-quality but boring.

The book indirectly, without pretensions, compares two times - that and this. Therefore, the content and the title (optimism and pessimism) are its essence, as it is also the essence of our lives. However, these extremes run through the entire text as an additional character that linguistically changes forms, meanings, and cover; like a snake or a man changing his material and spiritual wardrobe.

The meanings of this phrase are multiple; from the shot of the starting gun that marks the beginning of a sports or life race, through (un)successful improvisation, military, rocker or pleasant meaning, all the way to symbolic or literal defeat. When going on a trip, the main character wonders if America will be that empty shot.

Somewhere at the beginning of the novel, you say that Belgrade was New York in miniature, and after a few lines you extract the expression "the Yugoslav and American dream". It may be a place where readers who remember that time will have to give in to nostalgia. It should be said that the nostalgia in your book is not sad, which is the most common case, rather, it is realistic and justified. That is why it is more devastating.

I avoided nostalgia, which was no easy task. To find a shade that celebrates the creative successes or personalities of the time and to reach that high threshold of creativity, and to be aware that everything is in the writing and somewhat elevated above objectivity, was also a pleasure and not just the expected pain. Zoran Paunović, the editor of the book, was equally romantically inclined to this thesis ("the last decade in which we could still believe that New York was a suburb of Belgrade"). Of course, these two cities, and even countries, were not literally correlated. But they were, each in their own way, then and in the previous decades, the closest in terms of connections between culture and even politics. The key word is (was) breadth. But yes!, the consequence of this comparison is the feeling and the visible reality in the similarity today of Serbia and the USA, but also in dilapidation, dissatisfaction and general decline, and even the loss of individual and group civilizational and cultural progress. It's a legitimate situation for nostalgia, whoever leans into it.

So, both then and now, it's like we follow each other. To that extent, my mention (and even inventing) of the "Yugoslav dream" is the shortest, but quite accurate definition of the attainability of the spiritual state of the individual and the nation of that time. And since that dream has a direct association with the famous "American dream", it is clear that we are talking about artistic states that were possible and often achieved.

How is it possible that the culture did not build on the foundations laid by the eighties? What diverted her into banality?

If I knew that for sure, I would accept the position of world president or at least the minister of culture and correct and make up for it all. When I put the joke aside, it is not difficult to come up with better and smarter solutions than the so-called. the current cultural policy that adorns us, and which would only spend money for culture elsewhere. So, which does not exist. I can only begin and guess the answer, using the position of a witness-collaborator to my own life.

And in the years of high creative achievements in almost all fields of culture, at the same time, a storm was lurking in the announcement. Some felt it, some didn't. But everyone still did their best to add their best to the world. Then came the nineties and the complete collapse of everything existing. Then, in the first decade of the 2000s, there was hope for the return of values, only for a new spiritual defeat to occur in the next. With these decades, the language also changed, not only beliefs. However, the responsibility of the elite at that time for not being able to deal with the general defeat of values ​​consisted of two types: one that leaned towards material and spiritual profiteering through a pretended struggle for national identity (beating the chests of bigger Serbs than those "others", misuse of terms - the people, the hearth, enhancing the so-called centuries-old vulnerability but also the legendary courage, integrity, etc.). And other types, immersed sincerely and blindly in their occupations or falsely uninformed about the drama around the corner, without making an effort to oppose it. Among them there was a smaller number of those who tried to preserve normality and peace by fighting against evil from all sides. But it turned out that this resistance was not enough. The strength of those who quickly floated to the surface and occupied all the space prevailed: primitive and ignorant. They created the now famous Serbian arrogance of ignorance. All in all, here culture has become entertainment, and in America it has become entertainment. It pushed all possible "rolling stones" into the abyss in which we still find ourselves.

photo: marija janković

You translate HBO as "home treasury" and you explain that people are offered entertainment without partying, What is it, according to you, actually a word about laziness, about commotion. What is the result of that?

Television in itself, apart from various other innovations, brought laziness to the life of America. But with the advent of cable television and its support for consumer mentality and marketing, everything became possible to do and achieve - from the armchair. It became not only physical inactivity, but spiritual as well. After all, TV has always been a substitute for a lullaby: the easiest way to go from tired to sleep at the end of the day was by looking at that talking and watching box. But HBO, especially at that time, was an example of the innovation of the still fresh cable television that offers entertainment and even culture. My character V. is in HBO at a time when this company is establishing a separate Cinemax program in order to make the first feature film, expensive and very good, for the first time as a production company - Gandi. Therefore, it is about the innocent age of the so-called serious entertainment. Although, already at that time, those cable televisions that only broadcast 24-hour news, like CNN (which my hero also visits), already show a penchant for manipulation.

In your book, CNN is an example of shaping truth and reality, production of hunger for news and everything else that is now our daily media life. You say that the news is a tool that can be easily manipulated and easily turned into a weapon. Who abused them?

It was conceived in attachments that were, according to the new rules, as short and as quick as possible. This gave birth to the excessive amount of information then and now, which further passiveized the human mind and slowly turned it into an obedient robot, if not a zombie. Hence reaching the current consumerism, superficiality and passivity of the mind. Who did it? Well, globalization, business and money. America then and now has a unique relationship with money, to the extent that it is a legitimate means of influencing politics. There it is called financing and support, and here it is called bribery and corruption. The results are similar.

Some parts of the book are highlighted in italics. In them you write about changes, quirks in the current language. Like a book within a book, designed to underline even more then and now. What today's language says about us? What kind of people we are? How clever we are? What we feel? What we think about ourselves and the world?

The time of the main plot is set in the mid-80s, and 1984 is the so-called cumulative (and not only Orwellian) year. It is the base of everything, but the italicized parts escape into its past and future, sticking to the themes that make it up. But those time trips actually serve to see the development of personalities, events, and concepts. That development, how where and how when, in that symbolic yesterday and tomorrow became ruin or progress, defeat or success. Equally central, the starting point of all places is the hotel "Chelsea", itself a character in the book, from which the action and thinking of the author and hero of the book spreads in concentric circles towards other topos. It was an attempt to expand time and space, but at the same time compact it. The language is equally "guilty" that today we have given up on our beliefs, weakened from repeating the same (words, not just actions), tired of failure. In reality, language has proven to be equally manipulative with the smart and limited, with intellectuals and politicians. Today, in addition to its basic task - communication, it has become a tool of simpletons and violence, unabashed illiteracy, lies and crime. By abusing it, false leaders reach the ultimate deity - money.

I think that a hidden process of the regime had an enormous impact on what we are now, which we don't dream about but is happening to us. Namely, "in the spirit of Western individualism", divisions, separations and hatred were systematically worked on here for years (the introduction was in the nineties, of course). This is how the original Serbian individualism was created: selfishness. People are forced to fight for material or spiritual existence by not accepting the existence of other and different opinion. That's how we came to worry only about our own rear and front, losing not only empathy but also the power of elementary civilized behavior.

At the linguistic level, you explain the change of the world with the example of words "challenge".

The language that I deal with as a separate and integral layer of the book seemed to me convenient to personalize the changes that have taken place up to today. That writer's basic tool analyzes changes in the meaning of certain words and phrases over time. Example in words challenge is good. In the text, I explain the following in great detail: how it is usage those words are wrong. It stands for the word today problem although its original meaning is a challenge. So, it goes round and round as necessary for both translation and meaning. But out of ignorance of "modernity", it further developed into a manipulation of its own meaning. Used above all by politicians, it has become a handy tool in labeling (and not just translating) the swagger with which leaders no longer acknowledge the existence of a problem! There are only challenges that, my goodness, are not only surmountable but desirable. They are the ease of solving the seemingly insurmountable, and thus an indicator of the omnipotence of politics. Proof of this is the fact that many educated people use it incorrectly. Apart from being pliable, they also do it, I guess, because it gives them the illusion of having (non-existent) power.

The current team of the Ministry of Culture insists on national identity, especially on traditional creativity and Cyrillic. The language is currently being defended only against Croatisms, the rest doesn't bother them. At the very end of the book, you say that politics entered the language in the worst possible way.

Whenever an individual or an institution has no plan, let alone a vision, it initiates megalomaniac, retrograde and, as a rule, wrong moves. This is how we often defend the Cyrillic alphabet from ourselves. Thus, in his first public address, the newly minted Minister of Culture makes two fundamental mistakes in one and a half sentences (I'm paraphrasing): he says that the Serbian language has two alphabets! He does not know that there are two letters, the alphabet and the alphabet. In fact, he overlooks (or "just" does not acknowledge) the existence of the Other World. In that half of the sentence, he asks for the exclusive use of Cyrillic keyboards in public space. He doesn't know (or won't know) that every computer has a pre-existing program that makes it possible to switch from one letter to another with a single click/move. In any case, that fight for a nationally pressed one is being waged out of ignorance and/or because of another opportunity for a privileged person to make unnecessary money with the huge cost of buying tens of thousands of keyboards, but also to incorporate some others.

About the meaning of the authoritarian request-order that all publishers for the purchase of books already from this past year and not only from now on, are forced that if they want to purchase books for libraries in Serbia - they must print them in Cyrillic, so that does not deserve a comment. Except: if the Ministry of Culture retroactively and at the same speed realized all the tenders and payments, and also increased the percentage of money allocated from the budget for culture, where would we end up! However, it came in handy to "extract" the Ministry of Finance, which "doesn't give" on time, neither more nor less. Neither Full nor Small. Like the love between Fat and Skinny.

Have you caught up to Kerouac in word count??

Yes. To this day, I don't know exactly why it was almost an obsession for me (which I write about in the book). But surely readers will find reasons, even symbolic ones.

The first and last sentence in the book is a fictional Latin saying "Veni, vidi, therein", which you end up translating as "I came, I saw, I leave". Why didn't you stay??

It is my invention with a clear association with Caesar's famous saying. It is translated in the book in two ways: correctly as "Come, see, go" before the beginning of the book and at the end as "I came, saw, left". I think its meaning, as well as the change of tense, are clear in both variants.

And I and/or my hero did not stay in the USA because not accepting the offer was proof of the equal opportunity to realize both the Yugoslav and the American dream. And we know, dreams guide us.