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Galway Advertiser 2004/2004_08_19/GA_1908_E1_005.pdf
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Galway Advertiser
August 19 2004
Alt.com Air rage passenger
BY JEFF O'CONNELL
Czeslaw Milosz, 1911 - 2004
Czeslaw Milosz, who died in his native Poland on Saturday at the age of 93, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His poetry, essays, and novels combined autobiography, philosophy, and politics, into work that was recognised with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. All he wrote drew on his childhood in ethnically complicated Lithuania, his experience of the Warsaw uprising, and his service abroad as a member of the post-war communist government before he defected to the West in 1951. The resulting exile did not lead, as so often, to a shrivelling of talent but a flowering of creativity. During the next nine years in Paris, when he worked for the influential emigre journal Kultura, Milosz published some of his best works. The Captive Mind (1953) showed how intellectuals, to whom he allotted such illustrative names as Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, were drawn into accepting "the new faith" of communism. His other works from this time included the novels The Issa Valley, in which an idyllic childhood is overcast by the horrors of World War II, and The Usurpers, a sharp satire on the way in which the liberating Soviet army became the herald of a repression much more terrible than that of the Nazis. Milosz's international reputation increased steadily after he moved in 1960 to the University of California at Berkeley, where he was for many years professor of Slavic Literature and became an American citizen until he was able to return home. The son of Polish intellectuals, Czeslaw Milosz was born on June 30, 1911 in Lithuania. As a small child he spent several years in Siberia, where his father worked as an engineer, before returning with his family to Wilno, the historic capital of Lithuania, which was now situated in the reborn state of Poland. Young Milosz entered high school in Wilno and then went to the King Stefan Batory University, where he objected to compulsory religious education being specifically Roman Catholic. In 1930 he co-founded the literary periodical Zagary and published his first poems in Alma Mater Vilneosis. Three years later he produced his first volume, Poems on Frozen Time. After obtaining a degree in law from Wilno University, he received an award from the Polish Writers' Union that enabled him to go to Paris. There his kinsman Oscar Vladislav de Lubicz Milosz, a member of the Lithuanian legation who wrote in French, deflated his awe of Parisian literary movements and directed him towards more fundamental concerns. Milosz returned home after a year to take a job at the local radio station in Wilno, from which he was dismissed after being attacked for his liberalism. He was then hired as a programme organiser by a sympathetic director of Polish Radio in Warsaw. During the Second World War, Milosz remained in Nazioccupied Warsaw, working for the Polish underground when he edited, under the pseudonym Jan Syrue, a clandestine poetry anthology Invincible Song. His collection, Rescue, one of the first books to be published after the Polish People's Republic was established in 1945, immediately placed him among the country's leading writers. Without being a member of the Communist Party, he joined the diplomatic service, which sent him as a cultural attache first to Washington DC, and then to Paris where, in 1951, threatened by the increasingly repressive Polish Communist government, he asked for asylum. In 1961 he was appointed lecturer in Polish literature at the University of California where, a year later, he became Professor of Slavic Language and Literature. Milosz's literary activity reached its peak in the years that followed; he brought out 10 volumes of verse as well as The History of Polish Literature while seeing the majority of his works being translated into English. He translated the works of T S Eliot, Walt Whitman, Simone Weil, and Jacques Maritain into Polish, as well as St Mark's Gospel and the Psalms. When the Communist regime started to quake under the onslaughts of Lech Walesa and the trade union Solidarity, Milosz made a triumphant visit home where he was received as a national hero by the strikers of the Gdansk shipyards and received an honorary doctorate at the Catholic University of Lublin. On settling in Cracow with his second wife Carol Thigpen (whom he had married after the death of his first wife in 1986 and who died in 2002), he did not take a prominent part in national life; but he continued to produce verse. Although even he admitted that his poetry did not translate easily because of its wealth of cultural and linguistic allusions, some of it still demonstrates a refreshing, spikey character: What is poetry which does not save Nations or people? A connivance of official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings from sophomore girls. But, ever suspicious of the pitfalls of fame, he did not delude himself about his significance, pointing out that his survival would be as: an item in the fourteenth volume of an encyclopedia Next to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse.
walks free after lodging 4,000 bail
A New York restaurant manager who was sentenced to three months in prison at Galway District Court on Tuesday for causing an air rage incident on board a flight from New York to Athens which had to be diverted to Shannon, walked free hours after the court hearing when he lodged 4,000 cash bail at Shannon Garda Station. Thirty-six-year old Greek-born, Panagotis `Peter' Genovezos, from Brooklyn, New York, was involved in an air rage incident during which a Delta Airlines flight carrying 165 passengers and 12 crew had to be diverted to Shannon at around 5.30 am on Tuesday morning. The accused was arrested by Gardai when the flight landed and he was brought before Judge Conal Gibbons later in the day at Galway District Court where he was charged with being drunk to such an extent as might endanger himself and other passengers; with engaging in abusive and insulting behaviour; and with engaging in behaviour likely to cause annoyance to passengers and crew, having being requested by a member of crew to cease such behaviour, contrary to the Air Navigation and Transport Act, 1998. Genovezos was placed under arrest nearly two hours into the flight by Federal Air Marshal, Mark Bailer, after he became abusive to other passengers and flight crew and started making racist and anti-Semitic remarks before finally assaulting another passenger. Mr Bailer told the court Genovezos made racist remarks to the people sitting in front of him on the plane. "He called them `Jews' and I also heard him call them `fags' and `homosexuals'," Mr. Bailer said of the accused. Women with young children were put in fear by Genovezos's behaviour and the marshal said he had to sit beside the accused and advise him to behave. Flight captain, James Angarella, who spoke to the accused about his behaviour on two separate occasions, decided to divert the flight to Shannon when Genovezos threatened him with physical violence. Genovezos became more aggressive when he heard the flight was being diverted to Shannon and he stuck a passenger in the seat in front of him into the face with his elbow when the passenger asked him to sit down. The accused was then restrained against the side of the plane and handcuffed by Air Marshall Bailer. Shortly afterwards the flight landed at Shannon where Genovezos was taken into custody by gardai from Shannon and charged with the three offences. Defence solicitor, Caitriona Carmody, told the court her client, who manages a small restaurant in Manhattan, and who has lived in New York for 20 years, was on his way to Athens for a family reunion and to visit his ill mother. She said her client was pleading guilty to the three charges before the court and was extremely sorry for his behaviour. Genovezos took the witness stand to express his sorrow. He admitted to the court that while he was not served any alcohol on board the flight, he had drunk too much before boarding and was also drinking from a bottle of orange, heavily laced with vodka, during the flight. The accused, who looked slightly confused, told Judge Conal Gibbons he was amazed at the beauty of the Irish countryside, remarking that he would like to see more of the country some time. Judge Gibbons told him he would be giving him an opportunity to see the country now. He said the offences before the court, given the climate in this day and age, were very serious and on top of that the accused had compounded the matter by making anti-Semitic and racist remarks to other passengers which amounted to outrageous behaviour. Sentencing Genovezos to three months in prison and fining him 300, the judge said he hoped the accused would have more respect for people, especially those of the Jewish faith, in future. Judge Gibbons fixed recognisance in the event of an appeal on the accused man's own cash surety of 4,000 and advised the gardai to give him back his passport so that he could visit his ill mother. Hours after the court hearing Genovezos was released from Garda custody in Shannon when he lodged the 4,000 cash bail.
Peter Genovezos of New York arriving at Galway Court House on Tuesday, charged with an air rage incident in a transatlantic filght. Photo:- Mike Shaughnessy
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