feeling listless

Books Nora Ephron's mother, on her death bed, told her daughter that she should have a notebook out because 'Everything's copy'. There are those writers who can convincingly make everything up as they go along -- but that kind thing leads to Star Trek tie-in novels. For me, The really good ones work from experience, either because it's what they know or because they feel like they've got a responsibility to report what they've seen. Natasha Radojcic-Kane falls into the latter catagory. She was born under Tito's reign in Yugoslavia and then watched the country fade from inside after his death:

"I felt it most personally through the music of the time. By the late 1980s the lines at the opera house, where my father had first taken me, were shrinking, and a new kind of music crammed the stores: terribly aggressive turbo-folk, expressing the discontent of a nation gasping for air under the yoke of the disintegrating economy. And then there were my friends at Belgrade’s Academy of Arts, where I was a film student. Once, they were sharp, unflinching supporters of free thought; individualist, secularist. Now they were succumbing, lost and hopeless, to the new mantra—“Serbia, Serbia.” My half-Muslim blood rendered me persona non grata at their parties. My phone grew quieter and quieter."

This is a lady who will never get over her guilt of not being there.