#NISHT REBAGELN

[chicago-geniza]

- Some background here is I’m in a Facebook group called “Secesja” that posts pictures of Jugendstil and Secessionstil design from that period. It’s moderated but members are allowed to post. This is nice because people upload pics of, e.g., architecture from their towns, family heirlooms, museum objects, etc.

- Today someone uploaded this:

- It is clearly one of the many “Tiffany-style” knockoff lamps you see proliferating in “shabby chic” chain boutiques like mushrooms after rain. However, this design rips off a specific lamp by Philippe Wolfers, “La Fée au Pavon,” first shown at Salon National des Beaux-Arts 

- He did work for Tiffany! He was Belgian, he and his brother Marcel were instrumental in creating the Jugendstil ~aesthetic for interiors and accessories and accoutrements in general, especially jewellery. Real Nouveau hours, fluid lines, floral shapes, those fanciful fin-de-siècle “secret garden” motifs that intersected with the fad for all things mystical and mysterious (see: fin-de-siecle Orientalism)–peacock feathers, butterfly wings, flower petals, fairies, those opalescent droplet pendants with structured silver “streams” flowing toward their “source,” like a fey diadem repurposed to adorn the throat 

- Anyway I just did some translation work for a company that works with Palazzo INT in Germany and this is from their catalogue lol

- Moreover you can see from the cast that it’s either pure resin or polystone with a painted finish, it is not from the early 1900s

  - Here is the original lamp, and its sketch [source I found cites the sketch as a scan from Jugendstil by Gabriele Fahr-Becker]

- Tl;dr please be more rigorous in vetting the images you post and pass off as authentic Secession-era design, administrators of my “Secesja” Facebook group! It doesn’t have to be a peer review process but we must have some community standards, we cannot operate on pure vibes!

- Yes my grandmother was an antiques dealer who put me to work doing inventory in lieu of babysitting yes I am on the autism spectrum and also specifically obsessed with turn-of-the-century decor. Sorry :(

- Also lol at the fact that they put clothes on her. Free the titty

#NISHT REBAGELN #i can't sleep so i typed the Ultimate Post of Ultimate Pedantry #please know i am exercising so much restraint to not be like this at all times #because i know it's insufferable #however. it is unfortunately. my personality

[chicago-geniza]

me: did you know the british boy scouts only announced they’d stop using the swastika for their gratitude badges, per the associated press, on december 18th, 1935, fully two years after hitler was elected, and a year after the night of the long knives, and the rationale given was not an objection to fascism as such, but rather a desire to “keep aloof from political and religious issues”? one recalls that oft-posted photo of the young queen bess, wallis simpson’s nazi convictions, and of course on december 12th of that year, himmler introduced the lebensborn program, which--

my mom, sighing the heaviest sigh that has ever been sighed: you think i don’t know about the lebensborn program and the british aristocracy’s nazi sympathies? who TAUGHT you about that?

#NISHT REBAGELN #i come by my compulsive anxious memorization of historical fascist L Word Chart style shit honestly :(

[chicago-geniza]

itogi nedeli s a little bit more--ahhh there is a colloquialism po-russki, na końcu języka, it is like, a dollop, a dash, you use it when saying how old someone is, nemnozhko, also eshche chut’-chut’, like ei 20 s [slovom], so dobavkoi, no malen’koi, malyuuuusenk’oi dobavkoi, you know what i am trying to remember? i have had so many absence seizures from stress and sleep deprivation. anyway itogi nedeli. 

- rugal died

- parents decided absolutely to get divorced, stepdad is...apparently getting medically assisted suicide because he can’t tolerate Being Disabled & he has no friends or family besides my mother

- phone partially broke and i can’t get internet there & am only intermittently getting texts, not getting calls at all 

- parents are unvaccinated on principle, won’t wear masks on principle, have been very generously, however, running errands all over chicago, comma, however, the 3rd largest metro area, comma, for me, since i am disabled & immunocompromised!

- unfortunately, as you probably already know

- per test i just took. They Gave Me Covid

- have been [indescribable] since the 28th

- have not checked emails or texts or anything since then 

- behind on 990385349058 deadlines, need to send 43985903485 Apology Tour emails

- ok

- obv posting from desktop since phone is on the fritz so if you rb this i will eat your liver with some fava beans and a big amarone

- “blassberg mowi, ze jestem przesadna i talmudyczna” ale. there’s a precedent here

- at this point i fully believe gd will kill me between sunset on oct 4th and sunrise on oct 5th

- just chugged a bang energy & a baziillion anti-inflammatories & paid a bunch of bills & am trying to catch up on work & respond to my over one thousand (!!!) emails

- can’t voice my true thoughts because gd will hear them & enact them on earth 

- all three of my parents seem to have been diagnosed with Problems Disorders of the personality and i was like. yes i am fully aware that nothing but the fully concentrated energies of a middle class OCPD person & a working class paranoid PD person & an also working class guy with clinically assessed narcissism who was also on the autism spectrum, all of whom were variously abused as kids in different ways, each in keeping with their socioeconomic + cultural + immigration backgrounds, produced. Me, a person recently described as “whenever i see that whoopi goldberg ‘i don’t want somebody in my house’ meme i think of you” & whose repeatedly diagnosed anxiety disorders go away the second i stop having to live with, work with, or be around other human beings, & who, at their age 6 neuropsych assessment, was flagged like those feral kids locked in closets because i spent the formative years of my life either 1) entirely alone, “entertaining myself” with my own imagination/personal language; 2) being socially ostracized as a weirdo; 3) being screamed at or punished or hit or threatened or taken to authority figures for “suspicious conduct”; 5) learning to Keep It (myself, my inner Seele; etc.) Secret & Keep It Safe, not be observed in order to not be corrected, not be punished, not be “caught doing what i’m not meant to be doing,” doing a task Wrong, doing it in the Wrong timeframe, being surveilled & monitored, leaning when i could be cleaning, keeping my space & my interests & everything else hidden because they were put in the trash & used to yell at me for not doing what i was supposed to & used to berate me for being stupid & useless & slovenly & disgusting! my dad was a compulsive liar because his mother was an evangelical christian who searched his room whenever he left the house & beat him bloody if she found anything she deemed sinful or even, frankly, indicative of Bad Character or Bad Personality. we had a limited and estranged relationship but i did, admittedly, lose it a little reading all those reports from his small-town illinois newspaper: from ages ~10 or 11-15 or 16 he routinely got physically assaulted so badly by his peers that he was taken to the ER and bystanders called the cops. like groups of preteen & teen boys hated him so much they’d just beat the shit out of him till he needed emergency intervention & someone deigned to intervene. he was huge, also, & although clumsy, could defend himself in a pinch against a single attacker, so it had to be like, a swarm. if i knew i was adopted and my parents hated me and my whole town hated me & i got beaten up about it every day of my life so bad it gave me brain damage i’d end up like my dad too! probably less arrogant, cannot imagine having such a high opinion of myself, or reflexively thinking so poorly of everyone else, or dismissing anyone i come into contact with as like, not...possessed of three-dimensional human subjectivity & a rich inner life, which ALL of my parents seem to have in common. it’s infuriating. their isolation makes them think everyone else is a brainwashed moron out to get them, with whom they couldn’t possibly have anything in common, even solidarity or sympathy. it’s a reactionary response to “you know, harriet, there are some very pleasant nazis” (without tone markers) attitude that many of their milquetoast liberal neighbors adopt but the aggressive cynicism of “our countrymen are morons, you can’t reason with Sheep [editorial note: you CAN actually reason with sheep, however, you shouldn’t keep them in pastures with slatted fences or they’ll get stuck. access needs. sheep are lovely & contrary to stereotype quite intelligent. they are also ungulates & behave like ungulates). my mom is freaked out by lying because dad leveraged his ability to lie against her. that was a Him Problem. i got cagey & avoidant & lied because she & stepdad did the same thing to me & would not permit me any privacy either, stepdad because he was paranoid, mom because she is a control freak. i finally got them to see a little bit of the connection, i think? like, again, a 7th grader is not abusing you by lying, you are in fact abusing them by going through their closet, throwing out all their carefully hidden shit, then cutting them off from the outside world because they accessed gay media against your explicit wishes and lied about it. that cagey defensive compulsive lying at such a young age about all aspects of one’s life and personal identity is defensive thing. in 5th-6th grade i was writing my diary not only in a coded alphabet but in a russian-english-hebrew conlang with klingon, vulcan, and celtic-language features, not from unjustified paranoia, but because i knew it would be read & i took prophylactic, offensive steps to make it indecipherable. i knew this because they read my sister’s diaries & went through HER drawers. even when they visited this time i kept my journals & the one (1) empty wine bottle in the house on me 24/7 because they think i’m teetotal & i know they’d go through all my things. anyway my mom is being a lot nicer to me now that she’s getting divorced, so 

#NISHT REBAGELN

[chicago-geniza]

Hey @horrid-little-pedant I can make you a Boy Scouts/international Scouting movement imperialism/colonialism/not-so-crypto-fascism syllabus if you’d like but for a first tantalizing taste here is:

Fig 1) Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and the Scouting movement, on the swastika symbol, from his 1917 sequel to the classic manual Scouting For Boys, entitled Young Knights of The Empire. Its companion book, for Girl Guides/Girl Scouts, authored by his sister Agnes, was called How Girls Can Help Build Up the Empire. The Baden-Powell family, prominent British military aristocrats, were instrumental in the British colonial expansion re: South Africa. Baden-Powell’s inspiration for the Boy Scouts was the Mafeking Cadet Corps, a group of child soldiers formed by Lord Edward Cecil shortly before the Siege of Mafeking that secured Robert’s place in annals of imperial military history. His niece Betty later became--I am choking and wheezing and coughing up a hairball getting this phrase out--Scoutmaster for the. Girl Guides of North Rhodesia. Do not even get me STARTED on, uh. The Peace Light of Bethlehem (tl;dr it’s a program inaugurated in Austria circa 1986 nominally to help ~handicapped children, but of course. In 2005. The International Commissioner of Austria symbolically passed the Peace Light to a delegation of Scouts and Guides from the Palestinian National Authority, comma, just after the Oslo Accords. And then in 2007 a delegation of Guides and Scouts from Austria, Germany, France, Jordan, Israel, and the PNA--by the way, all but Jordan and Israel are part of the Catholic international Scouting branch that generally, depending on region, ‘pledges allegiance’ to “[country], God, Church, and Christian Europe”--they symbolically lit the ~*~Peace Light together. In. Bethlehem. Scouting is the most fucked-up Bad Internationalism movement in the world.)

Fig 2) The Rodlo symbol was designed by a woman who was part of the Polish minority population in Germany, she went to a Sokol (also Scouting!!!) gymnasium, she got a scholarship to study with Wladyslaw Skyoczylas and other modernist naive folk-revival painters at the school of fine arts in Warsaw, she survived the war, she got into this bizarre movement of neo-pagan anti-clerical pan-Slavist ‘nationalism’ that confirms every single thing I said in my undergrad thesis, she wants to take these symbols back from Hitler and stress the uniqueness of the Polish-German border regions that are neither like, fashy Catholic nationalist Poland nor fashy-flavor Germany, unfortunately that’s not how history or visual semantics work. She says it’s ‘rod’ plus ‘godlo’ (pretend it’s a liquid l) but it’s rodnoverie, we know what you’re about, Joasia--or rather, if you have to give a paragraph-long disclaimer every time you present your lovingly-rendered symbol, you gotta just let it go once it reaches critical mass and recognize that that your defensive disclaimers come across as “my t-shirt is raising a lot of questions that are answered by the shirt.” Anyway. This Harcerstwo troupe named after...the Harcerstwo movement that became a WWII paramilitary and subsequently Catholic anticommunist movement adopted it as their symbol. They’re from a small town in the Katowice region and they are. Well. If you don’t want everyone to think you’re fascists then maybe don’t be a paramilitary organization with a Hitler Youth lite flag (if you put the Rodlo on the Polish flag...it’s...it scans as the swastika on the...they know! They’re not oblivious, they do 500 WWII memorial actions per year!). And don’t have your scouts swear fealty in military fatigues while doing the seig heil to the Slavic Hitlerjugend flag in the woods. Ya dig. Their website is like “why are our enrollments declining :(” 

idk man maybe your town’s teens want to smoke weed under the bridge and not be put through boot camp after school 

#NISHT REBAGELN #i have so much autism about scouting and it is extremely embarrassing but if you have questions about it. i have Answers #also did you know the UU church got in a huge fight with boy scouts of america #and boy scouts of america got in a huge fight with baden-powell about being allowed to say god #i do not need to explain the context of the PNA & the oslo accords for tumblr user horrid-little-pedant but can if other people are not awar #*aware. Scouting: Bad Internationalism #OH. wanna hear about the officially recognized Boy Scouts Displaced Persons DIvision after WWII dissolved c. 1950 #or Mury: Harcerki Troupe of Ravensbruck #did you know krupskaya once used komsomol and 'boyskautizm' as synonyms and that #ok i got distracted but again. rudyard kipling. he just tweeted it out. there are also 800000 examples in this book about Helping Police #and how scouts are like bees: serve their Queen & DISPOSE OF THE UNEMPLOYED #also baden-powell's sister agnes was great friends with marconi you know the long-distance radio transmission inventor who #joined the italian fascist party in 1923 like years before mussolini came to power and #used his authority as director of the science institute to mark all jewish applicants' papers with an E (italian word for jew starts with E) #& none were admitted during his tenure. before this became state policy & before this pressure was even. you know. subtly dispersed by #mussolini. just of his own initiative! #he has so many quotes praising fascism i couldn't fit them in one document #the british monarchy & aristocracy will see continental european fascism and especially german & go 'Tell Me More...' #the polish nobility AND endecja will see various permutations of fascism & say 'tell me more...' for different reasons #the polish intelligentsia will see ITALIAN fascism & say 'tell me more [eyes emoji] while condemning german fascism bc one has #better aesthetics #meanwhile stefania zahorska & bruno schulz are having stress-induced heart disease #pilsudski wants to be england so bad it makes him look stupid. & dmowski hates england & germany on paper but also #wants to be them so bad it makes them look stupid if he can do it with the slavophile side of the slavophile vs. westernizer debate #comma american industry and isolationism comma good old WWI 'ethnographic borders' comma #and solve The Jewish Question (threat)

[chicago-geniza]

Saw a “Krzysztof Jasiewicz, historian” on the guest list for this conference event I’d been invited to and did a double take because Krzysztof Jasiewicz is a Polish historian who notoriously went around the bend and started peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories and presenting Judeo-Bolshevism as though it were a genuine-article, documented phenomenon--anyway here is this poor, beleaguered man’s professional biography

#NISHT REBAGELN #losing my mind. this is a DISCLAIMER that comes BEFORE his biography #what has this man been through. what has he seen. what sort of deranged emails has he been sent #this is what i'd have to do if i hadn't changed my mind and had ended up changing my name to ben

[chicago-geniza]

The Margaret Sanger/contraception/eugenics needle has been threaded a thousand times and is common knowledge but went back and found this blog post that threads a similar history-of-ideas needle for interwar Poland--was reminded by a primary-source quote re: an organization advocating for anti-clerical causes, a woman’s right to dictate the conditions of her marriage and reproduction, as well as “eugenics”--part of Krzywicka’s philosophy re: doing a “trial run” of married life and practical cohabitation (with all that entails!) for at least a year to see if you’re compatible in the long term before you start a family. The rationale, she argued, was to prevent hotheaded couples from rushing into things unprepared for parenthood, taking on responsibility they weren’t ready for and and ended up resenting, which would negatively impact the child’s development. Makes sense! However when situated in context re: the Discourse du Jour, we need to remember that eugenics was a social project, it was at the level of society. Am extremely exhausted at the moment but all these interwar pedagogies that tried to shape the “whole child,” that tried to address poverty and “rural backwardness” and religious backwardness and physical weakness in one fell swoop--well. In my notes I call it the “Drugie Oświecenie.” More later, now read about eugenics in the Wiadomosci milieu. Like it is not really understood I don’t think how ubiquitous eugenics was in the 1930s because it is presented exclusively as phrenology-bust calipers-brained great-chain-of-being race science and involuntarily sterilizing the most vulnerable, so the insidiousness of its “utopian” rhetoric--from bioethicists, from socialists, in public health policy, all over the place--becomes less recognizable when it creeps in. 

#NISHT REBAGELN #interwar polish press tag

[chicago-geniza]

Have once again discovered a very good Slavic-language poem about death through a laurel-wreathed, prestigious-publication-lauded poet who unfortunately did a hack job on it. Had only heard the poet’s name in passing because the uber-parsimonious uber-ironic aphoristic style of the new wave is something I can only really take in small doses. However this poem (Ewa Lipska’s ‘Study Death’ / ‘Ucz sie smierci’) packs a lot of layers into its language that the translator didn’t make an effort to relay at all? For example:

Ucz się śmierci. Na pamięć. Zgodnie z zasadami pisowni wyrazów martwych.

Pisz ją łącznie jak rzeczpospolita albo lwipyszczek.

So! 

Translator has this as: 

Study death. Learn it by heart. Following to the rules of spelling dead words.

Spell it together like commonwealth or toadflax.

Let’s do Fardibekt’s Reading Comprehension Corner! We can deduce from context that she is writing either in the PRL or right at its end, the late 80s/early 90s. ‘Dead expressions’ are those that “już dawno wyszły z obiegu,” i.e., spoken language, have fallen out of regular use. When we encounter them in philological studies, they tend to come with disclaimers about semantic ambiguity, “dwuznaczność,” two (or more) meanings. “Lacznie” is like, as a spelling rule, write it as a single word without a hyphen or a space. Rzeczpospolita written lacznie = republic (the Second Republic is Druga Rzeczpospolita); rzecz pospolita written separately is “ordinary thing.” [Ok - yes it’s commonwealth, and common/wealth does preserve the duality. I redact my earlier complaint. You can’t translate every nuance and there’s of course no way to render the matrix of constructs that is “X pospolity” in both taxonomy and ironic vernacular usage.] Now Lipska moves us from historical-political gravitas to the pastoral. First of all I don’t know why the translator chose “toadflax,” it’s a snapdragon in English, which works surprisingly well to convey the secondary meaning--lwie paszcza, lion’s mouth. The flower is so named because it resembles a lion’s mouth. Later on in the poem she plays with flowing inside of a single line--in two idioms--from the figurative to the concrete to the figurative again. Moreover she lays out her literary genealogy in the poetic form itself, this poem about death, specifically, from the Pokolenie Kolumbow back through the Awangarda Krakowska to Tadeusz Pieper. 

The translator ALSO doesn’t notice that the poem begins and ends, like a fugue, with two colloquial expressions that she anchors into the space of the Polish past-present--”na pamięć / na żywo.” We are moving out of memory and into life.

#translation tag #NISHT REBAGELN

[chicago-geniza]

Ok actually you know what. I wouldn’t translate rzeczpospolita as commonwealth, I’d translate it as republic, because it’s a calque of res publica, and commonwealth is...also that calque in English, and it has imperial associations (Britain, mostly) for a decent amount of Anglophone readers, whereas “republic,” despite the best efforts of US bipartisan politics, is associated with France and the French Revolution. Lipska’s poem is pointing to both the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Second Polish Republic, but the latter sounds less like I’m a 17th-century exchequer and also preserves the phonetic quality of the Polish. Also this isn’t a poem I’d want to “localize” using any Old English/Saxon etymological elements in the parts that call attention to the device in language itself, if that makes sense. Gd I have to translate a website from Russian why am I doing this 

#translation tag #NISHT REBAGELN

[chicago-geniza]

Keep clicking on panels that sound interesting to make a schedule for the conference next month and there’s always one person I know, one person writing about a subject only I had written about before and whom I want to fight (German dude reinventing multidirectional memory like it’s Brand! New! Information!, or like it’s new or novel to discuss the individual-emotional and metonymic-historical significance of material objects or assemblage/photomontage as a literary device in a poetry collection literally called “Family Album” where the conceit is a family photo album and the theme is the fragmented, scattered, out-of-order form in which you inherit different histories alongside History with a capital H as a Russian-speaking Odessa Jew growing up just after WWII, about “family heirlooms” and the stories that come with them, about ritual objects and museum objects and objects at Judaica auctions (with everything that implies in Eastern Europe), there’s a poem about archaeologists going to the desert and being unable to find evidence of the Temple and it’s a meditation on allegory vs. orthodoxy, i.e., materialism/empiricism as the sole metric of Truth, vs. allowance for interpretations less literal--and archaeology is not an incidental metaphor. Gd. Going to this panel just to take furious notes and bringing my own paper about this poem cycle) 

#NISHT REBAGELN #he has two relatives named raya and differentiates between them bc one used to be a rachel. i'm very attached to this poem cycle

[chicago-geniza]

this should not make me laugh but the fact that it is 1) Paris fucking Kultura, founded and edited by Jerzy “I’m not an Endek, but...” Giedroyc, and 2) this is exactly what Polish ~national Discourse sounds like every single year on some kind of seasonal cyclical schedule but it’s just relitigating the same two Public Debates i like to call “Jan Blonski Flavor” and “Jan Gross Flavor”--I just. You know how it goes. Another scandal at Auschwitz because a military or government official went there to do some Solemn Genocide Commemoration and have a photo op with the Never Again monument they just erected but the old bastard put his foot in it and did something egregiously antisemitic instead, 

#Another scandal at/with/about Auschwitz comma #NISHT REBAGELN #like this is just going to be my echolalic shorthand for the Polish Holocaust Relitigation Discourse Cycle #Kolejny skandal jest z Oswiecimem comma

[chicago-geniza]

can’t write my chapter on the zoom in zoom out phenomenon re: individual as metonym for the nation (Geist/collective consciousness/national character/etc.) without also [heavy sigh] hitching it to the wagon of 1) race science (of course) and 2) Assimilation & Its Discontents by discussing how the 23&me model of individual genealogy by haplotype breakdown from cheek swab is the monad modern modified version of “seroanthropology,” a ~*~discipline devised during WWI by assimilated polish jewish doctors ludwik & hanna hirschfeld--later VERY ardent catholic converts--based on blood samples from soldiers (multiethnic empires yield diverse armies). oh yeah they were the ones who gave us the blood typing system! A, B, O, etc. and they noticed that different populations had different ratios of different blood types, and were like. it is the 1910s. how can we use this to make a map of serotypes at the population level. stop doing race science you weirdos! your daughter will die of tuberculosis in the holocaust!  

why do i know this? they were stefania’s neighbors in saska kepa, of course, and socialized with her and jelonka for years. they seem to have been close with wanda jablonka as well, but i have to investigate those ties when i have access to more materials. 

#stefania tag #profesorstwo hirszfeldowie tag #jelonka tag #NISHT REBAGELN #assimilation and its discontents

[chicago-geniza]

one nice thing about going through the 2K emails in my inbox is that some of the archives i’ve been obsessively contacting got back to me! i’m getting a court case about jelonka’s dad’s emigration and we’ll see about wanda poznanska’s--later jablonka--certificate from the russian imperial government to teach private lessons at home, circa 1901. i know she homeschooled jelonka until jel. started gymnasium hum. zen. im. orzeszkowej in...1914? and hers was the sole household income, so she must have had other pupils as well. still losing my mind at the fact that jelonka’s gymnasium was in the same building as the main lodz zionist org while stefania’s family were...driving many of the zionist projects in krakow. assimilation is truly an individual insistence within one’s habitus, “the right to choose one’s nationality for oneself” even as you share a school building or a tense family dinner with people who represent the scarlet letter you are so scrupulously terrified of having sewn to your lapel. in this case jewishness and zionism do become conflated as polishness and niepodleglosc become conflated, both as “national self-determination.” the zionists were polish speakers, were also assimilated, after all. it’s a similar discursive structure in different directions. (speaking specifically about stefania’s and jelonka’s milieux, don’t @ me)

#NISHT REBAGELN #am on desktop but i will eat you #stefania tag #jelonka tag