This week’s Nie tells of the predicament of an Armenian small trader in Poland. In brief, he has been refused permission to continue residing in the country because, well yes, he is paying his own way, and yes, he is employing a few Polish people and no he’s no burden on society and he’s not […]
“Ulotki i reklamy prosz? wrzuca? do skrzynki” say the signs outside the doors of the flats on the leafy X. estate in Gda?sk. This means “please place advertisements and flyers in the box” but the receptacle into which the obliging postmen have placed the advertisements and flyers looks an awful lot like a wastepaper basket. […]
The New Yorker gives its take on the brainstorming behind devising a catchy slogan to replace “stay the course,” a phrase that, apparently, was never really mouthed by President Bush in the first place.
Look, Polish novelists who stop by here. In case I’m not making myself clear enough: you have to re-read your books to make sure they make sense. Jack Kerouac can write a book in one non-stop draft, but you’re not Jack Kerouac. Today’s offender is Marek Krajewski, in his Festung Breslau. His attention to the […]
Gazeta Wyborcza‘s motto is “Nam nie jest wszystko jedno,” or “it’s not all the same to us.” The crusading force is strong in this one. There was the schools campaign (motto: the inspired “class with class”), which I am told was a nightmare of added paperwork for the teachers involved — which was nearly all […]
Is there something offensive about Borat, “Kazakhstan’s sixth most famous man” and the second comedic invention of Sacha Baron Cohen to be give celluloid treatment* ? This would seem not so much a rhetorical question as a flagrantly disingenuous one. Borat, whose persona is composed of a toxic mixture of Asperberger-lite obliviousness and charmless pushiness, […]
“This essay was commissioned by the guest editors of a special issue of the academic journal Social Text but rejected by the journal’s editorial collective on the grounds it was theoretically unsophisticated that included a ‘cheap shot’ at professors.” This message precedes an article by Robert Jensen, who is always worth reading, on academic freedom […]
Regular visitors to this site will find it as radically altered as Kenny Rogers. But in this case, I believe the changes are a good thing.All the improvements can be exclusively attributed to my sister, web designer extraordinaire Catriona, who is scarily au fait with the cryptic realm of CSS files.Now, as Wilde famously remarked […]
Local elections are approaching and all over Poland (presumably — I haven’t been all over it myself) teams of workers are energetically engaged in infrastructural work. Roads are being resurfaced, roundabouts rationalised and parks prettified. It’s not fooling anyone: “kie?basa wyborcza” (election sausage) is what Poles call this transparent bribery of the general public. My […]
The Complete Review reports on the arrival at their offices of the latest, and possibly last, wrist-snapping 1100-page meganovel from that PoMo giant, Thomas Pynchon. They suggest that the book Against The Day “most resembles is, indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow. But that’s just a very quick first impression: this is definitely a text it’s going to […]
