Reading up and around Walser-never a good idea-you stumble across someone called Hamsun. Looks good: "fragmentariness," lyricism, the ordinary lives of ordinary people, someone who was greatly admired by other writers, "the first", the originator of modernism, etc., etc. But there's something terribly stern looking about his face, the unwavering solid jaw, for instance.
Just read the bloody thing, why don't you? But it's the old Camus/Berlin problem. You just can't let the politics go. But if you're going down that line (I imagine my imaginary reader asking) why do you seem to let your guard down when it comes to Muslim writers? Aren't some of their views obnoxious as well?
There was this line by Charles Ramsey-and I think it's got everyone's attention:
"Well, I knew something was wrong when a pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she homeless, or she got problems, that's the only why she's runnin' to a black man."
Compare this to ol' Knut job:
"The Negros are and will remain Negros, a nascent human form from the tropics, rudimentary organs on the body of white society. Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto studfarm"
Now, he may be a "great" writer, but I just haven't got the stomach for that type of nonsense. A man of his time, you might say. Let it go.
Back to Ramsey...
"She needed an ambulance, or what? She needs everything. She's, uh, she's in a panic. She's been kidnapped, so you know, put yourself in her shoes."
....
Maybe there's a point here about this need for "heroes", everyone's desire for fifteen minutes of fame, how an ordinary person speaks just the lines we'd expect him or her to speak-as if we'd seen them all too often in a movie. Just recently there was the American cowboy at Boston, the dark man in the shadows, dealing with his own suffering. Don't knock it. It's real. The ordinary loser, wayfarer, as a way out of the mess, the all-American nobody who doesn't want much except to sit down to the game with a Big Mac and some beer, whose good days are a long fine summer and a barbeque. Disheveled, forgotten, in and out of welfare, the wonder years gone from his eyes, his bones long, his clothes loose.
Of course, this is just a sideshow. The main story is, of course, the horrendous act itself. This, you feel, is the issue that will undoubtedly get swept under the carpet because it holds up a true mirror to just how sick human beings really are (for human beings read: men). This is on the back of the terrible revelations about Jimmy Saville and now Stuart Hall.
Just read the bloody thing, why don't you? But it's the old Camus/Berlin problem. You just can't let the politics go. But if you're going down that line (I imagine my imaginary reader asking) why do you seem to let your guard down when it comes to Muslim writers? Aren't some of their views obnoxious as well?
There was this line by Charles Ramsey-and I think it's got everyone's attention:
"Well, I knew something was wrong when a pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she homeless, or she got problems, that's the only why she's runnin' to a black man."
Compare this to ol' Knut job:
"The Negros are and will remain Negros, a nascent human form from the tropics, rudimentary organs on the body of white society. Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto studfarm"
Now, he may be a "great" writer, but I just haven't got the stomach for that type of nonsense. A man of his time, you might say. Let it go.
Back to Ramsey...
"She needed an ambulance, or what? She needs everything. She's, uh, she's in a panic. She's been kidnapped, so you know, put yourself in her shoes."
....
Maybe there's a point here about this need for "heroes", everyone's desire for fifteen minutes of fame, how an ordinary person speaks just the lines we'd expect him or her to speak-as if we'd seen them all too often in a movie. Just recently there was the American cowboy at Boston, the dark man in the shadows, dealing with his own suffering. Don't knock it. It's real. The ordinary loser, wayfarer, as a way out of the mess, the all-American nobody who doesn't want much except to sit down to the game with a Big Mac and some beer, whose good days are a long fine summer and a barbeque. Disheveled, forgotten, in and out of welfare, the wonder years gone from his eyes, his bones long, his clothes loose.
Of course, this is just a sideshow. The main story is, of course, the horrendous act itself. This, you feel, is the issue that will undoubtedly get swept under the carpet because it holds up a true mirror to just how sick human beings really are (for human beings read: men). This is on the back of the terrible revelations about Jimmy Saville and now Stuart Hall.
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