W.G. Sebald, who emigrated to England when he was in his 20s, but continued to write in German until his death in 2001, on living between two languages:
[O]n bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.
Some things you don't learn until you leave your country. Emerson - who reads him these days? But here in Germany, I was surprised to find a large contingent of German scholars who spend years poring through the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, apparently to their great satisfaciton. A few weeks ago, I saw a lecture by one German professor of American studies in which he claimed to show that almost every important idea Nietzsche had ever had, Emerson had had first. Time to go back and read Emerson...
"As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of being
wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. II.
Thomas Bulfinch on "Norse Literature," from the revised and expanded edition of The Age of Fable:
The introduction of Christianity into the North brought with it the influence of the classical races, and this eventually supplanted the native genius, so that the alien mythology of the literature of Greece and Rome have formed an increasing part of the mental equipment of the northern peoples in proportion as the native literature and tradition have been neglected.
Undoubtedly Northern mythology has exercised a deep influence on our customs, laws and language, and there has been, therefore, a great unconscious imspiration flowing from these into English literature. The most distinctive traits of this mythology are a peculiar grim humour, to be found in the religion of no other race, and a dark thread of tragedy which runs througout the whole woof, and these characteristics, touching both extremes, are writ large over English literature.
From Think Progress, two sentiments you won't be hearing from European politicians anytime soon (I doubt Sarkozy's slogan "work more to earn more (F)" refers to working more jobs):
Representative Michelle Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, January 16, 2008: "I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs."
President Bush, speaking to a divorced mother of three in February of 2005: “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”
UPDATE: After I thought about it a bit, something else about Bush's quote irritated me: the American tic of identifying something as "uniquely American" or exclaiming "only in America!" after some rags-to-riches story. This is classic Frankfurtian bullshit: generally, Americans who say these things haven't the faintest idea whether the stuff they're describing really does happen only in the U.S., (usually because they have only the dimmest idea of what goes on in other countries).
To take Bush's example, I'm sure there are lots of countries in which people who are trying to support a family might work as many as three jobs. India and China come to mind. While I was in the U.S., I lost track of the number of times I heard Barack Obama's life (white American mother, black Kenyan father) described as an "only-in-America" story. As a friend exclaimed the 14th time we heard some TV announcer say this, "that statement is almost certainly demonstrably false." Nor, for that matter, was Bill Clinton's life story of growing up in poverty with a single mother and becoming leader of his country particularly exceptional; look at Brazil and Germany. Get ready to hear any number of spurious "only in America!"s if Hillary Clinton is elected.
The only thing that might is "uniquely American" in all of the above, I'd say, is the idea that having to work three jobs is "'fantastic."
"[I]t is no doubt still unbearable for many people to imagine that the burden of deciding which goals humanity should pursue, which plans and actions have or have not meaning for human beings, falls on themselves. They constantly seek someone to take this burden from them, someone who prescribes rules by which they should live and sets goals that make their lives worth living. What they expect is a pre-ordained meaning coming from outside; what is possible is a meaning created for themselves and ultimately by human beings together, which gives their life its direction."
[from an October 1983 speech: 'Ageing and Dying: Some Sociological Problems'].
Intermittent blogging continues while I socialize among my glittering circle of intelligent, good-looking friends.
Continuing with the Prussian Virtues theme:
"The most radical division it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort toward perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves."
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (quotation found here).
From The American Prospect (of all places):
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass. The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! The second tear makes kitsch kitsch.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I think Kundera has it right. It's not the naked content of the image or book or painting that makes it kitsch, it's the sense that whoever created it is striving toward a particular effect, or trying to force the viewer's reaction into some kind of reactive channel (usually, inoffensive wholesomeness).
Two conclusions follow: not all sentimentality is kitsch, and some things that are kitsch can nevertheless be appreciated for their non-kitschy qualities. The Cavalia show, for instance. Perhaps even Andre Rieu.* Of course, in order to extract the non-kitschy 'genuine' pleasure from these kitschy experiences, you'll need to make sure everyone knows you are doing so. The dilemma is further explored here.
* Warning: both websites play music. Which, itself, is a sure sign of Netkitsch.
Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger on European death-penalty opponents:
Particularly in European abolitionist discourse, the binary opposition between "civilized" and "uncivilized" criminal justice systems is conjured up all too often and too easily. While this might be a powerful rhetoric, it only works as a "conversation stopper." It is further empirically incorrect, since abolition seems to be rooted in European societies much less than the claim implies. Lastly, it seems the perpetuation of colonialist discourse to establish moral hierarchies between whole societies based on their "civilizational progress."
Sarat & Boulanger, 'Putting Culture into the Picture', in Sarat & Boulanger, The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment, pp. 32-33.
"I didn't expect such gastronomical knowledge from an American cartoon!"
-- From this washington post article.
[T]he leisure class's "veneration of the archaic" shows itself everywhere: in the popularity among the upper-middle class of attending opera and classical ballet; of sending its issue to single-sex prep schools, because more unregenrate and old-style than co-ed ones; of traveling to view antiquties in Europe and the Middle East; of studying the "humanities" instead of, say, electrical engineering, since the humanities involve the past and studying them usually results in elegiac emotions. Even the study of law has about it this attractive aura of archaism: there's all that dog Latin, and the "cases" must all be rooted in the past. Classy people never deal with the future.
Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Status System, p. 72.
"There are people sitting in government offices who simply like to put up signs."
Thomas Hessling, ADAC traffic engineer, as quoted in this article on a Germany's nascent road-sign-reduction campaign.
From a long interview (G) with the gravely-ill Walter Kempowski (my translation):
You have the gift of humor. Why does everything have to be so gloomy in German literature?
Gloomy and ideological. Germans so often had to twist themselves to Christianity, Communism, Nazism -- who could possibly keep a sense of humor during all that?
***
How do you want to die?
Like [Theodor] Fontane. While eating, he told his daughter: "I'm just going to go into the other room." When she looked in after a quarter-hour, he lay there on the bed, dead. I probably won't have it that easy.
"Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember."
Martin Amis, 2001.
From Lucius Annaeus Seneca: On the Shortness of Life:
Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.
From a billboard advertisement for the tabloid newspaper Bild:
"Complaining is the death of love." (Noergeln ist der Tod der Liebe) -- Marlene Dietrich
(From their "Every truth requires someone brave enough to say it" series).
Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic, Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, on the different level (G) of anti-Americanism in Western Europe and the former Eastern bloc: "Here, you don't see the kind of virulent anti-Americanism that dominates Western Europe. After all, our nations weren't nourished back to health on American Marshall Plan funds, and we therefore have less occasion to cultivate our prejudices."
P.S. I could tell he was Central European royalty just by the moustache, couldn't you?
Recent Comments
Member since 11/2004
Categories
July 2008
Archives
Blogs I Read
Reading List
Czeslaw Milosz: To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays
Essays on writing, history, cities, politics, Poland, poetry, and religion. Most are as idiosyncratic as they are lovely.
English Title: "In Europe: A Journey through the 20th Century." Dutch journalist and historian Geert Mak traveled for a year throughout Europe and files this almost 1000-page report on the places he saw and the history that shaped them. A bit rambling, but packed with fascinating detail.
James Q. Whitman: Harsh Justice : Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe
Why does Europe send criminals to nice prisons for short, rehabilitative stays, while America degrades them, locks them up for decades, and even kills them? An insightful historical look at the development of criminal justice policy on each side of the Atlantic
Halldor Laxness: Independent People (Vintage International)
1955 Nobel Prize winnder Laxness's epic tale of Bjartur of Summerhouses, a fiercely backward and obstinate Icelandic shepherd, and his willful daughter Asta Solillja, told in feverish, mystical prose.
Sebastian Haffner: Anmerkungen zu Hitler
A German/English journalist's brief but lucid analysis of Hitler's worldview, his achievements, his military strategies, his mistakes, and his crimes.
Photo Albums