vinterkräksjuka
A rather dreary weekend, a rather dreary beginning to the week. Hopes for a wild weekend, being crushed by a certain friend's incompetance led to me deciding to go home early after a few beers at Nada with Andreas, mattias and an exgirlfriend or two that I'd rather have avoided. I had a nice time, I just hadn't planned to end the whole evening at
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It's very rough - the final draft was a little more accomplished but the general drift is the same.
Mr Benulic,
I must say I found your column today (26/10) to be complete nonsense.
To begin with we should perhaps place this evil and repellent Pinter into context. Almost all of Pinter’s tirades against the American/English attacks against Serbia and Iraq have been borne of a disgust with the massive amount of lives wasted. His ire is reserved principally for Blair/Clinton/Bush on the basis that they used terrible force against innocent people.
As he stated in a letter to the Guardian:
“The justification for the action - "humanitarian considerations" - is clearly a very bad joke. It also demonstrates a profound hypocrisy on the part of the US and UK. Sanctions on Iraq -led by those countries - have killed nearly one million Iraqi children. That's genocide for you - in no uncertain terms. Milosevic is undoubtedly ruthless and savage. So is Clinton”
He is not excusing Milosevic rather he is rather placing those leaders he hates on the same level.
Is his belief that the war in Serbia and Iraq were motivated by an American desire for power hidden behind a laughable façade of humanitarian considerations really so controversial? Haven’t recent surveys shown that the large majority of the Swedish people feel the same way.
When the Guardian printed, as you indeed do, that Pinter believed milosovich innocent he replied in an interview:
“It is rather curious, isn't it, that the Guardian, so highly respected and regarded, sees fit to actually, just for the sake of a headline, if you like, a little nice quote - it's a good quote, isn't it: "Milosevic is innocent, says Pinter." It's a lie. I've never said that. And the fact they can do that I think is pretty deplorable”
And of course this is what you are doing, putting words into mouths, reaching false concluisans and damning someone based on too little information. It makes great invective though and has a lot more to do with tabloid sensationalism than a reasoned and fair debate.
It should be also noted that this “despicable” man is actively involved with, sponsoring and supporting, Amnesty international, The Kurdish Human rights project, The National assembly against Racism, Chile committee for human rights, refugee support centre and many more.
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Even taking all this into account, you may be right in suggesting that we judge people not just on their ability to do their jobs but upon the opinions they hold. Indeed I’d agree with you completely on that point.
However as far as I know the Nobel Prize for literature was never intended to be an award given to outstanding people each year but rather to people who have made an outstanding contribution to literature.
Your suggestion that great literature and populary condoned ideas of political sorrectness must go hand in hand is absoloutely ludicrous.
You may not be able to think of any writers as exceptions to your little rule but in that case you are severely lacking in knowledge of literary history or just hoping noone will think about it too carefully.
Just off the top of my head I could mention that Yeats (nobel prize winner), Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and TS Eliot (nobel prize winner) puportedly had fascist sympathies as did indeed a great number of modernists at the time.
Celine's Long Journey into Night is a wonderful, insightful book about the modern world but he spent half his life in exile due to (again) fascist sympathies and anti semitism.
That great socialist and alround compassionate liberal playright George Bernard Shaw (nobel prize winner) was not only interested in Eugenics he firmly believed that only a comprehensive instigation of eugenics would "save the world". A movement that he freely admitted might justify the need for concentration camps.
I'm a huge fan of Yukio Mishima, he wrote some of the best prose of the Twentieth century. He was also a right wing nationalist extremist. So extreme in fact that he staged an armed take over of a military base and tried to convince the army to stage a coup detat.
It is not a writer’s job to be right or wrong, it is their job to asks questions to have opinions but most of all it is their job to write plays, poetry or novels that make us think that affect us deeply.
All this seems particularly ridiculous as Pinter’s greatest work has little to do with direct politics but with the human condition itself. It has a lot to do with the power plays between ordinary people and the way in which we use and abuse language. It is the profoundness with which he has approached these issues that has made him the great writer he is. It is for this that he is in the position to win the Nobel Prize. You may well consider him to be a mediocre writer but ask pretty much any student of English literature or theatre or indeed read most books on the subject and you’ll see that he is more often than not to be considered one of the great dramatists of the late twentieth century.
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