« November 2006 | Main | January 2007 »
December 19, 2006
Christmas Cheer
More from the censors' archives:
"At the start of December the editors [of the local newspaper] enthusiastically took to rehabilitating Santa Claus. At least one front page article devoted to this oh so important question was planned... The editors' plan to completely rehabilitate Santa Claus was foiled by the censor. Two articles and three plates were withdrawn. It's an unhappy affair and the fact that the censor was forced to intervene in material which should have been rejected by the editors much earlier gives pause for thought."
Posted by hgrodsk at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2006
Intelligentsia
Professor Maria Janion, a distinguished Polish scholar, is eighty this Christmas and, Poland being a country which -- though it publishes interviews in Playboy with Boris Szyc (pronounced "shits") where he gets to say rude words a lot -- still takes scholarship seriously, this week's Polityka has a tribute to her. Of the tribute-payers, only Stefan Chwin and Henryk Markiewicz manage to praise her without praising themselves.
Marek Bie?czyk writes: "During seminars she skilfully hid her stress," but not skilfully enough, since the eagly-of-eye Bie?czyk noticed. Who is this Bie?czyk? A writer and former student of Dr. Janion. I must confess to a tinge of jealousy as I read that, as a doctoral student in the eighties, he called for her in his car. I was never able to afford a car in the eighties, and not in the nineties either, and certainly not while I was still a student. The car motif recurs (the Polish intelligentsia are obsessed with the car and are frequently incapable of expressing themselves without reference to it -- witness Pawel Huelle's novella Mercedes Benz) later in the article: "She travelled with me in the car and learned how the clutch worked and what the various parts were for in a flash. She understood phenomenologically what a car is."
Yes, he really complimented her for understanding a car. Phenomenologically.
Phenomenology: Branch of philosophy which emphasises that meaning is generated through the influence of a person's consciousness upon perceptions.
Bie?czyk is not alone. Kazimiera Szczuka, another former student: "She has an unbelievably powerful influence on people. Everyone can take from her as much as they want, as much as they can carry. Sometimes that disturbs people. They compare themselves to her. But the majority of people who came into contact with her made brilliant careers" -- like Kazimiera Szczuka, for example, Gazeta Wyborcza regular, meeja person, talking head and brilliant careerist.
Neither Bie?czyk nor Szczuka can compare, however, with the very wonderful Dorota Siwicka: "I was still a schoolgirl when, at the beginning of the seventies, I found [Janion's] Romanticism, Revolution and Marxism, which grew from her Gda?sk seminar, in a bookshop... It became a cult book. We went to school with it, we opened it out on the bench, we held it under our arms at the theatre." Again I confess to a tinge of jealousy. When I was that age (the teens -- Siwicka was born in 1956) I was reading Lord of the Rings and I had never been in a theatre. Even today, I am not intellectual enough to bring a book with me to the theatre. During the interval I just stare into space like a moron.
But it's not all luv: as one might drearily expect, Szczuka, Bie?czyk and Siwicka -- errr, I mean Dr. Janion is a tough cookie. Fools are not suffered gladly. Siwicka again: "But in conversations with her there are no easy comforts, no smooth words, no maternal stroking of the head." Or as Bie?czyk puts it: "on days when I had to hand in my own text [text, mark you: nothing so mundane as an "essay" or - God forbid - "homework"] I felt like a gladiator in the arena. Her opinion was a thumb up or a thumb down." Tough guys, these academics and writers. It's a tough, tough, bloody old intelligentsia world. You horny handed workers and peasants wouldn't last a minute. If called upon to pay tribute to a teacher you'd probably fluff the whole thing by inarticulately mumbling the word "thanks."
Posted by hgrodsk at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2006
Primitives
The recent political sex-scandal here has brought the primitives crawling out of the woodwork. We have been reminded of such pearls of wisdom from the Polish political classes as "how can you rape a prostitute?" (In fairness to Poland's backwoodsmen, no one has quite equalled Putin's congratulating of the Israeli president.) But such primitivism is not limited to a few unenlightened ape-like creatures from the parliament.
Recently I had a rare opportunity to revel in the unmitigated delight that is Polish televsion. Oh, the wonders... I could fill an entire beermat with them. But one ad in particular caught my attention. It features a young Polish actor called Boris Szyc (it's pronounced "shits" so he'd better make hay while his Polish sun shines: he won't break Hollywood that easy). In it he and someone else are racing cars at great speed and with reckless abandon on public roads in a glorification of dangerous driving that was banned years ago in more civilised countries. For some reason the other boy racer ends up in the backseat of Szyc's car, handcuffed to Szyc's headrest. Szyc starts up the engine and indicates to his be-balaclava'ed prisoner that he should fasten his seatbelt. The prisoner shakes his handcuffs to show that he can't. Szyc just grins and hits the accelerator.
So we hit a tree (pedestrian etc) and you die screaming? I've got an airbag and a seatbelt. Tough Szyc.
Posted by hgrodsk at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2006
More Free Speech
The hounding of Hubert H. (see previous entry) is due to end today in court. In the meantime here is some Polish free speech of an older vintage. My mole in the archives sent me the following. It is a censor's criticism of a magazine called Veterinary Medicine from 1953. March 1953 - when Stalin died.
The harmfulness of the special issue consists in the fact that the editors limited themselves to putting a picture of comrade Stalin in page one without any kind of leader article. Putting "The Protective Vaccination of Swine" in the place of a leader article leaves a very unpleasant impression on readers.
(Readers may have an unpleasant impression of laziness on my part lately. My computer broke down and since in its absence my productivity has leapt to Stakhanovite proportions, I have decided not to have it repaired.)
Posted by hgrodsk at 02:01 PM | Comments (2)