mostly on Susan Sontag
Oct. 13th, 2003 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakFeeling 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.
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Just Rewards
Date: 2003-10-13 01:13 am (UTC)Don't worry, your "Just Rewards" CD is already in the making. I downloaded the episode a couple of days ago and pretty much suspected that you might want a copy *g*
Re: Just Rewards
Date: 2003-10-13 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-13 01:52 am (UTC)See earlier lj entry.
Date: 2003-10-13 02:50 am (UTC)Jingo: another fine Terry Pratchett novel
Date: 2003-10-13 05:08 pm (UTC)The Iraq war was/is not so universally condemned in the Denmark as in Germany and France, not that is popular far from that.
And not because that the majority people doesn’t feel, that the government arguments stinks after the war But large part of the reason for that, that Denmark has become a very very small "partner" of “The collation of willing”, as it so poetic is called. You don’t hear so loud and generaly criticiseme of the decision to go to war, can be because it’s Danish soldier there are in potential at risk. The situation is pretty strange for me, when I think about it. It is first time in about 200 years that we have entered, more or less willingly, on our own accord into an attack war. Another reason could be, that culturally do we more look to England and USA. Perhaps because it gives some counterweight to the big continental countries as France and Germany. Many people do distrust the Americans government motive, but for many is the distrust larger over for particularly France. They are seen as arrogant and system imperialistic, and worst of all ineffective and old fashioned.
Have you read the rather famous essay “Power and Weakness” By Robert Kagan? about the diffraction between Usa and Europe. The essay is in some part oversimplified, which the writer acknowledged. But I found it interesting, and perhaps do I fear a little, that essay thoughts, can find fertile ground in both camps of the conflict. So it will become something of a self fulfilling prophecy. See eventual part the essay here.
http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html
I hope that is ok, that I jumped in your Lj, with something political?, if not, sorry.
Lakrids
Re: Jingo: another fine Terry Pratchett novel
Date: 2003-10-13 10:12 pm (UTC)The Book Fair is open to the general public from late Friday afternoon till Sunday evening. The rest of the days (i.e. the preceding Wednesday, Thursday, and earlier Friday) are for the people in the trade.
Robert Kagan: I read some of his stuff, and wasn't that much impressed, but maybe it was because it were excerpts. At any rate, as Sontag put it in her acceptance speech, sometimes I have to pinch myself - now the problem with Germany, from some Americans pov, is that Germans are repelled by war?
Imperialism: was certainly part of Germany's and France's past, and I do think Chirac etc. still have this idea of La France. But nowadays? I think, baring the Chinese, there is just one serious candidate for the Empire position. Incidentally, I once had the chance to hear former President Clinton talk on the subject, and he thinks the US empire won't last longer than 40, 50 more years...