Marina Pianu - Maddalena de SedaTwo bodies, one sole... |
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marina pianu (1957- ). the life of marina pianu meanders along an obligatory itinerary of happenchance, coincidences, and errors (sometimes intentional). it was by mistake, in fact, that she was born in liguria (near portofino), even though at that time her family resided in padua. it is also by chance that, since her earliest childhood, she found herself discombobulated bouncing between three different regions and four homes; happy childhood albeit a tinsy winsy bit lonely. it is precisely thanks to this solitude that she has developed her lively imagination (ranging between the morbid to the outright demented). it is at this time that her first imaginary playmates are born, and her earliest self-told tales and her own "personal town" (which still to this day represents her own little oneiric theater). marina blooms late to social life, moving through love and adventures. since the age of eight she has never stopped being in love (men, women, anything that crawls...) and this continuous love has driven her to transfer on paper her wish to realize dreams and fantasies and illusions. whenver these love interests actually materialized, her written fantasies acquired the delicious flavor of adultery, of illegality, of sin. religiously diffident since early adulthood, rebel against anything that even remotely sounded like rules and authority, our poetess (well...) keeps moving on from the adriatic regions to rome, then london, then at last to the american shores where she manages to find and develop and refine what will become her distinguishing mark: style. she lives in chicago, in connecticut and, passing through paris, in florida, before returning definitively (?) in italy. she gorges on french authors (proust, colette, pagnol, diderot, and of course sade) and 1960's movies (italian, french and american). these are the years of wild experimentations, from thai food to ketamine, from pointilism in art to the stream of consciousness in writing, criss-crossing brian eno's diversified recurrences (her favorite quote is "repetition is a form of change"). she embarks on long translation projects which, for sheer laziness, will forever remain unfinished. however, she does publish a couple of short works in small local presses. she also participates in the launch of a new literary journal in paris ("diffusions") and composes her "longovel" (loooong novel), "leda" in (we haven't finished counting) volumes, labiryntine voyage through the world of s/m. once back in italy, she devotes herself to journalism meddling in a bit of everything, from graphic layout to pic manipulation, from article writing to editing and titling, etc. finally, she lands in the felsinean capital (bologna) so as to devote herself full-time to writing and with the purpose of launching a new literary review which would, immodestly enough, aim at returning back to the origins of the old italian literary avant garde. |
![]() maddalena de seda (1957-2033). letter-day author, was founder and sponsor of the well-known "let others do it" movement, which gained great momentum just until yesterday, in all fields of human knowledge: in literature, as we all know, as well as in craftsmanship, politics, economics, and, of course, in philosophy and theology. some of her biographers imagined they could trace this impetus back to the criticism school in which de seda grew and formed. of a quite different view, others seem to attribute this critical approach to the strong influence of such authors as henry james and proust (whom de seda adored almost to distraction). to put everything in place here comes dr. pianu (notorious tv psychiatrist) who has shed new light on sedian patterns and trends in her latest, thought-provoking and ground-breaking analysis ("what the heck am i doing?", 2035, laughing cows pub.), explaining how the sardinian writer's innate laziness has had a terrific influence on her school of thought. among her most accomplished works, we cannot forget "i'd rather not" and "leisure for leisure" (from the shakespearian period), "grapes of sleep" (from the depression period), her brilliant comedy "portrait of a lazy" and her autobiographical novel in thirty volumes "the importance of being idle". in 2004 she founded, with tireless efforts and few moves, the journal "being and idleness". occasionally, and in her ample spare time, she indulged in songwriting gaining impressive positions in the billboard top-ten charts with such hits as "should i stay or should i rest," "let me be," and "born to be asleep." (envious and less talented artists like the clash and the beatles have repeatedly, albeit without success, sued her for plagiarism) awards: the sixpence award in 2011 for her novel "pontius pilatus;" pulitzer prize in 2013 for the story collection entitled "as the screw turns." and lastly (but not less importantly), in 2033, just a few months before her death, she was awarded the nobel prize for literature but, in spite of perfect health conditions, she neglected to fetch the award for, as she stated to journalists assailing her home, "i can't miss oprah winfrey." during the last period of her life, ms. de seda was suddenly and inexplicably hit by a serious illness affecting the nervous system. suffering from abrupt and inexplicable fits of hyperactivity, among which we all remember her frantic mayoral campaign in saradara (sardinia), her tournée in oceania for the defense of mandingos, as well as her participation to the "win'n'scratch" quiz show, toward the end of 2033 our beloved writer lost her battle to fatigue and had to be urgently hospitalized at the "mauvais repos" clinic in zurich. in spite of extremely expensive attentions, she at last found the enternal rest which she had been craving for all her life, leaving behind an unfillable hole in the memory of readers, friends and relatives. |
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