There were exhibitions and a film I'd wanted to see passing through London so I'd ignored the newspapers all the previous day. It was only as we were boarding that I found out. Some passengers ahead of me in the queue were delaying everybody, helping themselves to three or four different newspapers at the entrance […]
If you’re looking for the place where Michael Jackson intersects with Al-Qaeda, look no further than Algerian born novelist Aziz Chouaki’s The Star of Algiers. Have we got your attention? Good. In truth, Jackson figures only slightly in this urgent, rythmic novel, and then only as a musical/cultural influence on the protagonist Moussa Massy, but […]
“To create a democracy, blood must sometimes be spilled”. These would be wise words were it not for the fact that they were pronounced by Augusto Pinochet, one of the greatest mass-murderers of the 20th century. Pinochet’s seizure of power on September 11th 1973, an earlier 9/11 which produced a similarly catastrophic scene – that […]
When Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt first decided to study and write about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, in the late 1980s, many of her colleagues counselled her against her decision. Holocaust denial was, in their eyes a fringe movement of no-importance, akin to the Flat Earth Society. She was, in short, warned against taking ‘these […]
“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, […]