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mostly on Susan Sontag
Oct. 13th, 2003 09:42 amFeeling a bit less worn out this morning. Incidentally, I won't be able to comment on Angel episodes until next weekend, due to being confined to my trusty laptop with its dial connection until then. Unless ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bimo has managed to download Just Rewards and can give it to me tomorrow, when I see her?
More on Susan Sontag receiving the Friedenspreis yesterday: the first speech, by the head of the German bookseller's association, was dull as usual. Then came Petra Roth, the mayor of Frankfurt, who not only spoke well but said while she disagrees with some of Sontag's writings, such as her initial article on 9/11, she deeply respects her for challenging her own ideas again and again, something few thinkers and less politicians do, and this visibly moved Sontag more than the dull adulatory speech earlier. Then came Ivan Nagel with the true laudatory speech, which was anything but dull and of all speeches the one with the most verbal stilettos in the direction of the Bush administration. (Sontag's own speech was more philosophical and consequently went a bit deeper.) The comparison that stuck to mind the most was between decorated WWII general Eisenhower never wearing uniform once after being elected as President, since, as Nagel put it, he understood that the President of the U.S. was an elected citizen, and Bush's Top Gun masquerade on May 1st, bearing in mind Bush never experienced a war and got around serving in Vietnam due to Daddy's money and connections. What did this have to do with Sontag? Well, Nagel used it as an example of imagery and the deformation public consciousness, a major Sontag theme.
The lady herself mentioned Dubya only once, in connection of the different uses of religion in Europe and the US. And of course she commented on the notorious absence of US ambassador Daniel Coats, about whom today's Frankfurter Allgemeine (our Washington Post, the more conservative of our major daily newspapers, as opposed to the Süddeutsche Zeitung which I'd compare to the New York Times) wrote: "One doesn't want to call him ambassador of the United States any longer. The insult was intended for Ms Sontag but also hits the German booksellers and the country which regards the peace award as one of the most important and highest honours it can give." Any one who speaks German can read the entire article
here.
Anyway, back to Sontag and her speech, which was relaxed and once the Coats allusion was out of the way very conciliatory. She spoke about the increasing use of clichés on both sides of the Atlantic, about our differences and shared traits, and between quotes of Alexis de Tocqueville and D.H. Lawrence (who in her opinion wrote the two books which are still the best on the US) suggested that ultimately, literature is the multinational country which is able to set us free. She ended on an anecdote: as an imaginative child in 1943, she read her first German books in translation (Goethe's Werther and Storm's Immensee), which helped her through school, while simultanously having nightmares about the German soldiers which were kept in a camp in her home state, Arizona, breaking out and killing her; decades later, when meeting her German editor, Fritz Arnold, for the first time, she found out he was one of these POWs who then for the first time was reading American literature, which helped him through the years of internment. The speech is reprinted in today's SZ but I haven't been able to track down an English version yet. When I do, I'll link it because I think it's really much fairer and balanced than any of Sontag's critics would have expected.
And finally ending on a frivolous note:hobsonphile has some neat observations on my favourite Ferengi here.
bimo has managed to download Just Rewards and can give it to me tomorrow, when I see her? More on Susan Sontag receiving the Friedenspreis yesterday: the first speech, by the head of the German bookseller's association, was dull as usual. Then came Petra Roth, the mayor of Frankfurt, who not only spoke well but said while she disagrees with some of Sontag's writings, such as her initial article on 9/11, she deeply respects her for challenging her own ideas again and again, something few thinkers and less politicians do, and this visibly moved Sontag more than the dull adulatory speech earlier. Then came Ivan Nagel with the true laudatory speech, which was anything but dull and of all speeches the one with the most verbal stilettos in the direction of the Bush administration. (Sontag's own speech was more philosophical and consequently went a bit deeper.) The comparison that stuck to mind the most was between decorated WWII general Eisenhower never wearing uniform once after being elected as President, since, as Nagel put it, he understood that the President of the U.S. was an elected citizen, and Bush's Top Gun masquerade on May 1st, bearing in mind Bush never experienced a war and got around serving in Vietnam due to Daddy's money and connections. What did this have to do with Sontag? Well, Nagel used it as an example of imagery and the deformation public consciousness, a major Sontag theme.
The lady herself mentioned Dubya only once, in connection of the different uses of religion in Europe and the US. And of course she commented on the notorious absence of US ambassador Daniel Coats, about whom today's Frankfurter Allgemeine (our Washington Post, the more conservative of our major daily newspapers, as opposed to the Süddeutsche Zeitung which I'd compare to the New York Times) wrote: "One doesn't want to call him ambassador of the United States any longer. The insult was intended for Ms Sontag but also hits the German booksellers and the country which regards the peace award as one of the most important and highest honours it can give." Any one who speaks German can read the entire article
here.
Anyway, back to Sontag and her speech, which was relaxed and once the Coats allusion was out of the way very conciliatory. She spoke about the increasing use of clichés on both sides of the Atlantic, about our differences and shared traits, and between quotes of Alexis de Tocqueville and D.H. Lawrence (who in her opinion wrote the two books which are still the best on the US) suggested that ultimately, literature is the multinational country which is able to set us free. She ended on an anecdote: as an imaginative child in 1943, she read her first German books in translation (Goethe's Werther and Storm's Immensee), which helped her through school, while simultanously having nightmares about the German soldiers which were kept in a camp in her home state, Arizona, breaking out and killing her; decades later, when meeting her German editor, Fritz Arnold, for the first time, she found out he was one of these POWs who then for the first time was reading American literature, which helped him through the years of internment. The speech is reprinted in today's SZ but I haven't been able to track down an English version yet. When I do, I'll link it because I think it's really much fairer and balanced than any of Sontag's critics would have expected.
And finally ending on a frivolous note:
hobsonphile has some neat observations on my favourite Ferengi here.
