TICKET TO POLAND IS BOOKED!! see you soon, adam!
oh right. that’s what spring looks like. good work, ann arbor.
i love it that all my books on the orange alternative are orange.
“email adam mickiewicz. letter to kosciuszko.”
my notes make my correspondence seem WAY more exciting than it actually is.
I read verses about Poland
written by foreign poets. Germans and Russians
have not only rifles, but also
ink, pens, a little heart and a lot
of imagination. Poland — in their verses —
resembles a reckless unicorn
feeding on the wool of tapestries,
it is beautiful, weak and imprudent.
I do not comprehend the working
of the mechanism of illusion
but even I, a sober reader,
am enchanted by that legendary, defenseless country
on which feed black eagles, hungry emperors,
the Third Reich and the Third Rome.
—“verses about poland,” a. zagajewski (trans. antony graham).
In Magritte’s painting Les Amants a man and a woman are
kissing. But it can’t be much fun because they have
cloths over their heads so they can’t see each other.
I know two lovers who could not see each other correctly.
They kissed a lot but what they saw was not really the
other person. It was a person each one had made up. This
made them unhappy but they couldn’t stop doing it. They
had to make each other up.
—James Laughlin, “Les Amants”
Art Credit René Magritte
i love this painting (i have a poster of it in my apartment). i quite like the poem too.
tłusty czwartek is today. what i wouldn’t give for a pączek..mmmmm.
russian lit. english tea.
A cow has been spotted on the Soviet-Polish border.
The authorities in Moscow are informed of the situation:
Which way is it facing?
It is facing us.
Then feed it.
The news also reaches the Polish leaders in Warsaw:
Mr. Jaruzelski, this cow is standing right on our frontier.
Which way is it facing?
It is facing the other way.
Then milk it!
—
now this is my kind of polish joke.
as quoted by z. wojnowski in “staging patriotism: popular responses to solidarnosc in soviet ukraine, 1980-1981” (slavic review 71, no. 4). he notes, “this joke was overheard and noted down by the famous ukrainian writer, oles honchar, on an airplane traveling from kiev to the crimea in august 1982.”
finally. doing some reading with a practical application.
The pioneering Russian animator Fyodor Khitruk has died at age 95. Perhaps best known for his adaptations of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories, Khitru’s work was often political and avant-garde. 1973’s Island, below, won the Palme d’Or for best short.
tree and tolstoy. merry saturday.
gilberto gil played at hill this evening. it was one of the best, if not THE best, concerts i’ve seen there. he was AMAZING. i’ve never seen hill so energized. so SO so good.
(Source: Spotify)
happy independence day, poland!
tiny house. big city.
i just read this article on the TINY house jakub szczesny built between two buildings in warsaw. such a cool project. and again, so tiny.
*this photo is from this awesome nytimes slideshow of the house.
