Over at The Sigla Blog, Sinéad Gleeson gives Sophia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette a brief but unambiguous mauling (“overblown, dull.”)Although I’m not that pushed to defend this glossy confection, I found its languorous depiction of Versailles as a sort of John Hughesesque high school mildly diverting. My indulgence might have been prompted by watching it on a […]
From today’s Indo: TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern said yesterday that “aggressive secularism” had no place in modern pluralist Ireland.Mr Ahern was inaugurating a Church-State forum which he described as representing “a new and important strand in the civic and political culture of the State”. […]”There is a form of aggressive secularism which would have the State […]
I am happy to report that I have solved the mystery of why Polish writers are so sloppy about little things like suspension of disbelief. They’re copying Joseph “monachal vaticinations” Conrad. In Under Western Eyes Razumov enters his apartment to find a man called Haldin inside, waiting for him. How did this man get in? […]
Here’s a Polish poem from 1950 in – for reasons that should become obvious – very free translation: “One needs” Stars stars have spread out in heaven Silence descends from the tops of the town. One needs one needs love poems so that lovers can notice them In the plan in the plan in the […]
Nie reveals that one of the creditors of the Academic Clinical Hospital in Wrocław, one of the hospitals facing the bailiffs, is a company called Greenhouse. The big cheese here is one Tomasz Tokarski, a CASE (Socio-economic Analysis Centre) expert. CASE is the organisation that advocates the introduction of additional, voluntary health insurance.
Average Polish pay, 1997: 1,000 zł Average Polish pay, 2005: 2,500 zł Mimimum wage: currently about 935 zł (Some organisations define poverty as an income of less than half the national average.)
Advertisers are easy enough targets at the best of times: a car manufacturer is trying to persuade gullible Poles that its new car can see around corners. (Cretinous slogan: “C’mon” – in English of course, though it’s a German firm operating in Poland.) But when they supply the ammunition themselves… Here’s the slogan of one […]
The children of the movies have seen our world destroyed a hundred times–we can accept the apocalypse, even guiltily savour it, but we want the smouldering ruins to have grandeur.
In the last two years some 1.2 million people have left Poland. Since May 2004 2.5 million cars have been imported. (Polityka 2007: nr. 7) I don’t know what that signifies. Probably nothing.
On the cover of a new edition of Krzysztof Varga’s Chłopaki nie płaczą is a stern message to, among others, Olaf Lubaszenko, who had the temerity to make a film of the same name but entirely unconnected with Varga’s original work (published 1996). Poor old Varga was tired of explaining to interviewers that the two […]
