Burning Pinter

Click on pic to see original sources as long as it is available.

Snow in Stockholm. The Nobelists at their session I guess no longer in their tuxedos seem to me like some kind of Universalist congress. The league of nation lives. Today for sure, as British playright Harold Pinter comes to it like Halide Silesia on the eve of deduction. The Nobel group has dynamite money to burn, and only has power over domains like physics, chemistry, literature. But there is something in the air when the awards are ceded, and the winners do their end-zone dance.

In this case the chandiliers wavered like in a small earthquake. Pinter, Big Brother like, came over video conferencing satellite.

This is writ on a day I think we could call Pinteresque, upon a Nobel ceremony that we can call Pinteresque, which I found out about on page 3 of the New York Times, Pinteresquely sandwiched in the vicinity of a story on the U.S. flight from responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions* and Macy’s and Lord and Taylor’s ads [for jewelry and suits, but you are welcome to picture Bloomingdale’s lingerie [page 4] and watches too]. Page one NYT Sec of State Rice explains what grilling is in relation to prisoner renditions.

Dressed in black, Pinter explained how an image or word can ignite his acts of composition. The goal is truth. Yet the artist cant ignore the political, he said, if the politics of the time creates a tapestry of lies, and uses language to obscure reality. It is the duty of citizens, Pinter said, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.

Pinter is like an old Ohio Teamster with his 15 minutes on the World stage. But more power to him. Dadgummit. I think the United States is the greatest country in the world and there is nowhere else I would rather be. But my country roots for the underdog - doesn’t lord it over anyone. And the lord-it-over overdog Pinter describes today is far from a fiction.

* “There is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it,” said Canada Prime Minister Paul Martin. Separately representatives from the Eskimo native culture of the Artic have filed a petition against the U.S, as unabated American emissions threaten the ice shelves from which they hunt and on which they travel.

See Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S. - NYT, Dec. 8, 2005
See US Resists New Targets for Curbing Emissions - NYT, Dec. 8, 2005
See Pinter's speech text - Nobel.org