Two stories from Oblivion reveal David Foster Wallace�s debt to Jorge Luis Borges* most clearly. The first, �Another Pioneer,� which indirectly recounts the story of the influence of a child prodigy/deity on the mindset of a nameless Palaeolithic tribe living in an Amazonian rainforest, borrows the quintessential Borgesian technique of using a framing or distancing […]
Debut album from Montreal based multi-instrumentalists Arcade Fire.
Just as the hysterical claims that the Sheffield outfit has already surpassed The Beatles in musical achievement have the paradoxical effect of making me never want to hear another track from the ‘world-beating album‘ by the Arctic Monkeys, so the assertions that David Foster Wallace is the best writer of his (our?) generation have ensured […]
“Give Hamas a Chance” Gazeta wyborcza (28-29th Jan) magnanimously states on page six in the headline of a piece by Mariusz Zawadzki, datelined Gaza and marked “analysis”. The subhead (actually it appears above the grand headline) reads: Democracy in the Middle East is bearing unexpected fruit. Elections are being won by the ultra radical Mahmud […]
The Poles seemed to lose interest in novels very quickly. Hardly had they managed to produce a handful of decent ones than Witold Gombrowicz set to work writing “anti-novels.” His contemporary, Witkacy, refused even to accord novels the status of “art.” Polish writers are still experimenting with a form barely mastered. Take Sławomir Shuty’s Zwał: […]
From Friday’s Rzeczpospolita, a national daily paper in Poland: A front page article by Marcin Czeka?ski about the detrimental effects of the government’s disarray. It seems that many key posts have not been filled yet. There is no treasury minister, for example. And then this gem: “Privatisation is limping. PiS [the near-winners of the elections] […]
Blogger Ellis Sharp delivers a pretty devastating critique of John Banville’s radio play, Todtnauberg, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last week as part of the Holocaust commemorations. I was listening to it on the laptop while engaged in the distinctly low-tech and unelevating task of doing the washing-up. But with dialogue along the lines of […]
Today’s RTE (Radio Telef�s Eireann. RTE is the state broadcaster in Ireland) news website contains a report on the Jean Charles De Menezes killing. The report contains the following sentence: “Mr de Menezes was shot dead by police at a London underground station six months ago when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber.” How […]
A tightly-edited, coherent entry today: An initially unpromising article about ambulance services in the current (print edition) Polityka reveals (apart, of course, from the under-funded mess that Poland has inevitably made of its emergency services) that hospitals in Poland were located not in places determined by the needs of the surrounding civilian population but according […]