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February 26, 2007
Attention to Detail (Part n)
I am happy to report that I have solved the mystery of why Polish writers are so sloppy about little things like suspension of disbelief. They're copying Joseph “monachal vaticinations” Conrad. In Under Western Eyes Razumov enters his apartment to find a man called Haldin inside, waiting for him. How did this man get in? He was not let in by the landlady or the “dvornik” - this is spelled out clearly. Perhaps people didn't lock their doors in those days. A hundred years or so ago there were different notions of public and private space, after all. But the apartment door does have a lock: when Razumov leaves he locks Haldin in. Haldin is on the run (this all comes out in chapter one so I'm not spoiling much). The police are looking for him. He is in great peril... In the circumstances, I would not have agreed to being locked in – particularly since the front door of the apartment has a bolt anyway. Suppose Haldin looked out the window and saw the police arrive? He would be trapped. They would see him coming out the window. No, the door must be unlocked. As you can see, I would have been a lousy conspirator.
Not as bad as Haldin and Razumov, though. Haldin and a now dead accomplice have just killed a Czarist minister at dawn that day. To prepare themselves for the task, they spend the night wandering around Petersburg with bombs in their pockets. Whenever they saw police they let on they were a couple of drunks. Why not just meet at the appointed place a few minutes before the attack? The conspirators roamed around the snowy streets all night long drawing attention to themselves. Razumov is not much better. Haldin persuades him to go and get the help of one Ziemianitch, who has transport. So off he goes to look for the getaway driver in the pub he usually haunts. Razumov is careful to draw as much attention to himself as possible. When the publican tells him Ziemianitch is dead drunk he makes a scene (“You lie!” he shouts, having already bit his lip till it bled.) But the publican is not lying. Ziemianitch is indeed drunk. Razumov tries to remedy this situation by beating the insensible man almost to death (he breaks a pitch fork handle on the man's back) – in front of the publican, of course.
What modern Polish writers may have missed, though, is that the narrator is telling this part of the story on the basis of Razumov's diary (that's right: once police suspicion is firmly fixed on him, he starts keeping a diary). And so, when the text refers to his “cool superior reason” only moments after nearly killing a complete stranger for no reason at all, this is only Razumov's self-image. (“Razumov” comes from “rozum,” Polish for reason, understanding.) When Haldin goes on about Razunov's great brains he is probably flattering him: there may be more to this Haldin than meets the eye.
That lets Conrad off the hook for much of book one (or “Part First” as he calls it. Conrad often reads like a poor translation: “I used to take there books,” “Not a few poor people,” “I hear your High Nobility” etc. Part four of the book is called “Part Four”). But there are some niggling doubts: I defy any theatre director to block the scene in the general's room with Razumov, the general and Prince K--, a scene in which the general sits “before” his desk, in profile to Razumov, and the prince looks at Razumov “round the back of the armchair,” though a couple of mentions later he is standing...
Then there is book two. Here the narrator is speaking for himself. And here, on page 100, is Peter Ivanovitch's hat standing on the floor beside him and here, on page 107, is Peter Ivanovitch “seizing his hat off his knees.” How did it get there? I think we should be told.
Eastern Europeans and Russians will argue that these are the kind of pettifogging details that only a dull, materialist Westerner would pay any attention to. Of course Razumov's watch stops on the fatal night. Only a Westerner would remember to wind it. Indeed, the book is more about the Russian Spirit, totalitarianism, the power of the word to destroy and what have you than it is about the details of revolutionary conspiracies or levitating hats. But as explanations go it's a bit of a cop-out: “you wouldn't understand because you are a westerner.” Substitute the word “westerner” for, say, “woman” or “culchie” in polite society and see how many nods of understanding you get. In fact, Conrad must be sending up the Russian Soul line of guff with the story of Peter Ivanovitch's escape from Siberia: he files off one of his leg irons but drops and loses the file before doing the second one. Poles tell a joke of this sort about a Russian caught by the devil to this day...
But words mean things. Is this thing about the bolt/key Razumov's and Haldin's incompetence? The floating hat suggests that maybe it is just Conrad's carelessness and it would be a mistake to read too much into the locking in of Haldin. I'll leave the last words to Conrad, although I must say I don't understand them: “Practical thinking in the last instance is but criticism.”
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2007
Poetry
Here's a Polish poem from 1950 in - for reasons that should become obvious - very free translation:
"One needs"
Stars
stars have spread out in heaven
Silence descends from the tops of the town.
One needs
one needs love poems
so that lovers can notice them
In the plan
in the plan
in the six-year plan
one needs
one needs happy families
Let poetry among them become
an ornament to their evening hours.
Communist Poland was so fiercely independent of the USSR that their plans lated six years, not five. The poet in question is Wisława Syzmborska, who went on to better things.
Posted by hgrodsk at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)
Business is business
Nie reveals that one of the creditors of the Academic Clinical Hospital in Wrocaw, one of the hospitals facing the bailiffs, is a company called Greenhouse. The big cheese here is one Tomasz Tokarski, a CASE (Socio-economic Analysis Centre) expert. CASE is the organisation that advocates the introduction of additional, voluntary health insurance.
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
Numbers
Average Polish pay, 1997: 1,000 zł
Average Polish pay, 2005: 2,500 zł
Mimimum wage: currently about 935 zł
(Some organisations define poverty as an income of less than half the national average.)
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)
Keeping a Grip
Advertisers are easy enough targets at the best of times: a car manufacturer is trying to persuade gullible Poles that its new car can see around corners. (Cretinous slogan: "C'mon" - in English of course, though it's a German firm operating in Poland.)
But when they supply the ammunition themselves... Here's the slogan of one ad agency: "Wyobraźnia pod kontrolą" - "Imagination under control." And they call it a creative industry.
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2007
In and out
In the last two years some 1.2 million people have left Poland. Since May 2004 2.5 million cars have been imported. (Polityka 2007: nr. 7) I don't know what that signifies. Probably nothing.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)
Plagiarism? Intertextuality? A Bloody Cheek?
On the cover of a new edition of Krzysztof Varga's Chłopaki nie płaczą is a stern message to, among others, Olaf Lubaszenko, who had the temerity to make a film of the same name but entirely unconnected with Varga's original work (published 1996). Poor old Varga was tired of explaining to interviewers that the two were unconnected. Chłopaki nie płaczą means “Boys don't Cry.” Older readers may remember that this is a song by the Cure – from long before Varga's novel.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)
Szyc Hits Pits
I'm sorry. It's the best I could do and God knows I have been trying. This is the closest I can come to “Sticks nix hicks pix,” the famousest headline ever. Boris Szyc (it's pronounced “shits”) is an actor. He was in a film, playing a priest, against his co-star's prostitute. The reviewer didn't like the picture. He rated it poor stuff (wondering, acidly, why Polish film makers concentrate on priests and prostitutes and ignore the other 99% of society). So there is my headline. If only Boris had given up acting after the bad reviews...
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)
Kraków
There's a painting I particularly wanted to see so I took myself down to Kraków to have a look, spending a few days in the old place. I picked up a copy of the local paper and was dismayed to find that the good people of the newspaper are obssessed with Wrocław. How much money was invested in Wrocław last year? How much in Kraków? How rich how fast can you get in Wrocław in comparison with Kraków?
While in the National Museum looking for the painting I was reminded of a Billy Connolly joke: why do police officers always want you to describe what happened in your own words? “I don't have my own words. What would I want with them?” he asks. In the museum there was a video playing of an artist from Israel. At first I thought she was speaking Hebrew, as I did not understand any of it but then I read the accompanying blurb (the writer of which was good enough to tell me what I was supposed to feel when I looked at the images). In fact, the artist was talking in a language of her own invention. So there you go, Billy: if you had your own words instead of other peoples' you could be an internationally celebrated artist.
I also picked up a copy (the 92nd) of Aktivist, hoping to find that the kids were still on the verge of rioting. The editorial was written by one Łukasz Figielski: “We believe that your intellectual capabilities do not end with choosing the right gladrags.” It would be slightly more stirring if the magazine had not had three full-page ads for clothing manufacturers. To the untrained eye, sated with the radical pages of this guerilla publication (it's free), activism is about nightclubbing and fashion.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:05 PM | Comments (1)
I've got principles coming out of my ears
Marcin Wojciechowski of Gazeta Wyborcza (Feb 13th) takes the unfortunate minister for agriculture, Andrzej Lepper, to task for questioning the wisdom of locating an anti-missile shield in Poland. “In matters of state as important as the missile shield only the competent members of government should speak out, not the minister for agriculture, and never outside of the country,” he writes, continuing “Lepper has broken both these principles” -- principles which Wojciechowski made up on the spot. The idea of collective cabinet responsibility appears to be alien to both politicians and journalists in Poland. It's perfectly okay here to blame Lepper for – e.g.-- the pork mountain, even if you are in a coalition with him. And how dare a (democratically elected) farmer speak out about national defence, eh?
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)
We had to destroy the hospitals to save them
As mentioned previously, hospitals here in Poland are being overrun by bailiffs as the government agrees to bail out only a few of them. One of the reasons being offered for this disastrous turn of events is that there are too many hospitals. There may well be something in this but I would find it a little easier to swallow if there had been any mention of this problem before the current crisis. “Allowing hospitals going bankrupt would be good for the hospitals and for the patients. It would allow the protection of essential equipment from bailiffs” writes Elżbieta Cichocka in Gazeta Wzborcza (Feb 9th). Where were the leading articles calling for the closure of hospitals before now? After all, this is the crusading GW, motto: “it's not all the same to us.”
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2007
Health Care Bingo
The Polish health service is in a jock. Several hospitals in the ?l?sk region have had the pleasure of forming a close acquaintance with the bailiffs and it's back in time to the Victorian era of Do-gooding as a whip around is organised to keep taxpayer-funded hospitals afloat. If this were happening in a socialist country it would be held up as proof positive that socialism does not work.
Many commentators are commentating on the reasons why the Polish health service is in a jock. Here I present a cut-out-and-paste version of office bingo to help you while away the hours of talking heads talking about why the Polish health service is in a jock. You have to choose just three of the following commonly proferred explanations of why the Polish health service is in a jock. As soon as you hear or read one, award yourself the given number of points. The winner is whoever amasses the most points.
Reasons why the Polish health service is in a jock:
1. the managers of hospitals are incompetent (1 point)
2. the managers of hospitals are corrupt (1 point)
3. trade unions (1 point)
4. Fidel Castro is a dictator (2 points)
5. all the nurses have got the hell out and are working for five times their Polish wage in Irish hospitals scrubbing toilets (2 points)
6. all the doctors have got the hell out and are working for ten times their Polish wage in Irish hospitals parking old people on trolleys in the corridors of Saint James's hospital, Dublin (4 points)
7. Andrzej Lepper, minister for agriculture, is looking out for the interests of his constituents, the bastard (2 points)
8. the miners. They earn more than the average wage and they get to retire early, before their health is broken in half by the mines (2 points)
9. did I mention Fidel Castro? (2 points)
10. too many hospitals (1 point)
11. too few hospitals (1 point)
12. spies: it's all a "provocation" (1 point)
13. Poles are too mean to pay for a proper health service. They'll pay a bribe if it's their own in-grown toe-nail but pay for the new hip of some old boot you've never even met before? Forget about it: that's communism (25,000 points)
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:17 PM | Comments (3)