This weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza has a story headlined “Bush agrees to the Geneva Convention.” How good of him to agree to something his legislature signed into law half a century ago. Who would have thought the day would come when the agreement of the US not to torture prisoners would be news? The US! The […]
It must be great to be an artist. You get to puncture pretentious ideas about art and literature and no one has any come back because you’re the one doing the art, not just talking about it. Here is Beksiński in conversation with Henryk Brzozowski: Zna Pan na pewno te wszystkie komunały, które od lat […]
Andrzej Lepper, leader of Samoobrona, a farmers’ party, has left the coalition government. Primesident Kaczy?ski accused him of warcholstwo – brawling, troublemaking. In response, Lepper called this accusation “chamstwo,” which might be translated as “boorishness” but has also been translated on occasion as “assholeishness.” Although “warcho?” (troublemaker) may seem innocuous enough, the word has interesting […]
Yes, it’s good to be back in Poland, where pedestrians are inexorably being pushed off the streets by people handing out leaflets (schools, loans) to pedestrians. Turning, inevitably, to the papers, I find one intriguing story amongst the usual mire of vituperation and sleaze. Ludwik Dorn, deputy prime minister and minister for the interior, flew […]
In their article in Gazeta Wyborcza the three young economists offered up the following statistic: in 1960s Poland for every retired person and invalid in receipt of welfare there were 12 people working and paying taxes. Turning to this week’s Sunday Times I read that in Ireland in the 1960s there was a tiny 1.4 […]
Western readers will notice something peculiar about the stern and impressive Stefan Chwin’s latest novel and other works of fiction from this part of the world: the unashamed name dropping. I mean brand names. starannie ogolony i spryskany O… S… carefully shaven and sprayed in O… S… W supermarkecie A… In A… supermarket niczym dostawca […]
I blame Bia?oszewski. For the short sentences. In fact, fragmentary. Sentences, that is. Very annoying. He wrote a book once. Famous. Pami?tnik z powstania warszawskiego. It was called. Miron Bia?oszewski wrote short, abrupt sentences in a sometimes successful attempt to capture and reflect the urgency and chaos of Warsaw during the uprising. Polish lends itself […]
On Thursday, in the sleepy provincial city of Lublin, things got exciting. A motorist noticed that the driver of a Cherokee jeep (price: around 150,000 zl — you can buy a flat for that) was behaving erratically, weaving all over the road and stopping and starting for no reason. On calling the police he was […]
Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza has an interview with Lorenzo Vidino, an Italian terrorism expert, about the recent near-attack on trans-atlantic aeroplanes. The interviewer is the ever incisive Mariusz Zawadzki. The headline is “Why Great Britain Again?” It is quite a puzzler, alright. Vidino is able to help: he says that Britain is perceived the world over […]
I wrote a few weeks back about an article — nay, an appeal — in Gazeta Wyborcza written by three young economists and claiming that Poland was facing a dependency-rate crisis (i.e. too many leeches like the old, the young and the sick and not enough worker drones). Among the authors of that article was […]
