On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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 Posted: Thu Dec 25, 2008 9:13 am Post subject: Harold Pinter is dead |
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LONDON � Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.
Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.
"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said when it announced Pinter's award. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution."
The Nobel Prize gave Pinter a global platform which he seized enthusiastically to denounce U.S. President George W. Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
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I can't comment on his drama, never having read any of his plays. As someone who agreed with his general opposition to imperialism, I have to say I found his analysis somewhat simplisitic. As an example, in his denunciations of the Kosovo bombings, he made it sound like some dasrardly plot foisted by the evil Americans on helpless Europeans. That wasn't quite my recollection of how it all went down, in terms of where the impetus for the bombings was coming from.
And when he tried to mix art and politics, the results were decidedely substandard...
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God Bless America
Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.
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I assume this was maybe meant to be read aloud at a rally or something. Doesn't really flow too well on paper, I'd say.
But I guess he wasn't too anti-American with the leading lights of American theater. An amusing anedcote from Wikpedia...
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He has been active in International PEN, serving as a vice-president, along with American playwright Arthur Miller. In 1985, Pinter and Miller travelled to Turkey, on a mission co-sponsored by International PEN and a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. At an American embassy dinner in Ankara, held in Miller's honor, at which Pinter was also an invited guest, speaking on behalf of those imprisoned Turkish writers, Pinter confronted the ambassador with (in Pinter's words) "[t]he reality � of electric current on your genitals": Pinter's outspokenness apparently angered their host and led to indications of his desired departure. Guest of honor Miller left the embassy with him. Recounting this episode for a tribute to Miller on his 80th birthday, Pinter concludes: "Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller�a voluntary exile�was one of the proudest moments in my life" ("Arthur Miller's Socks", Various Voices 56�57). Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language "inspired" his 1988 play Mountain Language (Billington, Harold Pinter 309�10; Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 67�6 .
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I don't know what I personally would have taken this had I been in Arthur Miller's position. If Pinter felt so strongly about the Kurds that he couldn't behave civilly in the presence of the Turkish ambassador, it might have been a good idea for him to stay away from that particular party, given that he wasn't the guest of honor. Guess Miller was okay with it, though.
Anyway, RIP. |
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