Tag Archives: Culture

Your mother, your rat, your infidel house, your God, etc.

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Andrew Brown points us to an illuminating article by Bernard Nežmah on swearing in Serbian. Though the article is five years old, I daresay its theme is timeless.

According to Nežmah’s piece — published in Central Europe Review or, as we must now call it, Transitions Online — the Serbian language is blessed with a dazzling, perhaps unsurpassed richness of vulgarisms. Even English, no slouch at that sort of thing, pales in comparison: such are the subtleties of the Serbian variants on the F-word that Serbian-English dictionaries (the more comprehensive editions, one imagines) are reduced to explaining in an aside whether a given word for ‘fuck’ is jocularly offensive, just plain offensive, really really offensive, so offensive it should be used only in the event of war, etc.

A tip of the jaunty afoe fedora to Andrew (who surprises us by revealing he used to speak Serbo-Croat in addition to English, Swedish, Caenorhabditic and whatever else he has up his sleeve).

The Con-fusion

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I’m probably the last blogger still reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and chances are good that I won’t take on the third part, The System of the World, immediately after finishing the second, The Confusion. Not because the books aren’t good, just that it is a lot to read consecutively.

The good news is that the main characters, Jack Shaftoe and Eliza the Improbable Welshwoman, are much more interesting than they were in Quicksilver.
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Killer Identities

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Sorting through some old books yesterday, I came across one from Amin Maaloof that I hadn’t looked at in years. So I dusted it off, and started thinking about this post.

The English title of the book is “In the Name of Identity“, but the French title “Les Identit?s meurtrieres” (Lethal Identities?) or the Catalan one ‘Indentitats que Maten’ (Killer Identities) are much more expressive and to the point.
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Tour de Lance. Final Commentary.

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Alright, that’s not a particularly clever headline. I know you have probably read it a couple of hundred times in the course of the last years if you at all opened the sports section of your newspaper of choice in the month of July. But with only days left to the official retirement of Lance Armstrong from professional cycling, this year – despite the terror in London – the Tour, its most successful rider in history, as well as all alleged challengers are getting the additional amount of public attention only available in years without Olympics or a major international football competition.
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Free movement of persons, goods, capital, services and mortal remains

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Interesting piece today in the New York Times (reg. req.) on Germans having themselves cremated in the Netherlands. Wait; I should be more precise lest I alarm you — the article is about Germans arranging to have themselves cremated later. If you want to have your corpse burnt, the Dutch will do it with a lot less red tape. Much cheaper too; what’s not to love? And, thanks to the EU, Germans with bodies, but not money, to burn may freely access the Dutch cremation market.

Now that’s what Europe is all about.

Lost In Translation?

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Interesting piece in the FT this morning about Jack Lang, French PS politician, and possible presidential hopeful in 2007. Before going further I should perhaps point out that the only thing I really know about Lang is that when he was the Culture Minister, back in the 80’s, he opened a small museum dedicated to my preferred contemporary French poet – Ren? Char – in Char’s home town of L’Isle sur la Sorge. This fact may cloud my vision somewhat.

Lang is, one would have thought, the most improbable of Presidential candidates. Nonetheless, as the FT points out, he is definitely out in front as the most electable PS politician in the recent Paris Match (ifop) poll, pinning Sarkozy down to a fairly assailable 52% of the voting intentions in a head to head with him.
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National Cliches

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I was reading one of the Sueddeutsche books at lunch, and one of the characters, a Dutchman as it happens, casually drops into the conversation, “Poland has not yet perished.” It’s the opening line of the Polish national anthem, and one of those catchphrases of the culture, a hoary cliche, but one that despite everything still touches hearts.

I could think of one other for a European nation, “Happy is he who can say I am a Turk.” As much as the Polish phrase was a reaction to Partition in the 18th century, the Turkish phrase was a deliberate program from Ataturk, part of the whole effort to transfer loyalty from the Ottoman nstate to the Turkish.

The Germans might once have had one, but haven’t since 1945.

And of course there’s “God bless America.” Once a fervent and perhaps fragile hope, it has been misused by GWB&Co, turned into something of a command. Sets my teeth on edge.

Anyway, I was wondering how many of these national touchstones I’ve been completely ignorant about, lo these many years. What others are out there?

The Soap Bubble

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Apart from the fact that the alleged origin of the prize exhibit at Art Basle – a bar of soap, displayed on a square of black velvet, purportedly made from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s fat, which was removed during liposuction – may be in bad taste in terms of historical precedents, something else struck my untypically prudish eye: the yield inversion on contemporary over historic works of art. Sign of the times, Jack, sign of the times.

Prices are soaring for star-quality artists, topping levels charged for the old masters in a market that has an estimated $20 billion annual turnover, making veteran art experts wonder if this feeding frenzy can really last. Cellphones clamped to their ears, clutching lists, buyers clad in high-fashion gear dash from booth to booth. They exchange prices in the clipped shorthand of a seasoned trader. “Six-eight for that? Or two at 20?” said one, pointing from a Donald Judd minimalist sculpture to photographs. Nothing sells here with less than three zeros added to the price. Like Internet stocks, bonds, real estate and commodities before it, contemporary art today is luring the type of glitzy investment where anything that sniffs of a potential blockbuster is flying off the walls.

Joseph Vissarionovich and the People Who Loved Him

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Because some of them undoubtedly did, even people who knew him quite well. In his heyday, millions professed their love, sang his praises. Even those he had condemned in show trials, or in no trials, wrote to him of their devotion, wrote of their faithfulness, wrote of their belief. Perhaps they meant it, perhaps it was the only hope they had to continue living.

One person who does seem to have loved him in something like the normal sense of the word was his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Perhaps that is why she shot herself.
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