Dan C. Lord

I was born in 1967 in Romania, into a house that smelled of paper and something that might have been the future — my parents bought books every week for their entire lives. By the time I was twelve I had read everything I could reach: Jules Verne, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Jerome K. Jerome, the American hardboilers of the thirties. Then the Russians arrived — Chekhov, and Gogol whom I loved immediately and without reservation. Then Kafka. Then Daniil Kharms, who is a god and I will not argue about this. Then the South Americans — Borges, Bioy Casares, Márquez, Sabato — and something permanent shifted that has never shifted back.

Eugene O'Neill I mention separately. Long Day's Journey Into Night taught me that the most dangerous thing a writer can do is tell the truth about what he actually knows. I have been trying to apply that lesson ever since.

Parallel to the reading, there were circuits. Electronics clubs in the late seventies, soldering components, learning how signals move and how systems fail. Next door, ham radio operators were punching transmissions through the Iron Curtain — signals the regime could jam but never fully silence. I stopped building electronics at fourteen for the usual reasons. The understanding of how things connect never left.

I have built things since then, and lost them, and kept the forest. I have lived among trees in the middle of Bucharest for twenty-five years with ten thousand books I tell myself I will finish reading someday. Deep inside I know I won't. I keep buying them anyway.

TELLE came from all of it — the circuits and the signals, the tyrants absorbed through a childhood of literature, the detective novels, the Soviet aesthetics that surrounded me before I could name them, and a lifelong conviction that the obsolete and the forgotten carry more truth than the powerful ever want to admit.

Telle is a 1940 vacuum tube. Pre-atomic. Off every modern grid. Sarcastic, tired, still working.

I understand her completely.

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