PROSE
Arthur Signe
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Arthur Signe (B) signs his French novel, 17 rue de Belfast, a painful and hilarious novel about the Mukalo, a famous music club in Brussels. It operated in the 1050 Congolese district, torn by drug wars between ethnicities from all over the Brittanica Atlas: a rain of Molotov cocktails reduced an African dance hall on Belfast Street to ashes. The Mukalo existed only for two short years between 1988 and 1990, a sufficient span of time to make the place a nostalgic legend of cheerful mishap. Alcohol and drugs abounded (the cook was found to keep his heroine stashed in the kitchen frig) and heaps of concerts were organized: The Honeymoon Killers, Ted Milton aka Blurt, Nono 'Nyet-Nyet' García, the a cappella group Tam Echo Tam, and the Djinns, with the magnificent Nadia Alboukari bellydancing our hips into acute arthritis. Here, the now widely renowned Taraf de Haïduk (signed in Brussels by Crammed Discs) played their first concerts outside Romania. Marie Deaulne's vocal girls group Zap Mama bewitched the audience to conquer the world through Peter Gabriel's Real World record label a few years later. Apart from performing on stage, singer-songwriter Jay Conrad styled himself as the Savoy Hotel Barkeep with neat white shirts and a golden bowtie in an effort to counter the Mukalo madness. Arthur Signe describes a world in which violence, euphoria and indestructible friendships are reconciled. And how about those dawn closings, once marred by an Albanese gangster boss pitching a china ashtray at Conrad's head? Well, for once, poor Murat missed. 17 rue de Belfast is an unforgettable tale of an epoch of its own.
POETRY
Frantz Ariën
This Flemish poet (b. Montpelier, France, ) has no hesitations in using his Dutch language to the extreme: he invents new possibilities, juggles with those that exist, and creates a fresh linguistic landscape in which every word inspires curiosity and introspection. Over the last decades, he has written an oeuvre that provokes. Often pastoral in his celebration of the Flemish countryside, caring, tender and complex, Frantz Ariën ventures beyond the limits of Nature, its sunsets, its summer afternoons, and investigates the human condition like only true poets do: he challenges our sense of reason and bends our sense of perspective. He guides towards a new Dutch language, into a universe which so far escaped our telescopes.
The work of Frantz Ariën is not easy to read, but once you get the hang of his poetry, it becomes spellbinding: every word counts, becomes a challenge and goes far beyond of what modern Dutch and Flemish poetry represents these days.
We leave it to him to select from his work a forty-odd poems he thinks fit for publication by Δiagraph Books in an anthology.
