News from Poland: Finnegans Wake adaptation, George Dorn Screams

FIRST WE FEEL THEN WE FALL teaser #1 from jakub wroblewski on Vimeo.

It's always a pleasure to get an unexpected email from an interesting part of the world, but particularly so when the email has interesting news.

Adam Zulawski, consultant managing editor for the English section of Culture.pl, "the biggest and most comprehensive source of knowledge about Polish culture," wrote to me to call my attention to "First We Feel Then We Fall: Finnegans Wake On-screen," by Mikolaj Glinski. It tells the story of the adaptation of Joyce's Finnegans Wake by Polish visual artist Jakub Wróblewski and scholar Katarzyna Bazarnik. After you read Glinski's article, check out the trippy interactive film online. 

Zulawski, a RAW fan, writes, "The author who wrote this Joyce piece, Mikolaj Glinski, has written several about Joyce for the site in the past - it seems Poles have a deep appreciation for the book, trying to approach it in various ways, so our editorial office has tried to cover what we can. Mikolaj also wrote about freemasons after there was a large exhibition of freemason art last year in Warsaw. Apparently, he started receiving very strange paranoid rants from people over social media about it, and still does every so often. Fnord."

Culture.pl has a lot of other interesting stuff. See, for example, Glinski's piece on "11 Great Polish Books You Have to Read."  (I've read one, the science fiction novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.) Poland also has more than its share of interesting modern composers, such as Lutoslawski, so I find Polish music interesting.

George Dorn Screams

Speaking of Polish music, the rock band George Dorn Screams, which apparently takes its name from phrase in Illuminatus!, has just released a new album, Spacja kosmiczna. It, and the band's other albums, are available for streaming on Spotify. (I've been listening to it; it sounds good.)