Bad Taste Olympics

Lenin offers condescending critiques of my revolutionary ardour from atop Mount Desktop.

Hard Lines Piesio...

Justice doesn't deal with the innocent.

"And then you will buy more records, right?"

Is there a more untautological tautology than the expression 'meaningfully meaningful'?

Overacting 101

Style Leader

Just when I thought I wasn't going to get a Valenine this year...

...I think the ribbon needs changing though, so every cloud etc.

Le Retour of The Two Islands Review

When you've edited a review as long as I have, it's difficult not to become jaded. If truth be told, in recent years I have felt myself fading away from the high standards I have declared myself dedicated to diffuse, just as George, despite his best intentions, had done before me. The depressing decline in literary standards has led me, an austere, reclusive man, to spend many a night in my peasant apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, leaning perilously on the wrought iron balcony railing, after I have poured myself one Jean Gauthier too many, watching the Seine drift along past the Quai d'Orleans and the rue le Regrattier. 

If my own career as a novelist has been derailed by a lack of compelling ideas, appalling sentence construction. and sub-par grammar, I have always considered myself a keen spotter of talent in others. Thus you can imagine my excitement when my Portuguese awoke me at 14.00 this afternoon with a badly facsimiled copy of W Curran's tribute to Valentine's Day. It is as if Wisława Szymborska had been recast as a penniless Irish fishwife! 

Her words brought me back to the golden years of middle age, when I palled around with the Harry Gallaghers up on the Quai de Bourbon. How dear. darling, Louisa, Harry's wife, with her fine, shapely legs, and aquiline nose, would have been moved by these thoughtful words! It is difficult to imagine the pleasure she would have taken from the author's daring dismissal of the bourgeois requirement for a rhyming poem to scan, not to mention it's daring recasting of cliches. I particularly like the lines:

"I wait all day with bated breath,

For my bouquet I'm left bereft,

How can we miss what we've never had,

It doesn't really make me mad"

It reminds me of the last time I saw Louisa before she took a large bottle of aspirin, a sheaf of eight or nine sleeping suppositories, a bottle of Nembutal, and a half bottle of vodka. She told me that she had always loved me more than Harry, and wanted to have an affair with me. I calmly informed her that I couldn't begin to think of her in a romantic context, and she took it badly. If only she had read Curran's poem, she might have known not to get mad about what she could have never had, and moved on with her life, instead of ending her days in the American Hospital. 

Then it occurs to me: I must bring this poem to others, so that new lives may be saved anew. I tell my Portuguese to telex the printers in Eindhoven. 

The Two Islands Review is back!

By Jack Hartley

Krzysztof Kieslowski's Confectionery Corner

They say the summer is the time to take a holiday, and I suppose they can't always be in the wrong. So it was, that at the beginning of August, I left my humble home in the Mazurian lakes (cabbage slicer under one arm and a ski under the other) and took to the air. It's been a few years since I left the house, and I'd forgotten how good it can feel. I spent a few hours just drifting around in the sky; you can see so much from up there, although so many of the old buildings are gone now. For instance, the House of Culture in Sokolowsko, whose roof we used to climb to see movies for free, has been knocked to the ground and the sanatorium where my father stayed is now a holiday spa.

In the evening, I turned towards Warsaw, speeding up now. I hurried past the military hospital on Dolna Street where I managed to get myself diagnosed as "schizophrenia duplex", and the escalators in Castle Square where I met my mother in the rain after Lodz rejected me for the second time. I sat myself down outside the old Milk Cafe, where I used to meet Preisner on occasion. These places are one of the few relics of the old days, and it shows. I didn't fancy trying the meal of the day; chlodnik and weak tea, with stale cream cake for dessert. I wasn't really enjoying this part of my trip, to be honest. Then, all of a sudden, I remembered the delicious confectionery Emmanuel Finkiel used to bring me for lunch when I was working on the Trilogy in Paris. "That's what I want to eat!", I thought to myself.

I headed for Okecie Airport; when I arrived I saw that it has been renamed in honour of Frederic Chopin. I guess I wasn't famous enough for them to call the airport after me. I heard that they dedicated a fountain in Krakow, but I would have preferred the airport, to be honest. (If you don't like a fountain, you can't just fly away from it, whereas if you don't like an airport you can buy a ticket and go anywhere else in the world). I checked the timetable, and found the next flight bound for Paris; LO0333. I floated out to the runway, and waited for the plane to takeoff. "After you, Captain, just show me the way", I thought. I drafted off the plane as it made its ascent. I had never flown so high before, and it was incredibly cold. (Even ghosts can get frost bite, you know). But I persisted, and I arrived at Charles de Gaulle shortly before midnight.

Paris is such a beautiful city that I couldn't even think about sleeping. I skirted around all of the old haunts that me and my friends Piesio and Agnieszka used to frequent in the early '90s. Things haven't changed as much here as they have in Poland. I spotted a young couple walking by the Seine, and I started thinking about Irenka. I'm not sure what she is doing these days; she might be living in Paris for all I know. I kept an eye our for her, but I didn't spot her.

In the morning I headed for the Boulevard Saint-Germain to find something to eat. The chocolate hens in the window of Patrick Roger's shop looked inviting, so I headed inside. There was a vast array of sweets of all kinds; it was really very impressive. I moved towards a pretty young waitress: "A couple of fruit pastilles and a bottle of Coca-Cola with a straw in it please", I said, and waited for a response. "She can't hear you, you idiot", I thought to myself. (I forget that I'm dead sometimes!) It was nice to see the fine spread all the same though. However, I soon became homesick. I was a Pole throughout my life, even when I detested the country, and you can't change sides just because you've passed away. Everyone ought to have a place to which they return. I packed up my things, and headed back to CDG. "I've got to get back to my lawnmower and my cigarettes, and my rickety old chair", I thought. "I've got to get back home".