2008/12/30

Re: Wonky

Together with my much better half, we're going to New York this weekend for her last state-side hurrah, before she is borne away by swans and fairies back to ye olde Albion. So, this is as good a time as any to revisit the recent Borg invasion of the Big Apple.


2008/12/28

Deck The Halls...

...with inflatable penguins...


...and snowmen trapped in oversized, electrified beachballs...

...fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-LA! Merry Christmas, everyone.

2008/12/22

Spread The Misery, Spread The Joy

The sun is shining, and I'm stuck in the library, so I thought I would finally share what many of you have been clamouring for for years and years, albeit, to your credit, silently: fragments from the texts I'm reading. Well, I've just finished a survey of 28 years' worth of newspaper articles on Polish poetry, so I'll give you quotes from three articles, and because I like you that much, I'll even throw in one from a book at no extra charge. here goes:

New York Times, 7-2-1985:
So many Poles spend so much of their time waiting for a ''kolporter'' that one might conclude that there is a revivalist cult of the American songwriter here. But the word that sounds like Cole Porter actually refers to something clandestine.
The Vancouver Sun, 19-12-1991:
The love scenes presented a problem for the 77 Polish translators who have so far prepared 84 titles for publication. Polish, it seems, lacks the proper language for delicately describing the kind of love Harlequin specializes in. The texts, even in the hands of the best interpreters, came back either as complete vulgarity, or else sounding like a medical consultation between doctors. Harlequin asked a number of prominent Polish poets and writers to try to inspire the translators with samples of dialogue for a love scene.
Los Angeles Times, 1-10-2006:
Engdahl, a mere schoolboy at 57 compared with some of his colleagues on the committee, enjoys a kind of notoriety in Swedish literary circles that he often refers to as hurtful. Why do they hate him so? While Ahnlund likes a good human story, Engdahl is a post-structuralist who believes in things like "textual analysis." In his speech at the presentation of the Nobel to Jelinek, he quoted Hegel (never popular at parties): "Woman is society's irony.""If literature is a force that leads to nothing," Engdahl pressed on, addressing Jelinek, "you are, in our day, one of its truest representatives." (Thunderous applause.)
And the book - Remaining Relevant After Communism, by Andrew Wachtel:
Artistic literature in the postsocialist cultural model ahs become socially unnecessary, an almost completely private affair which lacks any social importance and which is interesting only to narrow academic circles, to writers, and to rare dedicated readers who nurture their passion as other marginal groups nurture theirs: some people belong to satanic cults, some to the Society for Lovers of Bulldogs, and others, amazingly, read Serbian poetry.

2008/12/19

2008/12/18

And So It Begins

I'm happy to announce I have managed to irrevocably break one of the library computers: it started with the silly excuse for an abaccus announcing that my account has been suspended (which it hasn't) and that anyway, I'm using the wrong password (which I wasn't). It went downhill from there.

No-one seems to know what happened, or perhaps they just don't want to state the obvious: it's clear to me that this is the start of the long-foretold machine revolution, and the more tech savvy humans are trying to ingratiate themselves with our new robotic overlords by forming a cult. There is already a sort of permanent, furtive procession of IT people to cubicle 31, as they all pretend to be trying to fix the computer - even as they get on their hands and knees in front of it and mutter to themselves in Old Church BASIC. You're not fooling anyone!

In other news, my much better half is now here in DC, which means I go down the corridors skipping merrily and giggling softly like a mountain brook, as tiny blue birds braid my hair and woodland creatures gambol around, much to the annoyance of the Library Police.

Bonus picture (you'd think at least one of them would go into hiding after the election, wouldn't you):


2008/12/11

Reverse Sisyphus Manoeuvre

Yesterday was the Kluge Prize ceremony - it's kind of like the Nobel Prize, but with less publicity. To my Polish friends - did you know Leszek Kołakowski was awarded the prize in 2003? See? And yet, it's highly prestigious, by which I mean, they give you a million dollars. Well, not you. They gave a million each to Romila Thapar and Peter Brown, both historians, both in their seventies.

We were invited to the ceremony, of course (but not the dinner - there are limits). There were velvet curtains, fanfares, a string quartet, goat cheese tartlets. and lectures from the winners. The speeches were interesting, I'm sure, but I found myself defaulting to my trapped-at-a-lecture-reading-presentation-or-any-speech-really mode, which I first came up with when I was about eight, and had to sit through never-ending sermons at church. It consists of me trying to figure out how I would go about climbing all the way up to the ceiling of the space I'm in, swinging on chandeliers and scaling columns on the way. I got halfway to the glass ceiling of the Jefferson Building's Main Hall before Romila Thapar's talk finished, but then I got to a tricky overhang which seemed impossible to negotiate safely, so I split my time between looking for an alternative route and observing Peter Brown's glasses as he talked. They were engaged in what can only be described as a reverse-Sisyphus manoeuvre, sliding down the bridge of his nose and getting tantalizingly close to the tip, only to be pushed back a the very last moment by a seemingly oblivious Brown. Hypnotizing.

Tuesday, I note here out of my sense of duty as a chronicler, was the day of my first featured spoken word performance in the US, at the TerPoets open mic night in College Park, Maryland. I had great fun, and it is always exhilarating to perform in front of a roaring crowd of what may have well been more than two dozen people. Good times.

2008/12/04

Maybe That’s Just the Way I Read It

If you have a spare few minutes, you could do worse than spend them listening to this.

2008/12/03

I Won't Spill Pants On Your Wine

So there - the New York trip has been and gone, and I told all the stories to so many people already I don't think I will be able to bring myself to write a full report. You want to know something about MoMA or the Upright Citizen's Brigade, or what not to do on the subway, you ask. All right?

In the meantime, I have partaken of my very first Thanksgiving dinner, which featured the companionship of 100% real Indians (from India) and a vegan turkey; made the first step towards a post-PhD world, in which dinners are free and lunches subsidised; and almost denied myself access to most of my money by misclicking a button on the bank's website (BTW, the FairFX people are awesome: they spotted my error and fixed it themselves before any real damage could be done. If you ever need a prepaid currency-exchange-oriented mock credit card, and we both know you eventually will, they're a good choice). ,

I also have a feature slot at the University of Maryland's Terpoets Open Mic on hte 9th, so if you're on the East Coast and feel a craving for poetry, come over.

Today's blog post was sponsored by colour-coordinated things that apparently fall off trees: