Branda Bocken Makes Washington Post

I was doing a Google search on Gävle and was suprised to see that the recent burning of the Christmas bocken made the Washington Post: Vandals Burn Swedish Christmas Goat, Again. Ira identified a couple inaccuracies in the AP report. She said Gävle is 180 km north of Stockholm, not 150 km, and that one of the men seen running from the scene of the crime was not just wearing a Father Christmas mask, but an entire costume. Moreover, the other man was dressed as a gingerbread man.

In any event, I'm pleased to report that the town has since erected a new bokken. We'll see if it remains standing throughout the holiday season. I'll try to snap a photo to post here before it burns.

Beckettian Elements in Pinter's Nobel Lecture

Michael Billington's report on Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture begins by noting the Beckettian aspects of Pinter's powerful performance, particularly the way Pinter appeared to literally embody the deteriorating subject found in so many of Beckett's texts. The figure of Pinter, confined to a wheelchair, legs draped with a blanket, juxtaposed with an image of himself as a younger, healthier man, reminded Billington of Hamm from Beckett's Endgame.

As Ira and I watched pre-recorded lecture (broadcast in prime time on Swedish television), we remarked on the Beckettian aura surrounding the entire event as well. We were thinking primarily of Pinter's dramatic pauses and his effective use of silence and ironic understatement to punctuate a gripping speech that made its polemical points in a measured manner. But Billington is right, I think, to find physical parallels with Beckett. The lecture, for instance, was filmed in a hospital where Pinter has been staying due to leg pains, which remind one of the suffering endured by the protagonists of Molloy. This is not, of course, to suggest that Pinter's mind has suffered the sort of deterioration that afflicts Moran and Molloy.

I wish Pinter's Nobel lecture had taken place a week earlier so I could have screened it for students in my class, who had to write their final papers on Beckettian elements in one of the postmodern novels we read.

Pinter on Art, Truth and Politics

I arrived in Sweden today, making it to Gavle in time to watch Harold Pinter deliver his pre-recorded Nobel lecture, titled "Art, Truth and Politics" on SVT. Pinter's speech was brilliant - a measured argument asserting that art, especially literature, exists to present the truth - which is largely absent from politics. I'm eager to read a transcript of the speech, which was powerfully delivered. I expect to address several of its points in my dissertation, in which I am discussing the relation between aesthetic affects and political effects in postmodern literature. The first portion of Pinter's speech explained how, as a writer, he works to reveal the truth through language. The second portion of Pinter's speech focused on how politicians use language in the service of power, which requires that language be used to keep people in a state of ignorance.

Pinter chose to use his speech to educate his audience about American foreign-policy abuses since World War II, particularly the widely overlooked fact that in this period the "US government supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world," including "Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippiines, Guatemala, El Salvador and, of course, Chile."

It's admirable that Channel 4 broadcast the speech, which was highly critical of Tony Blair's support for US foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere, in the UK. Perhaps PBS would air such an address in the US, though I'm sure it would generate much controversy and lead to the typical calls for abolishing state support for public broadcasting. I certainly cannot imagine American networks airing such an address. Despite the lip service paid to free speech in the USA, the greedy execs who program our commercial media networks are far too cowardly to broadcast an address by a literary artist, particularly one daring to suggest that the US "has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good." It's fine for a Noam Chomsky to document statements in books published on small, independent, preses, but nobody in the mainstream media wants to take responsibility for documenting the numerous abuses the US government has committed in recent history.

You can watch Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture for the 2005 Literature Prize online at Nobelprize.org.

Class Photo: English & American Fiction, Fall 2005

Today was the last day of classes at UIC. Here's the official class photo for my English and American Fiction section. It was an interesting group with a number of standout students. I had several students whom I spoke with regularly after class who indicated they would stay in touch. I hope so. Over the course of the semester the majority of the students made considerable progress as readers.

In the pic, just over 2/3 of the students are present, which isn't too bad a turnout for the final day, I suppose. Perhaps I should start taking a beginning-of-the-semester and an end-of-the-semester class photo for comparison purposes? The only problem is that the class roster is always in flux for the first few weeks of classes.

Hey, Patriots, Read Any Interesting Lately?...

...The FBI wants to know.

More updates on the Surveillance Society and how the U.S. Government is waging the War on Terror on the domestric front.

Read all about NSLs (national security letters), which override existing privacy laws and enable the FBI to add hitertho off limits personal information to its data banks.

No promises that you'll feel more secure.