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Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West
24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. The passengers of the low-budget airlines go east for stag parties, and they go West for work; but the East stays East, and West stays West. Caricatures abound - the Polish plumber in the tabloids, the New Cold War in the broadsheets and the endless search for 'the new Berlin' for hipsters. Against the stereotypes, Agata Pyzik peers behind the curtain to take a look at the secret histories of Eastern Europe (and its tortured relations with the 'West'). Neoliberalism and mass migration, post-punk and the Bowiephile obsession with the Eastern Bloc, Orientalism and 'self-colonization', the emancipatory potentials of Socialist Realism, the possibility of a non-Western idea of modernity and futurism, and the place of Eastern Europe in any current revival of 'the idea of communism' – all are much more complex and surprising than they appear. Poor But Sexy refuses both a dewy-eyed Ostalgia for the 'good old days' and the equally desperate desire to become a 'normal part of Europe', reclaiming instead the idea an Other Europe.
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309 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 2014
25 people are currently reading
693 people want to read
About the author
Agata Pyzik
8 books9 followersAgata Pyzik is a Polish journalist who divides her time between Warsaw and London, where she has already established herself as a writer on art, politics, music and culture for various magazines, including The Wire, Guardian, New Statesman, New Humanist, Afterall and Frieze.
She studied philosophy, art history, English and American studies in Warsaw, and started writing and publishing during this time. She wrote for major mainstream Polish newspapers, like Gazeta Wyborcza, Dziennik, Przekrój and Polityka, as well as was a regular contributor for a contemporary music magazine “Glissando”, and smaller literary magazines, like Lampa and other art magazines. Her major interest was literature, especially poetry, contemporary art and architecture. Her translations include American poet James Schuyler into Polish as well as a book by the Polish urbanist Krzysztof Nawratek City as Political idea into English, published by Plymouth University in 2011.
She worked for the foremost independent art foundation in Poland, Bec Zmiana, for whom she contributed essays to several books on architecture and philosophy. She also interviewed many writers for literary magazines, including Michel Houellebecq, Laszlo Krasznohorkai and Etgar Keret.
More recently her main interest is in contemporary forms of resistance and political aesthetics. She has interviewed some of the foremost leftist thinkers and art theoreticians for the Polish journal 6 Weeks Notebook, which put together will become a book in Poland.
(from http://www.zero-books.net/authors/aga...)
She studied philosophy, art history, English and American studies in Warsaw, and started writing and publishing during this time. She wrote for major mainstream Polish newspapers, like Gazeta Wyborcza, Dziennik, Przekrój and Polityka, as well as was a regular contributor for a contemporary music magazine “Glissando”, and smaller literary magazines, like Lampa and other art magazines. Her major interest was literature, especially poetry, contemporary art and architecture. Her translations include American poet James Schuyler into Polish as well as a book by the Polish urbanist Krzysztof Nawratek City as Political idea into English, published by Plymouth University in 2011.
She worked for the foremost independent art foundation in Poland, Bec Zmiana, for whom she contributed essays to several books on architecture and philosophy. She also interviewed many writers for literary magazines, including Michel Houellebecq, Laszlo Krasznohorkai and Etgar Keret.
More recently her main interest is in contemporary forms of resistance and political aesthetics. She has interviewed some of the foremost leftist thinkers and art theoreticians for the Polish journal 6 Weeks Notebook, which put together will become a book in Poland.
(from http://www.zero-books.net/authors/aga...)
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
September 25, 2014
Poor But Sexy could have been an excellent book - a readable introduction to the various and diverse cultures of eastern Europe, most of which are often seen as a single entity and inferior to these of the broadly defined West. Although not excusable as ignorance never is, it is understandable - countries which form this part of the world have been closed out of it for 50 years, and when they brought themselves back to it they surfaced again in different shapes. One thing was consistent - they were perceived as backward and undeveloped, poor and worse than those who were doing the perceiving. All the different countries and their cultures have been thrown into one bag, and branded with these unkind characteristics - if you'd ask an average Westerner what is the difference between a Russian and a Belorussian or a Ukrainian, a Pole and a Czech, chances are that would be an average answer you'd receive. After all, all Russians are drunks And all Romanians are gypsies, and who even cares about the Czechs?
Although the Berlin Wall has fell 25 years ago and this part of the world has experienced massive changes - largely as a result of freedom of movement - many of these sentiments continue to persist, and the unfavorable impression of the eastern nations is still widespread. This i why I approached Agata Pyzik's book with a good amount of interest - not only because she's a fellow Pole, but because I saw her book as a possible introduction to recent cultural and social history of our country and those surrounding it, one which I could recommend to my foreign friends.
To give Pyzik credit she does address these points - and more - but her book is a total mess. I don't think that an editor was actually involved in its creation - I have never seen a book which could more benefit from one. Although chaptered and divided into sections, Pyzik constantly jumps from topic to topic at a whim - the good sections of the book get buried under endless unnecessary digressions which are probably more interesting to the author than the potential reader (such as long entries on David Bowie and his music). The book is just as unedited on the sentence level - many of Pyzik sentences are haphazard and unnecessarily long, again prompting the question - did anyone edit this book? The text does not resemble a work of non-fiction but a collection of blog entries, hastily thrown together. And as Pyzik jumps from Poland to Germany to Romania to Poland again, from ancient history to modern times and from Bauhaus to Socialist Realism we see the book's biggest flaw - the lack of a central thesis and academic (and editorial) rigor.
Such rigor would require that in discussing history and culture an author would go beyond his/hers own interests and present elements which have been important in shaping both, even if they're not interesting to them or they personally disagree with such elements. Meanwhile, you'll find Pyzik going on for pages about Dawid Bowie and his music - which is not bad in itself - but you'll find her completely omitting crucial elements of culture which shaped lives in these times and continue to be relevant today.
Any Pole knows the famous black and white masterpiece of comedy, Rejs - The Cruise - shot as a quasi-documentary about the weekend cruise on a ship across the Vistula, it is a relentless parody of communism and the many absurdities of Polish life at the time. A stowaway is taken by mistake to be the event's cultural coordinator by the ship's captain, and before long he assumes the role of the vessel's own small dictator who makes both the crew and passenger participate in his absurd and vaguely humiliating games.
What's remarkable about Rejs is that the film features only a few professional actors, with the rest being amateurs who have never acted in a film before - giving it its unique air of absolute authenticity and made it a beloved cult classic. It also features what is probably the most memorable comedic performance by the great Polish amateur, untrained actor - Jan Himilsbach.
If you are interested in watching Rejs, I am happy to report that it has been digitally remastered and uploaded to YouTube by the Polish Film Studio "TOR", where you can watch it legally and for free - with English subtitles. Follow this link:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkEf4...
Rejs is not the only film in Polish cinema of the period to be a play on communism. Stanisław Bareja, a famous Polish film director, has written and directed a series of films which openly make fun of Polish communism and don't even try very hard to hide it - the only thing they miss is a sign stating "this motion picture is making fun of communism". Bareja's famous films such as Miś - Teddy Bear, Co mi zrobisz jak mnie złapiesz - What Will You Do When You Catch Me? - and his script for Rozmowy Kontrolowane - Controlled Conversations - are all cult films and brilliantly funny tours through Poland under communism. Bareja's work and influence on Polish culture is enormous, and quotes from his films have permanently settled themselves into Polish language. His work has even sparked a creation of a new word - Bareizm - initially used by his critics to describe his work as a synonym of kitsch; in contemporary Poland the word is used to describe absurd statements, signs, laws and things that couldn't happen anywhere else but here.
In his movies Bareja liked to have the protagonist walk into a room with a television set, on which a talking head would be giving the daily news. Dziennik Telewizyjny - literally "Television Daily" was a league in its own - it would usually feature two hosts, a man and a woman, dressed formally and sitting behind a desk with an obligatory telephone, and giving the news of the day without the slightest sign of humor or indeed any emotion - complete and utter professionalism. Popular news included the great development of Polish heavy industry and Soviet-Polish relations which were always friendly, and sometimes included news from other socialist countries such as People's Republic of Bulgaria or Mongolia. It would also often feature interviews with renowned economists or historians, who were just as robotic. Everybody spoke with unique wooden new-speak and spent hours saying nothing in particular, saving the few biting moments of fact and emotion for the strident ant-western rhetoric.
In the 90's, after the end of communism, Polish journalist Jacek Fedorowicz has resurrected Dziennik Telewizyjny as a satircal show, similar to the American Colbert Report. Fedorowicz would be dressed in a suit, sit behind a desk with the familiar telephone and say absurd statements in the wooden style of the real Dziennik with a complete poker face, parodying real events from the time. The program had the best fun with creating fake interviews with real politicians - parts of a real interview would be cut and inserted into a fake one - with great care put into arranging the studio's stage design to make both indistinguishable. Such an interview would end on the most absurd and comical conclusion possible, and often relied on heavy word play which made it even more funny. Fedorowicz even had the original Dziennik's opening reel.
These things are obvious and familiar to anyone who has grown up or lived in Poland at the time - and they are a part of the country's artistic and cultural heritage, and examples of our ability to laugh at ourselves and our past, and would undoubtedly be interesting to foreigners who want to understand the country and its people. Yet you won't learn about them from Pyzik's book - however noble its intentions might be. With all its good points and ideas it contains I was disappointed by its chaos and omissions, and these negatives outweighed the positives.
Although the Berlin Wall has fell 25 years ago and this part of the world has experienced massive changes - largely as a result of freedom of movement - many of these sentiments continue to persist, and the unfavorable impression of the eastern nations is still widespread. This i why I approached Agata Pyzik's book with a good amount of interest - not only because she's a fellow Pole, but because I saw her book as a possible introduction to recent cultural and social history of our country and those surrounding it, one which I could recommend to my foreign friends.
To give Pyzik credit she does address these points - and more - but her book is a total mess. I don't think that an editor was actually involved in its creation - I have never seen a book which could more benefit from one. Although chaptered and divided into sections, Pyzik constantly jumps from topic to topic at a whim - the good sections of the book get buried under endless unnecessary digressions which are probably more interesting to the author than the potential reader (such as long entries on David Bowie and his music). The book is just as unedited on the sentence level - many of Pyzik sentences are haphazard and unnecessarily long, again prompting the question - did anyone edit this book? The text does not resemble a work of non-fiction but a collection of blog entries, hastily thrown together. And as Pyzik jumps from Poland to Germany to Romania to Poland again, from ancient history to modern times and from Bauhaus to Socialist Realism we see the book's biggest flaw - the lack of a central thesis and academic (and editorial) rigor.
Such rigor would require that in discussing history and culture an author would go beyond his/hers own interests and present elements which have been important in shaping both, even if they're not interesting to them or they personally disagree with such elements. Meanwhile, you'll find Pyzik going on for pages about Dawid Bowie and his music - which is not bad in itself - but you'll find her completely omitting crucial elements of culture which shaped lives in these times and continue to be relevant today.
Any Pole knows the famous black and white masterpiece of comedy, Rejs - The Cruise - shot as a quasi-documentary about the weekend cruise on a ship across the Vistula, it is a relentless parody of communism and the many absurdities of Polish life at the time. A stowaway is taken by mistake to be the event's cultural coordinator by the ship's captain, and before long he assumes the role of the vessel's own small dictator who makes both the crew and passenger participate in his absurd and vaguely humiliating games.
What's remarkable about Rejs is that the film features only a few professional actors, with the rest being amateurs who have never acted in a film before - giving it its unique air of absolute authenticity and made it a beloved cult classic. It also features what is probably the most memorable comedic performance by the great Polish amateur, untrained actor - Jan Himilsbach.
If you are interested in watching Rejs, I am happy to report that it has been digitally remastered and uploaded to YouTube by the Polish Film Studio "TOR", where you can watch it legally and for free - with English subtitles. Follow this link:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkEf4...
Rejs is not the only film in Polish cinema of the period to be a play on communism. Stanisław Bareja, a famous Polish film director, has written and directed a series of films which openly make fun of Polish communism and don't even try very hard to hide it - the only thing they miss is a sign stating "this motion picture is making fun of communism". Bareja's famous films such as Miś - Teddy Bear, Co mi zrobisz jak mnie złapiesz - What Will You Do When You Catch Me? - and his script for Rozmowy Kontrolowane - Controlled Conversations - are all cult films and brilliantly funny tours through Poland under communism. Bareja's work and influence on Polish culture is enormous, and quotes from his films have permanently settled themselves into Polish language. His work has even sparked a creation of a new word - Bareizm - initially used by his critics to describe his work as a synonym of kitsch; in contemporary Poland the word is used to describe absurd statements, signs, laws and things that couldn't happen anywhere else but here.
In his movies Bareja liked to have the protagonist walk into a room with a television set, on which a talking head would be giving the daily news. Dziennik Telewizyjny - literally "Television Daily" was a league in its own - it would usually feature two hosts, a man and a woman, dressed formally and sitting behind a desk with an obligatory telephone, and giving the news of the day without the slightest sign of humor or indeed any emotion - complete and utter professionalism. Popular news included the great development of Polish heavy industry and Soviet-Polish relations which were always friendly, and sometimes included news from other socialist countries such as People's Republic of Bulgaria or Mongolia. It would also often feature interviews with renowned economists or historians, who were just as robotic. Everybody spoke with unique wooden new-speak and spent hours saying nothing in particular, saving the few biting moments of fact and emotion for the strident ant-western rhetoric.
In the 90's, after the end of communism, Polish journalist Jacek Fedorowicz has resurrected Dziennik Telewizyjny as a satircal show, similar to the American Colbert Report. Fedorowicz would be dressed in a suit, sit behind a desk with the familiar telephone and say absurd statements in the wooden style of the real Dziennik with a complete poker face, parodying real events from the time. The program had the best fun with creating fake interviews with real politicians - parts of a real interview would be cut and inserted into a fake one - with great care put into arranging the studio's stage design to make both indistinguishable. Such an interview would end on the most absurd and comical conclusion possible, and often relied on heavy word play which made it even more funny. Fedorowicz even had the original Dziennik's opening reel.
These things are obvious and familiar to anyone who has grown up or lived in Poland at the time - and they are a part of the country's artistic and cultural heritage, and examples of our ability to laugh at ourselves and our past, and would undoubtedly be interesting to foreigners who want to understand the country and its people. Yet you won't learn about them from Pyzik's book - however noble its intentions might be. With all its good points and ideas it contains I was disappointed by its chaos and omissions, and these negatives outweighed the positives.
November 23, 2014
If you're familiar with the Zero Books imprint, you know what you're in for: an analysis of pop culture by a leftist member of the intelligentsia. Unlike most Zero Books, Poor But Sexy is a full-length work, a tour through Eastern European pop culture before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It's erudite, ranty, witty, opinionated, more than a little random, not terribly useful as research source material but entertaining enough to make up for its shortage of conventional scholarship. Pyzik is utterly dismissive of anything involving computers, so online culture merits a single snarky sentence in 280 pages. It's not coincidental: while Pyzik is critical of "Ostalgia," she's fairly guilty of it herself, in harkening back to an era where protest and political art - in the avant-garde, punk, and high-culture sense - mattered. Some of this is her thesis: that when Eastern Europe looked "West," at least for the artists and intellectuals she's interested in, they looked to Paris, not New York, and to a common European culture of intellectualism and letters - but ended up with entertainment capitalism.
It's erudite, ranty, witty, opinionated, more than a little random, not terribly useful as research source material but entertaining enough to make up for its shortage of conventional scholarship. Pyzik is utterly dismissive of anything involving computers, so online culture merits a single snarky sentence in 280 pages. It's not coincidental: while Pyzik is critical of "Ostalgia," she's fairly guilty of it herself, in harkening back to an era where protest and political art - in the avant-garde, punk, and high-culture sense - mattered. Some of this is her thesis: that when Eastern Europe looked "West," at least for the artists and intellectuals she's interested in, they looked to Paris, not New York, and to a common European culture of intellectualism and letters - but ended up with entertainment capitalism.
January 29, 2024
desperately needs an editor
February 18, 2023
imo the best way to describe my experience with this book is:
1. wow, it reads like a long Atlantic article!
2. oh no, it reads like a long Atlantic article…
3. meh, it reads like a long Atlantic article.
while I feel Mark Fisher has done a lot of interesting and innovative writing, the flipside is that a lot of people try to imitate this style of texts. and often it leads to results that are either unbearable to read (pretty much anything written by Filip Szałasek) or just kinda joyless (like the discussed book). this was a difficult to read, and not entirely in fun, engaging way. but I have to say that maybe just the topic or the challenge is just too big to cover both social and political intricacies of middle and eastern europe. because - to give credit to the author - she’s definitely skilled writer. the first part of the book which describes political turmoil of the region, the media that affect it and other details are written in a very interesting way, this was the part of the book that was the most easy to read (although I have to acknowledge that some of it may be due to the fact, that as a Pole I knew a lot of this stuff before even starting reading).
for me where the issues started piling up when the author started veering towards more cultural side of the story. judging from reviews i assume this is the main part where people start to have these thoughts of „lack of an editor”. sometimes I just thought „it seems like the author just read a lot of this stuff, and then randomly decided to tie it all up”. of course this is maybe harsh considering that while history is easier to tell given its more linear nature, but I don’t really feel any effort to create a cohesive image of mid- and eastern European culture. It’s just jumping around random bands, writers, cinematographers etc. in random points in time.
and maybe I’m the wrong target. maybe it’s just for people who are thrilled to catch as many cultural connections just for the sake of it. but as much as i tried, after couple days of reading, every time I was going back to it, there was some element of dread before starting to read. though once I got rid of the thought that this is a cohesive body of work, and instead I started treating it like a series of vignettes it became slightly easier to skim through the pages.
I really wish the scale on goodreads had halves, like on rate your music, because generally I’d rate it 5/10 - even though I had harsh time, I definitely see the merits of the author writing and I got to know some interesting movies and music through that. but at the same time I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than someone who reallllly likes Mark Fisher and is absolutely dying to read anything about cultural studies.
1. wow, it reads like a long Atlantic article!
2. oh no, it reads like a long Atlantic article…
3. meh, it reads like a long Atlantic article.
while I feel Mark Fisher has done a lot of interesting and innovative writing, the flipside is that a lot of people try to imitate this style of texts. and often it leads to results that are either unbearable to read (pretty much anything written by Filip Szałasek) or just kinda joyless (like the discussed book). this was a difficult to read, and not entirely in fun, engaging way. but I have to say that maybe just the topic or the challenge is just too big to cover both social and political intricacies of middle and eastern europe. because - to give credit to the author - she’s definitely skilled writer. the first part of the book which describes political turmoil of the region, the media that affect it and other details are written in a very interesting way, this was the part of the book that was the most easy to read (although I have to acknowledge that some of it may be due to the fact, that as a Pole I knew a lot of this stuff before even starting reading).
for me where the issues started piling up when the author started veering towards more cultural side of the story. judging from reviews i assume this is the main part where people start to have these thoughts of „lack of an editor”. sometimes I just thought „it seems like the author just read a lot of this stuff, and then randomly decided to tie it all up”. of course this is maybe harsh considering that while history is easier to tell given its more linear nature, but I don’t really feel any effort to create a cohesive image of mid- and eastern European culture. It’s just jumping around random bands, writers, cinematographers etc. in random points in time.
and maybe I’m the wrong target. maybe it’s just for people who are thrilled to catch as many cultural connections just for the sake of it. but as much as i tried, after couple days of reading, every time I was going back to it, there was some element of dread before starting to read. though once I got rid of the thought that this is a cohesive body of work, and instead I started treating it like a series of vignettes it became slightly easier to skim through the pages.
I really wish the scale on goodreads had halves, like on rate your music, because generally I’d rate it 5/10 - even though I had harsh time, I definitely see the merits of the author writing and I got to know some interesting movies and music through that. but at the same time I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than someone who reallllly likes Mark Fisher and is absolutely dying to read anything about cultural studies.
May 10, 2016
Somewhere underneath layer upon layer of utterly pretentious nonsense lie the bones of an excellent analysis of Eastern European pop culture that contains some truly interesting insights into life under communism and the experience of coming to terms with life after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
This is not that book.
Pyzik is not a bad writer, in fact, considering she is not writing in her mother tongue she's an excellent one, but she is in dire need of an editor.
This is not that book.
Pyzik is not a bad writer, in fact, considering she is not writing in her mother tongue she's an excellent one, but she is in dire need of an editor.
August 11, 2015
An excellent cultural study of Poland under communism, showing an alternate history of the era with artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians who were for the most part unknown in the West (and to me). Pyzik shows that post-war Poland had an active and sophisticated popular culture, lost in the rush to "Europeanization" after 1989.
The book is a bit disorganized but passionate: I love a good rant!
The book is a bit disorganized but passionate: I love a good rant!
July 26, 2017
A deep and insighful study. As much as I enjoyed the writer's perspective, this book lacks editing (and sometimes footnotes), a fact which is painfully obvious from the very first chapter. Recommended, but with caution.
Read
April 27, 2015I can't possibly force my way through this chaos...absolutely impossible to read.
September 26, 2022
i think i am a bit too stupid for this book, but not in a good way. it had such high potential, but why was it so short but felt utterly eternal? :|
May 12, 2020
Dość chaotyczna i trudna do oceny książka, nierównomiernie zagłębiająca się w obszary relacji centrum - peryferie. Czasem wręcz akademicko wnikająca w analizę znaczeniową poszczególnych wersów utworów muzycznych, czasem ślizgająca się po generalizujących obserwacjach zachowania Polaków na pokładzie Ryanair’a, czasem całkowicie zbaczająca z toru narracji.
Sporo interesujących myśli i sporo trudnych do przebrnięcia fragmentów.
Sporo interesujących myśli i sporo trudnych do przebrnięcia fragmentów.
September 8, 2017
Very thought-provoking and raised a lot of interesting questions (plus gives me many things to pursue further), but it needed a strong editor -- it's often haphazard and runs off on tangents that go nowhere. Still well worth a read.
Read
November 1, 2021I read this while I was living in Berlin for a couple of months this summer, and it went a long way towards filling out my understanding of the psycho-geography of the city and the countries just a little bit further east (mainly Poland, but with some little bits about Czechia and Romania too). And I learned about a bunch of Polish new wave acts that I am just about to look for on Youtube, and a British group called "Xex" who apparently have a song called "Soviet Nerve Gas Attack"(!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nIwH...
Reading this also gave me an excuse to relisten to some Ultravox!.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nIwH...
Reading this also gave me an excuse to relisten to some Ultravox!.
November 19, 2025
complicated and chaotic 😮💨
as another review said, i’ve been dreading getting back to it each time due to the complexity of approaching this culture analysis.
but still fascinating. a bit alienating since half of the book is very much related to polish culture.
as another review said, i’ve been dreading getting back to it each time due to the complexity of approaching this culture analysis.
but still fascinating. a bit alienating since half of the book is very much related to polish culture.
September 4, 2024
good idea poor execution
virtually unreadable
virtually unreadable
January 4, 2025
To be fair I tried a few times but never finished all the way. It was confusing to follow. Seemed like a very interesting read, but I had a hard time with it.
June 7, 2025
How little we really know about the culture of that 'area of darkness:' Eastern Europe.
Living within a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors or music groups from somewhere as close as the Czech Republic or even from the former East Germany. Communism blotted out an entire world of creative expression to those who lived in the so-called free West of Europe and tastes in cultural fashion have hardly reclaimed any of it.
Reading Polish writer Agata Pyzik's recent ironically titled book "Poor But Sexy" helps to uncover some of what she calls the 'culture clashes' between the two sides of the continent.
She argues that twenty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. Only occasionally using too much post-modernist academic jargon, she makes the highly convincing case that the Western 'democratic' world has maintained an arrogant assumption that everybody wants to 'buy into' their capitalist belief systems. As well as this, she acknowledges that conservative political failures (including missed opportunities on the left) have meant that market forces and greed have also triumphed over social or collective responsibility in the East, just they clearly have triumphed in the West.
But what Pyzik also does is give the reader a new insight into the arts in a part of the planet when all creative action had a political edge to it. Russian films of the post-war era obviously had a propagandist purpose (very often) but the Sots Art movement also got away with mocking 'unberaable, ritualised Soviet life' while simultaneously showing how the average person could attempt a normal existence among the ruins of the old world.
As well as this, writers such as György Lukács used a kind of Brecht-like critical realism to 'inspire and activate the reader.' In his earlier book "Man Without Qualities" - a superb title - he largely rejects modernity, seeing 'the tragedy of the modern artist as someone who lost the ground under their feet.' Surprisingly, he views this as 'an advance rather than a difficulty.'
Again and again in Eastern Bloc culture Pyzik points out examples of the contradictions and paradoxes of the kind that seem to me to be a big part of French thinking but are so often overly simplified into the black-and-white certainties of Iberian habits of mind.
Another strength of this book is that it recognises the unheralded contribution of women in the East.
It took the feminist film director Agnieska to accurately predict how female activism in Poland's Solidarity movement would be wiped from popular memory and when this is combined with how sexuality was restricted and banned in the movies across Communist nations, it is alarming how the idea of feminine purity was so dominant. In a patriarchal Catholic Poland 'full of open sexism' precious few women characters of equality got through to be seen.
And in this book there are countless references to the culture from the West so that we are not lost in unfamiliar names. Everyone from David Bowie to Ken Loach to Art of Noise gets a mention. There are plenty of relevant comparisons with contemporary Eastern culture, Pyzik finds. She ends with the disturbing statement that the populace of Eastern Europe "so strongly believe we don't deserve the normal conditions of a social democracy that we hardly fight for it." Let's not make that same mistake in other parts of the planet.
[http://www.bretthetherington.net/defa...]
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.]
Living within a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors or music groups from somewhere as close as the Czech Republic or even from the former East Germany. Communism blotted out an entire world of creative expression to those who lived in the so-called free West of Europe and tastes in cultural fashion have hardly reclaimed any of it.
Reading Polish writer Agata Pyzik's recent ironically titled book "Poor But Sexy" helps to uncover some of what she calls the 'culture clashes' between the two sides of the continent.
She argues that twenty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. Only occasionally using too much post-modernist academic jargon, she makes the highly convincing case that the Western 'democratic' world has maintained an arrogant assumption that everybody wants to 'buy into' their capitalist belief systems. As well as this, she acknowledges that conservative political failures (including missed opportunities on the left) have meant that market forces and greed have also triumphed over social or collective responsibility in the East, just they clearly have triumphed in the West.
But what Pyzik also does is give the reader a new insight into the arts in a part of the planet when all creative action had a political edge to it. Russian films of the post-war era obviously had a propagandist purpose (very often) but the Sots Art movement also got away with mocking 'unberaable, ritualised Soviet life' while simultaneously showing how the average person could attempt a normal existence among the ruins of the old world.
As well as this, writers such as György Lukács used a kind of Brecht-like critical realism to 'inspire and activate the reader.' In his earlier book "Man Without Qualities" - a superb title - he largely rejects modernity, seeing 'the tragedy of the modern artist as someone who lost the ground under their feet.' Surprisingly, he views this as 'an advance rather than a difficulty.'
Again and again in Eastern Bloc culture Pyzik points out examples of the contradictions and paradoxes of the kind that seem to me to be a big part of French thinking but are so often overly simplified into the black-and-white certainties of Iberian habits of mind.
Another strength of this book is that it recognises the unheralded contribution of women in the East.
It took the feminist film director Agnieska to accurately predict how female activism in Poland's Solidarity movement would be wiped from popular memory and when this is combined with how sexuality was restricted and banned in the movies across Communist nations, it is alarming how the idea of feminine purity was so dominant. In a patriarchal Catholic Poland 'full of open sexism' precious few women characters of equality got through to be seen.
And in this book there are countless references to the culture from the West so that we are not lost in unfamiliar names. Everyone from David Bowie to Ken Loach to Art of Noise gets a mention. There are plenty of relevant comparisons with contemporary Eastern culture, Pyzik finds. She ends with the disturbing statement that the populace of Eastern Europe "so strongly believe we don't deserve the normal conditions of a social democracy that we hardly fight for it." Let's not make that same mistake in other parts of the planet.
[http://www.bretthetherington.net/defa...]
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.]
February 17, 2016
I speak Polish and have been to Poland many times (mostly ‘Poland B’, the poor, provincial and rural parts), and I felt like I already knew Agata Pyzik from her appearances in the writings of her partner, the architecture writer Owen Hatherley, so I bought this book with great interest, hoping to learn a lot more about Poland and other former Soviet Bloc countries. I enjoyed parts of the book, but overall I can only say ‘it was OK’, hence my two-star rating. I feel mean giving it such a low rating – I really wanted to like it – and I would give it two and a half if it were possible.
I loved the discussion of obscure films (how does one get to see things like Żuławski’s Possession?), bands and other cultural artefacts, especially from the 1980s, but had to skip over some of the pages about literature, because they read like esoteric, academic lit-crit. Who knows – it may be good lit-crit – but that is not a language with which I am familiar, and to me it was a jarring style change in the book, which is meant for the general reader and not as an academic book.
Having reached the end, I simply don’t feel that I really learned much about the former Soviet Bloc, how it is today and how it came to be like that. My questions about the differences between ‘Poland A’ and ‘Poland B’ remain unanswered. The book is not massively long – 286 pages for the main text – but it could have been quite a lot shorter and more focused. Unfortunately the amount of editing it underwent appears to be zero. It is obvious that the English text was not even proof-read by a native speaker, as there are many classic Polish mistakes – missing or incorrect definite and indefinite articles – all serving to interrupt the flow. Also, although most readers wouldn’t notice, the typesetting is very slapdash: the Palatino font is perfectly legible, but parenthetical phrases are often introduced with a hyphen and then closed with an en-dash, and the book can’t decide whether it is using single or double quotation marks. Polish accented characters are sometimes used correctly, sometimes not. So zero points to Zero Books for their lack of editing and proofreading and their atrocious production values, which made Poor But Sexy even harder to read than it needed to be.
I loved the discussion of obscure films (how does one get to see things like Żuławski’s Possession?), bands and other cultural artefacts, especially from the 1980s, but had to skip over some of the pages about literature, because they read like esoteric, academic lit-crit. Who knows – it may be good lit-crit – but that is not a language with which I am familiar, and to me it was a jarring style change in the book, which is meant for the general reader and not as an academic book.
Having reached the end, I simply don’t feel that I really learned much about the former Soviet Bloc, how it is today and how it came to be like that. My questions about the differences between ‘Poland A’ and ‘Poland B’ remain unanswered. The book is not massively long – 286 pages for the main text – but it could have been quite a lot shorter and more focused. Unfortunately the amount of editing it underwent appears to be zero. It is obvious that the English text was not even proof-read by a native speaker, as there are many classic Polish mistakes – missing or incorrect definite and indefinite articles – all serving to interrupt the flow. Also, although most readers wouldn’t notice, the typesetting is very slapdash: the Palatino font is perfectly legible, but parenthetical phrases are often introduced with a hyphen and then closed with an en-dash, and the book can’t decide whether it is using single or double quotation marks. Polish accented characters are sometimes used correctly, sometimes not. So zero points to Zero Books for their lack of editing and proofreading and their atrocious production values, which made Poor But Sexy even harder to read than it needed to be.
October 17, 2016
The introduction of this book and the first couple of chapters are fascinating - attention grabbing and prevocative. Having been educated solely in the West - my view of the East has been dictated largely by anti-Communist sentiment and ignorance. This book elucidated Poland and eastern Europe significantly; providing a deeper understanding of our current political climate more generally. I admit though- after chapter four my interest was beginning to wane and I felt the style became bogged down in the authors preconceptions somewhat. Nevertheless, I recommend it particularly to those interested in making sense of modern Europe and it's politics.
July 27, 2015
Wonderful book, bold and witty and warm. It was a pleasure to read.
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