IOAN PETRU CULIANU Argonaut of the 4th Dimension

Christmas 2024

Dear Ruby: Like you, I have designated writing days where I catch up with everything/everybody, and this is the day.

Meeting in the Whiteaker looks like the perfect way Michael and I can stay connected to you and your work. It did my heart good to hear you and Michael discuss your novella. Your subject kind of reminds me of the writing of someone my husband and I knew in our group in Paris, a highly positioned woman at UNICEF who was trying to write a satire about UNICEF‘s quest to create a manifesto declaring the Universal Ethic—only none of them could agree on what exactly was the Universal Ethic.

(She was brilliant, but always seemed a little distracted, not by work, we thought, but some other nagging concern… Years later I discovered by accident that Hillary’s fiance, a handsome brilliant professor named Ioan Culianu, was mysteriously murdered right on the campus where he was teaching Ancient Religions and the Occult… I only ran into him in my later readings because he was a fellow Twin Peaks fan… The police never found out who did it. I have my own, non-supernatural, solution to the case. But because of his connection to the occult, the story of Culianu’s murder attracted the worst elements of hack writerdom, turning it into horror fiction, and I have too much respect for Hillary Wiesner and the memory of Ioan Culianu to go anywhere near his story, no matter my convictions…)

I also have to let you know that when you talked about that NZ-based literary magazine you published in, it inspired me to revive my old zine, Bakya, and God bless the worldwide Filipino network, I’ve already got a couple of submissions, which well satisfies my craving for nonwhite material.

So thanks for that. See what a drop of rain in the desert will grow.

Best, Cantara