el Humpty Dumpty en los intérpretes (jueces)

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't – till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master – that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
"They've a temper, some of them – particularly verbs, they're the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

Una escena de A través del espejo y lo que Alicia encontró allí, muestra cómo a veces quienes interpretan las normas actúan como Humpty Dumpty... Una escena de la literatura infantil que se aplica a la interpretación del Derecho.

Aquí, Alice es perseguida por el Jabberwocky, pero en el libro, sigue platicando con Humpty hasta que sucede su fatal destino...

Por cierto, yo celebro mi no-cumpleaños, siempre he estado de acuerdo con la filosofía de Alicia.

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contra todos por la libertad: A. Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

I dedicate this

to all those who did not live

to tell it.

And may they please forgive me

for not having seen it all

nor remembered it all,

for not having divined all of it.

The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970 Banquet Speech English
Russian

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1974

(Translation)
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Many Nobel Prize laureates have appeared before you in this hall, but the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation have probably never had as much bother with anyone as they have had with me. On at least one occasion I have already been here, although not in the flesh; once the honorable Karl Ragnar Gierow was already on his way to meet me; and now, at last, I have arrived out of turn to occupy an extra seat. Four years had to pass to give me the floor for three minutes, and the secretary of the Academy is being forced now to address the third speech to the same writer.

I must ask your forgiveness, therefore, for having caused all of you so much trouble, and thank you especially for the ceremony in 1970, when your king and all of you welcomed here an empty chair.

But you will agree that it has not been so simple for the prizewinner, either: carrying his three-minute speech around with him for four years. When I was preparing to come to you in 1970 no room in my breast, no amount of paper was sufficient to let me speak my mind on the first free tribune of my life. For a writer from a land without liberty his first tribune and his first speech is a speech about everything in the world, about all the torments of his country, - and it is pardonable if he forgets the object of the ceremony, the persons assembled there and fills the goblets of joy with his bitterness. But since that year when I was unable to come here, I have learned to express openly practically all my thoughts in my own country as well. So that finding myself expatriated to the West, I have acquired all the better this unhindered possibility of saying as much as I want and where I want, which is something not always appreciated here. I needn't, therefore further burden down this short address.

However, I find a special advantage in not responding to the award of the Nobel Prize until four years later. For example, in four years it is possible to experience the role this prize has already played in your life. In my life it has been a very large one. It has prevented me from being crushed in the severe persecutions to which I have been subjected. It has helped my voice to be heard in places where my predecessors have not been heard for decades. It has helped me to express things that would have otherwise been impossible.

In my case, the Swedish Academy have made an exception, and a rather rare one, awarding me the prize when I am middleaged and my open literary activity is a mere child of some eight years. For the Academy there was a great hidden risk in doing so: after all, only a small part of the books I had written had been published.

But perhaps the finest task of any literary or scientific prize lies precisely in helping to clear the road ahead.

And I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the members of the Swedish Academy for the enormous support their choice in 1970 has given my works as a writer. I venture to thank them on behalf of that vast unofficial Russia which is prohibited from expressing itself aloud, which is persecuted both for writing books and even for reading them. The Academy have heard for this decision of theirs many reproaches implying that such a prize has served political interests. But these are the shouts of raucous loudmouths who know of no other interests. We all know that an artist's work cannot be contained within the wretched dimension of politics. For this dimension cannot hold the whole of our life and we must not restrain our social consciousness within in its bounds.

From Les Prix Nobel en 1970, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1971

Obra

Un día en la vida de Iván Denisovich (1950)
Nunca cometemos errores (1963)
Por el bien de la causa (1964)
El pabellón del cáncer (1967-68)ISBN 8472236781
El primer círculo (1968)
Agosto 1914 (1971)
Archipiélago Gulag (1973)
Lenin en Zurich: capítulos (1975)
Archipiélago Gulag 2 (1975)
Archipiélago Gulag 3 (1978)
El roble y el ternero
El peligro mortal
Cómo reorganizar Rusia (1990)
El problema ruso: al final del siglo XX (1992)
Rusia bajo los escombros (1992)
La rueda roja, tetralogía compuesta por Agosto 1914, Octubre 1916, Marzo 1917 y Abril 1917
El error de Occidente (Colección de ensayos)

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Homenaje a Octavio Paz

Hace una década Octavio Paz dejó de estar. Paz fue historia y su constante búsqueda por la existencia pervive en su obra, su pasión crítica es siempre vigente.

"A los mexicanos nos hace falta, lo mismo en la esfera privada que en la pública, volver a Montesquieu, quiero decir: conocer y reconocer los límites de cada uno, los míos y los de mi vecino. De ahí que la reforma política sea inseparable de la esfera intelectual y moral. Esto únicamente puede realizarse por una acción interior e interpersonal: una enmienda, una conversión. Por esto me atrevo a decir que la reforma moral es, o debería ser, la tarea de la nueva generación intelectual." (Vuelta 127, México, junio 1987)

Letras Libres le dedica su número 112 al premio nobel mexicano.

Aquí algunas publicaciones de Paz en Letras Libres. Algunos Poemas de Paz en la red. Colección de fotografías. Editoriales. aquí, aquí, , aquí
Vargas Llosa Sobre Sor Juana y las Trampas de la Fe Una página sobre Paz: Paz a la vista.

El fin de semana comenzó el homenaje al escritor mexicano y que consiste de una serie de exposiciones, conciertos, lecturas e incluso la publicación de cartas inéditas para conmemorar el décimo aniversario de la muerte del escritor Octavio Paz, único mexicano en ganar el Premio Nobel de Literatura (1990).

El acto central de conmemoración al poeta y ensayista se celebró el sábado 19 de abril, en el Palacio de Bellas Artes de la capital mexicana. En este homenaje estuiveron presentes entre otros el historiador Enrique Krauze, quien recordó que "Nada menos paceano que la paz de su apellido", pues "Paz", dijo Krauze "no era hombre de paz, sino de guerra, de una buena guerra: una noble guerra intelectual hecha de indignación y pasión. De indignación contra la superchería ideológica, la simplificación, la confusión, el fanatismo, la mala fe, pero sobre todo, indignación contra la mentira. De pasión por la libertad, la literatura, la claridad, la crítica, la razón, pero sobre todo, pasión por la verdad".

También estuvieron presentes el poeta Derek Walcott; el cubano Orlando González Esteva y el francés Michel Deguy, así como el arquitecto Teodoro González de León. Desde una pantalla se proyectaron testimonios de Juan Goytisolo, el historiador Hugh Thomas, el filósofo Ramón Xirau y Tomás Segovia.

Krauze recordó que a Paz le causaba desazón el futuro del país."México le dolía. '¿Qué va a pasar?' dijo Krauze: me preguntó con visible angustia la última vez que lo vi. Porque temía el imperio de la muerte en el alma del mexicano, porque conocía nuestras entrañas feroces, porque no sabía si aprenderíamos a tiempo las reglas de la vida cívica. Octavio Paz no sólo moría del terrible mal que lo aquejó, moría también de perplejidad".

La pregunta sigue abierta: "Como el poema de Paz (Águila o Sol), nuestro sino político, nuestro sino histórico ha topado con dos caminos: el sí y el no. El sí es la convivencia tolerante, la que dialoga, la civilizada; el no es el eterno retorno de lo mismo: la violencia, los caudillos, las fiestas trágicas, los mitos."No desde la borrosa patria de los muertos, sí desde la luz solar de su obra, Octavio Paz nos invita a optar resueltamente por el camino del sí", agregó Krauze.

Por otro lado, González Esteva leyó las palabras del poeta francés Yves Bonnefy, quién consideró que Paz perteneció a la estirpe de escritores que se asumen como ser político: "un ser hecho para guiar al grupo social, ofreciéndole tan pronto obras hechas de palabras, como ejemplos infinitamente meritorios"."Octavio Paz era de esta especie rara, al mismo tiempo que beneficiosa: un poeta ciudadano, un poeta comprometido con el devenir de la sociedad y del mundo. Uno de los que cada vez es más necesario conocer, desgraciadamente, en el comienzo de esta nueva era".

Después Walcott leyó fragmentos de Piedra de Sol, que él tradujo al inglés "para que escuchen cómo Paz deleita, también en esta lengua".

El acto cerró con el concierto con la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional.

Los intelectuales mexicanos Elena Poniatowska, José de la Colina, Eduardo Lizalde y Hugo Gutiérrez Vega realizarán varios debates sobre la obra de Paz el próximo 23 de abril, en coincidencia con la celebración del Día Internacional del Libro.

La publicación esta semana de 55 cartas que el mexicano envió al poeta español Tomás Segovia abrió los homenajes que se preparan en su país natal y que se prolongarán durante meses. Donadas por su viuda, Marie Jo Paz, las "Cartas a Tomás Segovia 1957-1985" contienen referencias a la génesis de sus obras "Blanco" (1966), "Cuadrivio" (1965) y "Piedra de sol" (1957), y ayudan a entender cómo se pergeñaron varios de sus proyectos, según la directora del Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), Consuelo Sáizar.

El conocido Festival Internacional Cervantino también dedicará este año un homenaje a Paz en octubre cuando pondrá en escena la única obra dramática del Premio Nobel, "La hija de Rappaccini".

En julio y agosto este museo acogerá una muestra llamada "Arte de México en la Obra de Octavio Paz", mientras que el Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso de la capital, donde el escritor estudió, realizará una exposición homenaje, de octubre de 2008 a marzo de 2009.

La sinrazón:
Los actos preparativos de sus homenajes no estuvieron exentos de polémica después de que los diputados federales creyeran que Paz no era digno de ocupar un espacio en el llamado "Muro de Honor" del Congreso de México, donde se inscriben los nombres de los personajes más destacados de la historia de México.
Afortunadamente todavía quedan algunos más civilizados:
El Senado mexicano decidió, sin embargo, bautizar con el nombre de Octavio Paz a una sala de la cámara alta. Y la Secretaría de Educación Pública rindió un homenaje a Octavio Paz al inscribir en letras de oro el nombre del poeta en el edificio central de esa dependencia, en la que destacan los murales de Diego Rivera.

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) se convirtió en 1990 en el único mexicano en recibir el Premio Nobel de Literatura como reconocimiento por su obra ensayística y poética, que incluye cerca de una treintena de títulos y es una de las más destacadas de la literatura latinoamericana del pasado siglo.

Video: recuerdan a Paz a 10 años de su muerte.
Información para elaborar esta nota: El Financiero, El Reforma. El Universal. El País.

"Si las revoluciones no se hacen con palabras, las ideas no se implantan con decretos"
Octavio Paz
El Laberito de la Soledad

"El niño es la semilla de creación del hombre."
Octavio Paz

Aquí la parte 1/12 de una larga entrevista hecha a Paz por Joaquín Soler. Para ver las 12 partes hace doble click sobre la imágen para que te lleve a Youtube. Ahí podrás ver del lado derecho las demás partes.

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el silencio de Nagasaki

Las crónicas que nunca fueron publicadas






Goeorge Weller Permaneció en Nagasaki desde el 6 hasta el 10 de septiembre de 1945, explorando la ciudad reventada durante el día, escribiendo sus partes hasta altas horas de la noche y enviándolos después a los censores militares de MacArthur en Tokio, con la esperanza de que siguieran su camino y fueran transmitidos por cable a los responsables del Chicago Daily News, y de ahí a una enorme cantidad de lectores norteamericanos a través de los periódicos de todo el país que compraban los artículos a su periódico. Estos partes, que fueron escritos tan sólo cuatro semanas después de que los americanos lanzaran sobre la ciudad una bomba atómica, han permanecido inéditos durante sesenta años; parece ser que el Gobierno estadounidense destruyó los originales. La censura de MacArthur también demoró la aparición de los partes que escribió Weller sobre sus visitas a los campos de prisioneros norteamericanos situados en un radio de 65 kilómetros desde Nagasaki. Allí descubrió el trato salvaje que el ejército japonés dispensó a sus prisioneros norteamericanos. Afortunadamente, las copias de las crónicas que guardaba el propio periodista, hechas con papel carbón, se hallaron en 2003, un año después de su muerte. Su hijo Anthony se ha encargado de recopilarlas. El libro, editado por Crítica, acaba de salir a la venta.


Publicado el domingo en El País

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El estrés del Nobel

Pregunta. ¿Cómo está usted ahora, después del ajetreo del Nobel?

Respuesta. ¿Me lo pregunta en serio? Pues tengo tos, una ligera diarrea y cistitis. Pero, aparte de eso, estoy muy bien, gracias. Lo que tengo es por culpa del estrés. El estrés del Nobel, esto es muy estresante. Suena el timbre de la puerta, vienen ustedes a verme, el teléfono no deja de sonar, y así todo el día. Y el gato está molesto, ¿no lo ve?

P. ¿Y ahora cómo ve Inglaterra?
R. Nunca volvió a ser así, en mi experiencia. La gente tiene tanto dinero... Vas a Leicester Square y la plaza está repleta de gente. Es medianoche, o casi de madrugada, y sigue habiendo jóvenes queriendo divertirse. Esto es nuevo en este país. No creo que dure... Hmmmm, veremos. Reconozco que hay bolsas de pobreza, pero en general la gente tiene dinero, y está cómoda, y no tiene miedo. Y eso solía pasar, la gente tenía miedo: a perder el empleo, a caer enfermo... Este tipo de sociedad tan confiada en la que vivimos ahora debe de ser única en la historia. ¿Cuándo ha pasado esto antes?

P. El 11-S, el 11-M, los atentados de Londres, nosotros seguimos sufriendo a ETA. Usted ha escrito mucho sobre terrorismo.
R. Y aquí tuvimos el IRA. ¿Sabe lo que la gente olvida? Que el IRA atentó con bombas contra nuestro Gobierno; que mató a varias personas mientras se celebraba una convención conservadora, en la que estaba la primera ministra, Margaret Thatcher. La gente se olvida. El 11-S fue terrible, pero si se repasa la historia del IRA, lo de los americanos no resulta tan terrible. Cualquier americano pensará que estoy loca. Murieron muchas personas, cayeron dos edificios prestigiosos, pero no fue tan terrible ni tan extraordinario como ellos creen; son gente muy ingenua, o fingen que lo son.

P. ¿Nos puede contar algo de su libro sobre la guerra?
R. Sobre mis padres y la guerra. Mis padres sufrieron mucho con la I Guerra Mundial, salieron muy dañados. Así que les he dado vida, como si la guerra mundial no hubiera ocurrido. Vidas decentes, corrientes, poco excitantes. Ésa es la primera mitad del libro. La segunda parte es lo que verdaderamente ocurrió, y debo decir que algunas partes son bastante trágicas, horrendas. ¡Porque fue trágico y horrendo! Esa gente era perfectamente normal, corriente, y fueron destrozados por la guerra. Yo esto lo sentía incluso cuando era una niña. Ha sido doloroso de escribir, pero muy agradable dar a mis padres vidas de paz. Mi padre siempre quiso ser un granjero inglés, así que le convertí en granjero inglés. Y a mi madre le he dado todo tipo de cosas interesantes que hacer, porque era una mujer tan sumamente lista.

ENTREVISTA: Doris Lessing
"La guerra y la memoria no acaban nunca"

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Novedades que me interesan

En el Sunday Book Review del NYT recomiendan entre otros, éstos libros:



Harvard University Press.

A Secular Age
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor is Winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/TAYSEC.html


Other HUP Books by Charles Taylor
The Ethics of Authenticity
Philosophical Arguments
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited

++

WEIMAR GERMANY
Promise and Tragedy.
By Eric D. Weitz.
Illustrated. 425 pp. Princeton University Press.

Berlin Stories
By BRIAN LADD
Democracy is a fragile flower, as we learn again and again. Among the many failed democracies of the past century, few held more promise than Germany’s Weimar Republic, and none collapsed into greater horror. Its story can be told in two ways: as a drama of decadent excess and tragic flaws, or as an elegy recalling noble promises betrayed by treacherous enemies. Eric D. Weitz’s “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” falls squarely into the second category.
Weitz, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, praises the republic’s achievements and condemns its murderers: the right-wing businessmen, army officers and civil servants who handed the country over to the Nazis. Together, the respectable and the radical right nourished the toxic lie that Germany lost World War I because it was “stabbed in the back” by leftist democrats. Still, the Weimar of this book is not a prelude to Hitler, who barely puts in an appearance.

++


THE SLAVE SHIP
A Human History.
By Marcus Rediker.
Illustrated. 434 pp. Viking.

Voyage of the Damned
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD
Most spasms of cruelty in history we know about largely through the testimony of victims. It is thanks to acts of witness by survivors like Primo Levi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, that we can begin to picture what life was like in Auschwitz and the gulag. There is no great trove of memoirs by retired concentration camp guards.
By contrast, a much more prolonged bout of suffering, the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic, on which more than 12 million Africans were embarked for the Americas over more than three centuries, we know about almost entirely from the perpetrators. There are few accounts of this voyage by slaves, and historians are now not 100 percent sure of the authenticity of the most famous of them, the 18th-century autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. But an astonishingly large body of evidence remains from those who trafficked in human beings: letters, diaries, memoirs, captain’s logbooks, shipping company records, testimony before British Parliamentary investigations, even poetry and at least one play by former slave-ship officers.
It is this rich array of material that Marcus Rediker plumbs, more thoroughly than anyone else to date, for his masterly new book, “The Slave Ship: A Human History.” His focus is on the period after 1700, when this traffic was increasingly dominated by Britain — a country where, as anyone who has worked in its libraries and archives knows, they seldom seem to throw a piece of paper away. The documents mounted up because the transport of chained and shackled Africans was once so central a part of world commerce.

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La experiencia humana

El zumbido de su cerebro trabajando

ROSA MONTERO 12/10/2007 El País

Es difícil describir el impacto que produjo El cuaderno dorado de Doris Lessing en las escritoras o aspirantes a escritoras de la época. La obra salió en 1962, pero en España la leímos en la transición y cayó en nuestras mentes como una bomba, rompiendo paredes, haciéndonos más libres y, como suele suceder con los materiales altamente explosivos, causando también considerables estragos. Era una novela que hablaba de problemas reales de mujeres reales; de Anna Wulf, escritora y madre en solitario de una niña, y de su lucha para salir adelante, para trabajar, para encontrar su lugar en un mundo que acababa de dinamitar (de nuevo un símil pirotécnico: eran tiempos fulminantes) los roles sexuales tradicionales. Y trataba de estos temas, por entonces novedosos, con vigor intelectual y con una gran complejidad formal. Fue un libro rompedor, y de ahí los estragos, porque una legión de escritoras se dedicó a imitar su estilo cacofónico, híbrido y fragmentario, tan original como brillante. Incluso se estereotipó, durante cierto tiempo, una supuesta voz literaria de mujer que pasaba obligatoriamente por escribir así, con esa técnica como de retales. Ni qué decir tiene que los resultados fueron por lo general calamitosos.
Ésta es la parte negativa de su influencia. Pero la positiva fue enorme, y consistió precisamente en lo contrario. Doris Lessing demostró que se podía escribir sobre temas que antes habían sido considerados como de mujeres con altura intelectual y con calidad literaria. Y que a través de esos temas se podía retratar el mundo con tanta hondura y amplitud como a través de cualquier otro.
Leo que la Academia Sueca le ha dado el galardón como transmisora "de la experiencia épica femenina", y me parece una explicación errónea e injusta. Creo que para Lessing la llamada "experiencia femenina" podía ser tan épica o tan mísera como la masculina, y exactamente equiparable a la hora de intentar entender la vida. El peso del prejuicio hace que todavía muchos crean que, cuando una mujer escribe una novela protagonizada por una mujer, está hablando de mujeres, mientras que cuando un hombre escribe una novela protagonizada por un hombre, está hablando del género humano. El cuaderno dorado nos enseñó que la "experiencia femenina" no era ni más ni menos que una experiencia profundamente humana.

[.....]

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Cebollas, Alcachofas y Premios a los 87....

“I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot. It’s a royal flush.”

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Sobre la proximidad, la democracia y el Guernica

Michael Kimmelman publica hoy en el NYT un ensayo interesante acerca de la democracia y el arte, el fundamentalismo y el simbolismo.

A Symbol of Freedom and a Target for Terrorists

MADRID — Last Saturday, on what Parisians call White Night, when thousands of people cavort in the streets until dawn, a bunch of intruders broke into the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and punched a hole in a Monet. Then from the obscure and formerly bucolic university town of Lund, in southern Sweden, came news that a group of hooded vandals with crowbars and axes stormed into an art gallery and, to the accompaniment of death-metal music, destroyed several sexually explicit photographs by Andres Serrano.

While the Parisian hooligans were undone partly because they were caught on the museum’s security cameras, the Swedish gang went them one better. They proudly advertised their crime on YouTube.

So the other day I stopped into the Reina Sofía here to check on Picasso’s “Guernica.” The threat of violence is nothing new in Spain, where Muslim terrorists blew up commuter trains a few years ago, killing many, and where the threat of killings by Basque extremists (there was a bomb attack in Bilbao on Tuesday, a truce with the government having broken down in June) has again become part of the daily background noise of life.

Only a simple stanchion, and a discreet alarm, as I discovered when leaning too close, separates the public from Picasso’s famous mural about a midcentury act of terror: the German bombing of the ancient Basque town of Guernica in 1936. The picture presides over a big gallery of related Picassos, each a target, I suppose, if you adopt the mindset that terrorists, and those who would exploit terrorism, like to foster.

Twenty-six years ago, when the painting arrived in Madrid from New York, it was installed in a huge bulletproof glass cage at an annex of the Prado, flanked by soldiers guarding what had become an international symbol of antifascism. Picasso had wanted it to go to Spain only when Generalissimo Francisco Franco was gone. To anyone who remembered it at the Museum of Modern Art, the sight at the Prado was sad and shocking. The picture looked forlorn, suffocated. It was almost impossible to see.

It had already been vandalized at the Museum of Modern Art when a small-time artist named Tony Shafrazi sprayed the words “Kill Lies All” on it in 1974. In the creepy, amnesiac way that celebrity and money operate in America and in the art world, Mr. Shafrazi went on to become a rich and powerful art dealer.

The painting moved some years ago from the Prado to the Reina Sofía and was finally let out of its glass prison. I’ve never loved “Guernica,” to tell the truth. Its lofty ambition obscures the detriments of its telegraphed emotions and inflated billboard-size Cubism, but time only adds to its patina of glory for the crowds that come to commune with it and who can now get almost, but not quite, close enough to touch the picture.

Proximity is the cost, and virtue, of a civil and democratic society. We run the risk that some lunatic or self-promoter will violate the public trust of an open space because we value that space as a democratic ideal. Part of what’s beautiful about an art museum, aside from what’s on view, is that it implies trust — it lets us stand next to objects that supposedly represent civilization at its best and, in so doing, flatters us for respecting our common welfare.

Complaints that museums are snobbish palaces and that works of art in them are treated like holy relics may not be all wrong, but they miss the point that people go to museums partly to enjoy this compact with what, as a society, we decide has enduring value — with art whose fragility and vulnerability to attack make our encounters with it that much more special.

....


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/arts/design/13vand.html?th&emc=th

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Nobel de Literatura

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007

Doris Lessing

http://www.dorislessing.org/

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007 is awarded to the English writer Doris Lessing

"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 to British parents in what was then known as Kermanshah in Persia (now Bakhtaran in Iran) as Doris May Taylor. Her father, Alfred Cook Taylor, formerly a captain in the British army during the First World War, was a bank official. Her mother, Emily Maude Taylor, had been a nurse. In 1925 the family moved to a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) hoping to improve their income. Lessing described her childhood on the farm in the first part of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). At the age of seven, she was sent to a convent boarding school but later moved to a girls' school in Salisbury. When 14 she independently ended her formal schooling. In the following years she worked as a young nanny, telephonist, office worker, stenographer and journalist and had several short stories published. In 1939 she married Frank Charles Wisdom with whom she had a son, John, and a daughter, Jean. The couple divorced in 1943. In 1945 Doris married Gottfried Lessing, a German-Jewish immigrant she had met in a Marxist group mainly concerned with the race issue. She became involved with the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party. She and Gottfried had a son, Peter. When the couple divorced in 1949, she took Peter and moved to London, quickly establishing herself as a writer. Between 1952 and 1956 she was a member of the British Communist Party and was active in the campaign against nuclear weapons. Because of her criticism of the South African regime, she was prohibited entry to that country between 1956 and 1995. After a brief visit to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she was banned there as well for the same reason. In African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992) she described going back in 1982 to the country where she had grown up. She now lives in London.

Doris Lessing made her debut as a novelist with The Grass is Singing (1950), which examines the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. The book is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts.

Even the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, usually called the Martha Quest series for its main character, is largely set in Africa. The series comprises Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969). It describes Martha Quest's awakening to greater awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman. With these books Lessing created a modern equivalent of the Bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century. The Children of Violence, despite its emphatic liberation theme, is characterised by an almost fatalistic outlook. The story is told with the mild despair of someone seeing her younger self from the heavens of an afterlife, unable to intervene. The masterpiece is the final volume of the series, The Four-Gated City, a period frescoe apparently enveloping all of England – indeed our entire culture – illuminated by the author’s empathy and incivility.

The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed form reflects that of the main character's mind. There is no single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience.

Books published in the 1970s included Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), inspired by R. D. Laing. Lessing has characterised her novel from this period as "inner-space fiction": an attempt in the spirit of Romanticism to expand human knowledge to encompass regions beyond the control of reason and the ego.

In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing expanded the science fiction genre. The series studies the post-atomic war development of the human species. Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles. Among inspirations for the work was the Idries Shah’s school of Sufism that she discovered in the 1960s. Doris Lessing revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004) collection of essays.

Lessing returned to realistic narrative in The Good Terrorist (1985), providing a satirical picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonist’s misdirected martyrdom and subjugation. Her analysis of the greenhouse for the terrorist mind in generation hatred and an Übermensch attitude retains currency.

The autobiographical Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) represented a new peak in her writing. Lessing recalls not only her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the empire. Her novel The Sweetest Dream (2001) is a stand-alone sequel in fictive form. Perhaps her unsparing view of the polical antics of friends and lovers necessitated such discretion.

Her other important novels are The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988). In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a woman finally about to fulfil her gift and sexual desires. After a first reading, the contours of the real novel take shape: a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. The Fifth Child is a masterfully realised psychological thriller, where a woman’s repressed or denied aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child.

The vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life has had special appeal for Doris Lessing. It reappears in some of her books of recent years: the fantasy novel Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005). From collapse and chaos emerge the elementary qualities that allow Lessing to retain hope in humanity.

Literary Prizes: Somerset Maugham Award (1954), Prix Médicis étranger (1976), Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur (1981), Shakespeare-Preis der Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S., Hamburg (1982), W. H. Smith Literary Award (1986), Palermo Prize (1987), Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987), Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989), James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize (1995), Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995), Premio Internacional Catalunya (1999), David Cohen British Literary Prize (2001), Companion of Honour from the Royal Society of Literature (2001), Premio Principe de Asturias (2001), S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002).

En espanol: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing

At 87, she is the oldest person ever who awarded this prize. Previously the oldest recipient was Theodor Mommsen, who was 85.

Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: The Communist theme 1944-1956 when she was writing radically on social issues (and returned to in The Good Terrorist (1985)), The psychological theme 1956-1969, and after that The Sufi theme which was explored in a science fiction setting in the Canopus series (see below). After the sufist themes Lessing has worked in all three areas.

When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the Canopus in Argos series. These books show, from many different perspectives, an advanced society's efforts at Forced evolution (also see Progressor and Uplift). The Canopus series is based partly on sufi concepts, to which Lessing was introduced by Idries Shah. Earlier works of "inner space" fiction like Briefing for a Descent into Hell and Memoirs of a Survivor also connect to this theme.
Apart from this, she has also written several short stories about cats, which are her favourite animals.
The Canopus in Argos: Archives Series (1979-1983):
Shikasta (1979)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980)
The Sirian Experiments (1980)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982)
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)


The Golden Notebook is a 1962 novel by British author Doris Lessing. This book, as well as the couple that followed it, enters the realm of what Margaret Drabble in The Oxford Companion to English Literature has called Lessing's "inner space fiction," her work that explores mental and societal breakdown. It is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. After the opening realistic section, ironically called "Free Women," the book fragments into Anna's four notebooks and each notebook is returned to four times, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections. The black notebook is for Anna's memories of her life in Central Africa, which inspired her own best-selling novel; the red one for her experiences with the British Communist Party; the yellow one for a fiction she writes that is based on the painful ending of her own love affair; and the blue one for recording her memories, dreams, and emotional life. All four notebooks and the frame narrative testify to women's struggles with the conflicts of work, sex, love, maternity, and politics. This kind of novel became popular among English writers during the 1960s. In them, the novelist is interested in the process of writing and the finished product. It has been translated into other languages, including Arabic.

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