Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Interviewed in Polityka (Oct 3^rd), Jacek Strzemieczny of the Civic Education Centre in Warsaw speaks in favour of sending your children to public, socially mixed schools. They prepare you better for life than “prestigious” schools where middle class children interact only with other middle class children. Asked how primary school principals detect the “good” pupils (or rather, winnow out the “bad” ones), he says it’s enough to call a meeting of future pupils’ parents and see if they even bother to come, or ask the children if they have had any contact with English.

I’ve commented before on the slavish devotion to the all-conquering English language of Poles – or rather, of some Poles. Some quarters are considerably more skeptical than the – ahem – elite (not that I count Strzemieczny among the slavish). It’s possible even to get the impression that, say, a Michał Witkowski could actually – unthinkably – be mocking devotees of English when he spells out English words phonetically in Margot. “Heloł” and “in czardż,” the loathsome media people say, while Waldemar Mandarynka’s trademark drink is Bacardi “brizzer” and in one place he refers to “Dragi, baraki, ful plazma na bekstejdżu!” It’s all much less reverent than what we meet a few lines down the page. Wrocław (repeatedly referred to by the show biz phoneys in the toe-curling diminutive “Wrocek”) is called “The Meeting Place”; its most prestigious (inevitably) property development is “Sky Tower.” These pretentiously idiotic names are not given phonetically: they’re the genuine products of complex-ridden PR gurus in Polish marketing departments.

Marta Dzido, in her Małż (Bivalve (zool.), mussel, clam; or, more likely given the book’s subject matter, short for “małżonek” (spouse)), also betrays less than 110% devotion to the Master Language, frequently defiling it with merely Polish spelling: “de namber ju ar trajink tu ricz…”, “Sajko bicz”, “Majteczki mejd in czajna”. Somehow much more effective than irony quotes, the phonetic spellings suggest a certain disillusionment with the promise of success held out by English boosters. Dzido is hardly a new Sinclair Lewis or John Steinbeck but there is something refreshing about the bucket of cold water she dumps on careerism in thrusting modern Poland. Her narrator is lucky enough to be asked by a newspaper to send 30 (!) ideas for articles to the editor. After a week she tries to get in touch with him:

Unfortunately he’s very busy, he has a very important meeting. He has an important board meeting. He’s in a meeting.* He just went out a minute ago. He’s on the phone. The boss can’t talk right now. He’s got a very important visitor. The boss is on a business trip. Unfortunately he can’t take your call. He’s in a meeting. He’s giving an interview. He’s riding his secretary behind closed doors in his office. He’s taking a dump on your thirty ideas.

There’s no need to know English. Just know someone.

* Polish seems to have more words for meeting than English does that I can think of off hand.

“Just have any old handsome face, cut in any old tattoos, pierce yourself more than the others, shave designs into your stubble, tilt your hat, carry a puppy in your arms, say controversial nonsense, swear, be more vulgar than the rest – and you’re a star.”

Those are Michał Witkowski’s instructions in his latest book, Margot. A part of it is the life story of Waldemar Bacardi Mandarynka (so-called because of the solarium-induced colour of his skin), a “martyr of early Polish show business.” Here’s Waldi on the subject of the jurors at his casting, as they say in “Polish” (they mean “audition”):

They nod to themselves, he [Waldi] is stupid, it’s good that he talks rubbish, that he flaunts his stupidity and annoys all the dying intelligentsia. They’re schizophrenic – they’re kind of former intelligentsia themselves: music critics and university graduates now transformed into media people. So they hate with all the more passion those of the intelligentsia that didn’t give in.

In a peculiar replay of communist Poland’s favouring of the children of workers and peasants, the intelligentsia jurors light on Waldi’s simple, rural background. One of them has read in Gazeta Wyborcza about “przystankersi”, disaffected country youth who hang around bus shelters, roughly corresponding to the urban phenomenon of “blokersi” (“przystanek”: bus stop; “blok”: block of flats). Waldi – although he is wearing artificial finger tips (“tipsy”) and has obviously turned his back on the countryside – plays up his humble origins and his membership of this semi-mythical group of “przystankers” (I suspected Witkowski of making it up but it turns out that some social anthropologist / Sunday supplement journo really did identify and describe such a subculture) and before you know it is eating sushi in Warsaw with the best of them.

I saved the best for first because in fact Margot is a disappointment. It tells a few stories, rather chaotically, and does not really draw them together well. To start with it’s a story of the life of truckers and the prostitutes that service them (quite explicit, it’s not an ideal Christmas present for your 7-year old nieces). Half way through, in a switch of subject “coś a là w podobie” Głowacki’s Ostatni cieć (The Last Caretaker), the narrator (Margot) introduces the life story of Waldemar Mandarynka: “While the enema dripped in me (because it’s not like a pear, it’s more like a drip)* Waldi honoured us with this story.” Waldi’s story is a straight satire of the shallow, celebrity-obsessed, dishonest, cruel, Warsaw-centric etc. etc. meeja. In it we meet many too-familiar types, such as the “Aging Gracefully – Yes, Gracefully – Star”, who could be any one of dozens of grotesquely primped, botoxed and face-lifted Polish female tv personalities whose age is impossible to gauge with more accuracy than “between 30 and 70.” It’s funny, rising to a farcical high-comedy kitsch explosion at the end but, lacking any real depth, easy (easy for Witkowski, that is). After Waldi’s story (about a third of the novel’s length) the narrative thread returns to Margot, but with only seven pages left there seems little point to telling us that she wandered off for casual sex in the moonlight.

Then again, I didn’t enjoy Ostatni cieć from the normally reliable Głowacki either so maybe this kind of structure just isn’t my thing. I look forward to Witkowski’s next book and in the meantime draw your attention to Bill Martin’s English translation of Lubiewo – Lovetown. You can read an extract on-line here.

* Literal translation. I haven’t the stomach to do the research required to bring it up to scratch.

A couple of weeks ago Jacek Dehnel had an article in Polityka in which he described his visit to Vienna. This week it’s Michał Witkowski’s turn: he was in Jerusalem and writes an interesting piece on it, on Polish-Jewish relations and on stereotypes. Here are the last lines: “What is the truth? What is a stereotype? I don’t know. I’m no expert. I’m just an ordinary tourist who wants to take a photograph but can’t because it’s the sabbath.” This is why I prefer Witkowski to Dehnel.

Michal Witkowski’s Lubiewo (2005) - though much concerned with the passage of time, especially from communist Poland to the present, glorious, third republic - probably fits the description of “queer literature.” The Lubiewo of the title is a beach he goes to where he meets, among many others, a group of complex-free, open, right-on, emancipated gays - one with peroxide dreads, another with a tatoo - playing ball and speaking in the language of current affairs magazines. Recognising him as a writer, one of them says:

“You’ve got to write about us, about us Gays… It has to be about two middle class gays, university educated, doctoral students in management and finances*, bespectacled, wearing jumpers… So they’ve created a lasting relationship and want to adopt a child but they keep running into problems. Society - get me? - won’t accept them even though they’re cultured and peaceful, as the reader sees. To make the contrast greater let their neighbours have a horribly dysfunctional relationship. They drink and beat their children but they’re the ones the state lets adopt children where it refuses our couple the right, even though a boy (a boy!) would be on the pig’s back with them. [...]”

“Umm. A great idea for a book, an excellent Valentine’s day present: gay couples would buy it in the shopping centres. I’ll run along now and write it. Gotta dash - I might make some money off it.”

Perhaps he would have made some money too but that is most emphatically not the book Witkowski wrote. This is what he wrote (using feminine grammatical forms - the right-on gays use masculine forms): “And I’m an intolerant old unfit, bad over the top faggot as closed to all your discourses as a communist era butcher’s after six. I am Alexis Carrington!” Elsewhere, with reference to the right-on gays’ meaningful relationships he writes “Ja chcę nieznajomego, co mnie wyrżnie jak burą sukę…” This one is not easy to translate, so I’ll just settle for “I want a stranger that’ll ride me like an old bike…” This time the pronoun is no longer masculine or feminine but “co,” which applies to objects…. Lubiewo is rough trading, no-holds barred stuff. An English translation is apparently in the works and I would recommend it.

* They’re a step up from the aspirations of Ala in Masłowska’s Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą bialo-czerwoną (White and Red), who suggests that the narrator must be studying “administration and management” - finances are always better that admin - but it’s good to see that not everyone in Poland has fully bought into chimera economics. Come to think of it, there’s a well-known line from a communist era film in which a character’s profession is described as “director” - of what, of course, it didn’t matter, as he was a made (party) man. Plus ca change!