Adela Greceanu and Matei Martin are the hosts of the show Timpul prezent/The Present Time, broadcast on Radio România Cultural and available on all podcast platforms.
Adela Greceanu is a journalist and a writer. Her debut poetry collection was Titlul volumului meu, care mă preocupă atât de mult.../The Title of My Volume which Concerns Me So Much... (Eminescu Publishing House), followed by Domnișoara Cvasi/Miss Cvasi (Vinea), Înțelegearea drept în inimă/Understanding Straight to the Heart (Paralela 45), Și cuvintele sînt o provincie/Words Are also a Province (Cartea Românească) and the novel Mireasa cu șosete roșii/The Bride with Red Socks (Polirom). She participated in numerous international literary festivals , and her texts were translated into various languages, such as English, German, Swedish, French, Greek and Hungarian.
Matei Martin is a journalist. Besides from Timpul prezent/The Present Time, he also hosts the show Bazar FM (Radio România Cultural). He writes for Dilema veche and he collaborated, among others, with Lettre Internationale, Regard, Radio France Internationale, Adevărul literar și artistic,, Esquire. He coordinated the Dilematecamagazine, he organized the literary-gastronomical meetings Porc cu piper from the Bastilia bookstore and he translated from German and French.
Adela drinks a lot of coffee, no sugar or milk. Matei does not wear a tie. Adela and Matei are, as they say in glossy magazines, a very cool couple, both in the radio studio and out of it.
In the past forty years people have been saying that “video killed the radio star”, however, radio is “alive and kicking”. What keeps it alive?
Adela: What was keeping it alive before: the fact that, while you’re listening to the radio you can deal with all sorts of things: cooking, cleaning the house, jogging in the park, driving the car – a lot of people listen to us in the car, especially because our show, “Timpul prezent”, is broadcast on Radio România Cultural at 18:00, during the rush hour. Somebody once told me that they started listening to the show while driving, but they arrived home before it ended, so they stayed in the car in order to listen to it to the end. And since we also have a podcast, which can be found on all the important platforms, people can listen to us at any time, to any episode. Some people listen to us when they’re jogging, others listen to us from other time zones, from Vietnam, or from the USA. We have entered, for quite some time already, the era of the podcast, the radio of our times. Maybe this is what keeps the radio alive, the audio production: the fact that it allows you to move, it does not keep you tied to a screen.
Matei: Maybe radio celebrities as we knew them no longer exist, maybe the radio audience is no longer the same as it was before the television and the internet. But the democratisation of the access to information sources and the multiplication of the media did not undermine the influence of the radio. The radio remains a relevant medium, even in a “displaycracy”. It’s more powerful than other media because it’s more subtle: it’s your friend and it can accompany you anywhere and in any circumstance: when you drive the car, when you run, when you go shopping or when you work. It’s a friend who does not need all of your attention. And now, with podcasts, it’s even easier to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want, “on demand”.
In the interviews on the Radio România Cultural site you talked about your beginnings in the written press and in radio. But what does a working day look like now?
Adela: Now, as in, since March 2020 and up until the present moment, our working day has changed significantly, not to say radically, given that we work from home. And I don’t mean that we work much more when we work from home – which almost became a cliché, many people noticed this. Our living room, which was also an office already, is also a recording studio now. We bought an audio mixer, microphones and professional headphones, so that we can have high quality sound. We usually record the show for that day in the mornings, through Skype, or through the phone, or through Zoom. Some hours of audio editing follow. The research for the subjects we tackle and the search for our guests happen at various hours, both in the morning and in the afternoon, sometimes even during the late night hours. When you work from home, you no longer have a fixed schedule, you’re flexible, isn’t it? And you lose track of time, you forget to get up from the computer, you don’t count the hours you worked. It’s very difficult to set a time and a space limit. With your house turned into a radio studio, you’re always at work. The psychologists I interviewed during the pandemic told us that it’s important to split your space and your time when working from home. But it’s pretty difficult, almost impossible, at times.
Matei: Every usual working day begins with the radio and ends with the radio. Yes, first we listen to the news, then we read the written press, then we prepare the show: the topic of the day and the guests. We talk to very different people, with specialists in various domains, with employed intellectuals, with creators. With people who matter. Half an hour on the radio goes by very fast for the listeners. Few of them realise how much preparation work each interview requires. And that’s very good! Then, if it isn’t a live show, what follows is the production. Good sound involves careful work, often boring, always tiring. Finally, the podcast means social media engagement, some interaction with the listeners, availability for dialogue – this being perhaps the most pleasant part of the job. We like polemical discussions, this is why neither we, nor our guests, are exempt from critique. But “Timpul prezent” is a space for debate. So any well-argued critique is welcome.
What are the instruments you use most often in your daily activities, as a radio journalist and a written press journalist?
Adela: Are you referring to actual objects? Well, for the radio, the microphone, the headphones, the mixer, the laptop. As for the unseen instruments, here I can name curiosity, attention to actual topics and to public interest topics, patience.
Matei: The voice. And the ears. Not necessarily in this order.
How do you choose the subjects you talk or write about? Is it only individual research, is there any lobbying, do you receive recommendations? What about the books?
Adela: Yes, we choose our subjects mostly based on individual research. But we also receive recommendations from our guests, from the people in PR. Most of the times I choose my books by myself, I pay attention to new releases, I am very interested in young authors, I believe that it’s important for a show on the public radio to offer them a place to express themselves and to keep the listeners up to date when it comes to the current trends in literature. But I’m also interested in well-established authors, of course, whenever they come back with an important book.
Matei: We work, as they say, “with what we’re given”: we try to identify, among the current topics, those subjects which preoccupy people, or which we know can spike up the interest of our listeners. Sometimes it’s sensitive or polemical topics. We avoid common places or topics everybody agrees upon, in order to encourage critical thinking. And, sometimes, we try to suggest new subjects, from outside the public agenda.
Do you have a top three of the shows which turned out the best?
Adela: It’s very difficult to come up with such a top. I was extremely happy when I managed to get a consistent interview with the poet Ruxandra Novac – there aren’t many audio interviews with her. It was a pleasure to have Olga Tokarczukas a guest on “Timpul prezent” twice, before she received the Nobel Prize. I have told this story before, but I like repeating it: I can brag that, in the morning before the announcement of the Nobel Prize winner in 2019 I had a feelingthat she would receive it and I prepared fragments from our interviews for the news, for my colleagues’ afternoon show, and the whole interview for the site. So, when the Swedish Academy was making the announcement, after letting out a very happy squeak, I clicked the send button, and, two minutes after the official announcement, the interview with Olga Tockarczuk was available for listening on the first page of the Radio România Cultural site. And I believe the shows from the series we named “Fabrici și uzine” turned out really well, about industrial platforms from various cities and about the prospects of them being turned into public spaces.
Matei: We do not create hierarchies. We are relevant and pertinent because of our subjects and most of all because of our guests. I am happy that I was able to suggest some shows which tackled less discussed topics in our daily press to our listeners. In the last season we talked about climate change, about heritage, about the relation between ethics and politics, about cultural economy etc.
What about memories which send chills down your spines?
Adela: Hm, we have such memories with guests who were very late, from back when we used to broadcast our show live, from the radio studio, or guests who did not show up at all. Of course we had a backup, but it still sent chills down our spines. But thankfully, that only happened three times or so.
Matei: Once, a long time ago, when I had just got a job on a radio station, I missed a pretty hard to obtain interview, after a lot of persistence. I was so nervous that I forgot to connect the microphone to the recorder, just like that. After discussing for half an hour I realized that I had not recorded anything. I was very lucky: Radu Mihăileanu (the interview was with him!) was more than understanding, so we were able to resume our conversation, this time on the record.
Are there things which cannot be fixed in your professional activity?
Adela: I think we just talked about them in the previous question: when the guest does not show up on time (and you only have one guest) and they don’t even answer their phone, then there isn’t anything else to fix. When this happened to me, I called two people who knew about the topic and asked them to join me live, through the phone. Then, on the spot. They were wonderful and accepted the invitation. And they talked very well.
Matei: The relationship with time (tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock).
You participated in numerous literary festivals or major events dedicated to books, both in in Romania and abroad. What was the most beautiful experience and what made it so beautiful?
Adela: The most is always difficult to choose. So I’ll mention two memorable experiences. FILIT, The International Literature and Translation Festival from Iași – I participated in all of the editions, except for the one from 2020, which was suspended one day after it began, because of the pandemic. We organized shows there, live or recorded, with extraordinary writers, Romanian and foreign, with translators devoted to the Romanian authors they translate, who promote them in their countries. There is a certain atmosphere in Iași during FILIT which creates the illusion that Romania is not the country where people read the least, compared to the other countries in the European Union. Another memorable experience was at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2018, when Romania was the guest of honour. Leipziger Buchmesse is one of the most important European book fairs, a book fair which is open to readers, where authors are in the foreground, in all sorts of debates, readings and book releases. Romania’s stand and the Romanian authors’ events were very well thought-out, with very good press even before the book fair started, with consistent interviews in the important German newspapers, on radio and on TV. Back then, at Leipzig, Matei and I did a journalistic marathon; not only did we handle our own show, but we also sent mails for the news reports and interviews for various shows from Radio România Cultural and Radio România Actualități.
Matei: The literature festival from Berlin has a very special atmosphere. A metropolis morphs into a literary salon. It’s touching to see how a whole city lives and breathes literature. Toute proportion gardée , this is close to how I felt at The International Literature Festival from Timișoara (FILTm), which is mostly interested in the marginal literature from the East of Europe.
Are there any notable differences between the festivals from abroad and those from Romania?
Adela: Between FILIT and great literary festivals “from abroad” there are no notable differences. And this has been said by writers, both Romanian and foreign, who have travelled the world. At the festival “Poezia e la Bistrița” and at “Festival de Poesia de la Mediterrània” (held in Mallorca), the organizers’ enthusiasm and their passion for poetry are similar in rate, very high. The public is just as happy to come to the literary festivals here, as well as anywhere else. The difference is outside of those festivals. And we have been seeing it, for a few years, in the studies about how much people read in the countries from the European Union.
Matei: There are no major differences between the festivals “from abroad” and those “from us”. The few, very few festivals from us (FILIT-Iași, FILTm, FILB or “Nocturnele ARCEN”) even look and sound like they’re from the West. The difference compared to the situation in France or in Germany is about quantity: there are hundreds of festivals, big or small, thousands of meetings and literary salons, all throughout the year, many have a longstanding tradition, whereas in our country there are only a few periodical events, all of them crowded, at the end of the fall, and those do not even have any continuity. This is neither about the quality of the literature, nor about the performance of the organizers, but about the state’s commitment to culture. In our country, the local authorities would rather finance a few cheap events in a very expensive way, or organize commercial events, for the general public. The written culture is almost abandoned.
What was it like and how did the relationship between you and the editors you collaborated with for the texts you published work up until now? Did you negotiate phrases, words?
Adela: A good editor knows how to identify your strengths and your weaknesses, they understand what you want to do in a text, they see both the trees and the woods. I had the joy of working with three such editors: Ruxandra Mihăilă, Alina Radu and Mădălina Ghiu.
Do you encourage the interaction with your readers or listeners? Do you participate in the discussions they suggest to you on various media?
Adela: If they react with opinions which lack any sort of arguments, and what is more, if those opinions are expressed aggressively, then I don’t entertain the dialogue, because it seems to me that they do not really wish to have an actual dialogue. Many times, those who react in such a way don’t even listen to the show, they latch on to the topic we are discussing or to words they take out of the context. And, sadly, social media is, most of the times, a battleground, a territory of polarization, where too many people shout and where “debates” very often arise out of nothing, or where heavy words are carelessly thrown around, on the basis of the freedom of expression. But we also have commenters who listen to the show and who have pertinent points of view or who tell us that we have made them reflect on the subjects we brought into discussion. I like to think the latter are more numerous than the former.
If, in a counterfactual image, we were to reverse the roles: what song would Adela sing on the Silver Church stage, at the coming of age of Dilema veche's and what poem would Matei read on the Bowery Poetry Club stage from New York.
Adela: I’ll answer with the first song that comes to mind, I don’t know why it was this exact one: “Bohemian Rhapsody”. But only together with the editorial board from Dilema veche from back then.
Matei: Anytime, anything form Arta Popescu.
(Main photo: Rareș Avram.) [Translated into English by Irina-Adelina Găinușă.]
