One of the first reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s 1,085-page novel, Against the Day, has appeared in Time. Richard Layco’s tone is that of a green-faced dinner who ordered something “adventurous” in, say, an authentic Cantonese restaurant and is now having trouble lifting up another spoonful of the undifferentiated pottage to his lips: More than in […]
After extensive research (one and a half minutes on Google) I have been unable to find the source for “no matter who you vote for the government always wins.” It’s certainly true here in Poland, with local elections just over and a government still firmly in power. An interesting difference of opinion has come out […]
Sponsorship is an idea that should never have been divulged to the Poles. At the moment there is an ad campaign for hospice care. Posters on bus stops invite you to send a text message to the hospice charity. They tell you how much the text costs with VAT but they don’t tell you what […]
All news is local, they say, so here’s what Poland looks like going by the pages of a classified ads newspaper that comes out twice a week here: Poles love cars. One third of the paper is given over to them. The section marked “hobby” is less than one page long, hopefully because hobbyists have […]
Who is Brian Atene? A month ago, apparently, if you Googled his name, all you would turn up was a school photo from the late 1970s. Now, thanks to the star-making power of You Tube, the Google query “Brian Atene” triggers an avalanche of 49,900 results. The sudden prominence is all down to a YouTube […]
Following the rout of the Republicans at the polls, sub-editors across the globe have, perhaps gloatingly, dubbed President Bush and his Secretary for Defence as “casualties of war.” Perhaps I’m being too literal-minded, but I didn’t see the president being medivaced from the White House lawn or hear of Donald Rumsfeld being injured in the […]
South America, of course. Here is the first sentence of a news (not comment) article reporting Daniel Ortega’s victory in Nicaragua’s presidential elections: “The former revolutionary and friend of communist dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan populist Hugo Chavez won Sunday’s presidential elections.” As I mentioned before, no such discussion of politics in this newspaper can […]
At the risk of sounding like one of those warbling thesps who bang on about the “dangers” of the stage and the “high-wire act” of live theatre, I suggest that going for a fancy style in prose can also be a risky undertaking. One textual faux pas can put the whole enterprise in jeopardy. For […]
Unilever’s public-spirited campaign to make women feel the need to purchase their beauty products continues. The latest manoeuvre is an interview on the subject of beauty and self-esteem with a sociologist in Wysokie Obcasy, the teeth-grindingly awful ladies’ weekend supplement to the crusading Gazeta Wyborcza. This colour magazine specialises in finding women who are (or […]
When writing, or even reading, history there is always an inclination to interpret the past teleologically–that is to assess the importance of events according to how they contributed to some apparently pre-ordained outcome. This inclination veers into overwhelming impulse when the history in question is that of Germany’s. Given that the Third Reich’s reign of […]
