State Patrol trooper killed, 3rd grader shot,crime is up?

[HollandofFrance]

Popinski found refuge in Malmo in 1945. Until recently, she told her story in Malmo schools as part of their Holocaust studies program. Now, some schools no longer ask Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, because Muslim students treat them with such disrespect, either ignoring the speakers or walking out of the class.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jews...m-1.301276

[HollandofFrance]

is swede3n where they give out peace prizes? so much for peace-Obama got one yet the drones fly all over with a 33% civilian casualty rate

[Inchante]

is swede3n where they give out peace prizes? so much for peace-Obama got one yet the drones fly all over with a 33% civilian casualty rate

And yet, the last of the "moster bombs" has been dismantled. That is the way the cookie crumbles in this world.

Honestly, I have always viewed Obama's peace prize as a prize, not for him, but for America in general for electing the first African American POTUS, but they really could not say that. Besides which, the Nobel organization has become so politicized that the only prizes that really seem to matter are those given out for the sciences, and the sciences alone.

[OrphanPip]

The Peace Prize is politicized because it is the only one given by politicians. The others are chosen by academics.

The literature prize isn't bad either, but it's a little biased towards scandinavian authors, and is essentially a Western European literary prize, but they've done a lot to correct that in recent years. There's obviously going to be an issue of availability of translation that unfortunately excludes a lot of great authors around the world.

It's probably a left biased literary award, T.S. Eliot being the only hardcore conservative I can spot on the list, but I don't think the politics of many of the writers were significant along ideological lines.

[HollandofFrance]

i feel no peace i see no peace
my neighborhood is full of democrat/anarchist yahoos who hate conservatives or ignore them

there was a group of black kids who attacked a white family in Ohio?toledo? on the 4th of july 2009 and beat them and Obama said nothing

they were yelling"this is now a black country now"

other stuff like that happens i suppose
you didnt hear about it?

whites have done bad too like the riots in tulsa around 1910

i dont feel very safe really--i think racism is up

i think obama makes blacks look stupid

Herman cain is brighter than him

whats Obama done to help the serbs persecuted in kosovo? nothing i bet

the Somali pirates have a low rate of killing the hostages like zero to 2-i dont even think Obama should have killed the pirate -he could have taken him alive

the Somali pirates are on facebook but ill not add them

[zeon]

This is sometimes the reason contributing to wards the fact that i generally do not vote in any election because i dont like politics and feel the people should have the power to decide the fate of their country they live in not the odd bods with the big wigs in the canteen

kindest regards

zeon x

[Inchante]

The literature prize isn't bad either, but it's a little biased towards scandinavian authors, and is essentially a Western European literary prize, but they've done a lot to correct that in recent years. There's obviously going to be an issue of availability of translation that unfortunately excludes a lot of great authors around the world.

Just saying:

Each year, the Nobel Lit Prize recipient is rarely on the list of authors most critics expect to receive the award (the "greatest," most well-known, bestsellers, award-winning, pillars in acadamia). Then too, some of the greatest writers in world literature (James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, and W.H. Auden) have not received the Nobel Prize for Literature. And that appears to be something of a goal of the Swedish Academy--to select those writers who are really voicing the angst of the voiceless, the nitty-gritty realities of humanity. The chosen few are often under-appreciated (or largely unknown). Interestingly enough, many of the Nobel Lit Prize recipients could also be recognized for their associations with banned or censored literature--through the controversies of their lives and literature.

In a recent AP article, Ian MacDougall spoke with Kjell Espmark, one of the jurors who has participated in blind balloting to select the Nobel laureate in literature. As MacDougall points out: "The list of the past 20 laureates includes one American -- novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 -- and 11 European writers, including German novelist Gunter Grass and British playwright Harold Pinter. Some of the others selected during that time are not from Europe but have spent much of their writing careers there." But Espmark defends the process, and he's quoted as saying: "The nation is not important, and balance (of laureates' homelands) is not interesting..."

Wanting to appear fair in its distribution of the prize, the Academy decided secretly that the award for 1968 should go to a Japanese. The committee actually sent scouts to Japan to ferret out a worthy recipient. That year Gunter Grass, Robert Graves, and Lawrence Durrell were passed over in favor of Yasunari Kawabata for his Snow Country and Thousand Cranes.

In a further effort to keep up the appearance of non-partisanship, the Academy awarded the 1973 prize of $121,000 to the Australian Patrick White for The Tree of Man and Voss, passing over Graham Greene, André Malraux, and Vladimir Nabokov.



A Rather Scathing Article from the Telegraph

Nobel Prize judge is wrong to denounce American literature
'Our mob, runs the theory, produce anaemic novels about dreary adulterers'
According to a Nobel luminary, the US has become parochial and Europe is the centre of the literary world. What rubbish, says Sam Leith
Horace Engdahl is the permanent secretary of the jury that awards the Nobel Prize for literature, and a man who - no less an authority than Wikipedia informs us - speaks Swedish, English, German, French and Russian fluently.
We can assume he knows a thing or two about literature, and we know that he can dismiss you as "parochial" in more languages than you know enough of to order a hamburger.

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world... not the United States," he told the Associated Press this week. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature... That ignorance is restraining."

• Nobel literature prize judge: American authors 'insular and ignorant'
• Booker Prize judge admits: We speed read
• Doris Lessing wins Nobel prize for literature

Now, not being a permanent member of the Swedish Academy, and not speaking five languages fluently - not speaking five languages at all, if I'm honest - I hesitate to contradict so august a figure in print. But here goes, anyway. You're wrong, Mr Engdahl. Wrong, wrong, big fat hairy wrong. So yah boo.

To start with: what does it mean to be "the centre of the literary world"? It means - quite simply - to write in English. The oldest, the most diverse, and the most voraciously acquisitive living literary tradition in the western world is English; and it is one that is more available to more people than any other single literature.

If you're talking about "the centre of the world" you're talking - surely - about lines of influence. More of them run through the Anglosphere (for in contrasting America to Europe, surely, he's contrasting America 'n' Britain to continental Europe) than anywhere else.

There is no question that there are numberless riches in the exchanges between other great Western literatures - particularly, in the 19th century, between French, Russian and German - but in the 20th century English was the Grand Central Terminus; the hub. There's surely a reason that Polish Joseph Conrad chose to write in English; and that in the following generation, that polyglot Russian smarty-pants Vladimir Nabokov (I think he had all Mr Engdahl's languages except Swedish, and knowing him he probably had that too) did so as well.

And as time goes on - sorry, Académie Française; sorry, Swedish Academy - English becomes, and will become, more rather than less central. It is the lingua franca of the internet, and the linguistic warp and weft of the post-colonial continuum from Trenchtown to Tasmania, from Assam to Abuja. That means that its availability for writers, across cultures worldwide, is greater than any other language. Derek Walcott and Helon Habila and A L Kennedy and Richard Flanagan all write in English.

So though English is not the only game in town, it is unquestionably the biggest. That presents problems of its own, mind. In his essay The Curtain, Milan Kundera deftly distinguishes between "the parochialism of large nations" and "the parochialism of small nations". The latter is a defensive parochialism - the parochialism of circled wagons. The former is a sort of complacency. That's the parochialism which - with justice - you might complain afflicts Anglo-American literature. Like Sarah Palin, with her shiny new passport, Anglospheric writers often seem to reckon: "We have all we need." We don't translate enough; we don't, often, understand our history.

When Americans look overseas they look most often to the UK. When Britons look overseas they look most often (though Julian Barnes, Adam Thirlwell and Tim Parks are honourable exceptions) to America. Anglo-American readers consume a pitifully small amount of modern literature (by living or not-long-dead writers) in translation. From France, perhaps, Michel Houellebecq, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Amélie Nothomb and, if we're feeling frisky, Catherine Millet. From Italy, we may read Italo Calvino and Lampedusa and Umberto Eco and Dario Fo. From Germany, Günter Grass and - er... um... - Brecht? From Japan, Haruki and Ryu Murakami; and back in the 1990s, Banana Yoshimoto. From modern Russia there's Andrey Kurkov, Viktor Pelevin and perhaps Vladimir Sorokin. From Scandinavia and the low countries, we read crime fiction but not a lot else. Arabic literature? For many Anglos, it starts and ends with Naguib Mahfouz. And relatively few Anglo-American writers have recent European writers among their prime influences.

But as well as the question of breadth of influence, there's the question of breadth of subject. The most clichéd complaint of the last couple of decades has been that English fiction, as opposed to American fiction, is "parochial" because American fiction is "ambitious". All American writers, runs this theory, turn face-first into the zeitgeist, and all of them are trying to produce a national epic. They generate enormous, baggy, multitude-containing Great American Novels like Moby-Dick, The U.S.A. trilogy, Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, The Corrections, Infinite Jest and so forth. Philip Roth even wrote one called The Great American Novel. Whereas our mob, runs the theory, spend their days producing well-turned but anaemic novels about dreary, bearded adulterers in one particular corner of North London.

So when we hear this Mr Engdahl denounce the Americans as parochial, our first instinct is to think: blinkin' eck, where does that leave us? But as much as the founding father of American literature, Walt Whitman, seems to fit the case, it's worth remembering that the founding mother, Emily Dickinson, arguably reached further into the universe despite barely leaving her bedroom in Amherst. Parochial is, as that other great American Forrest Gump would have said, as parochial does.

One point which might be adduced to support Mr Engdahl's Complaint (a good title for a Muriel Spark story, that) is the professionalisation of fiction writing in the States. Creative writing schools have, it's true, probably a greater purchase on American letters than their British, and certainly than their European, equivalents. American writers, runs this argument, now all come out of postgraduate courses in Iowa or Wisconsin having been taught to write like Raymond Carver - or, in recent years, like Dave Eggers. They emerge, they publish, they start teaching - and they know all about other books, and all about universities, but they know nothing about Real Life. Not like Swedish academicians know about Real Life, anyway. I refer again to the example of Emily Dickinson. Real Life is just raw material; it's what you do with it that counts.

So let's consider the product rather than the conditions of its creation. What would it look like to be not-parochial in a literature? What, we should ask ourselves, would a corpus of writing need to do? It would need to look outwards towards the world. It would need to engage with modernity - not just the political conditions of our age but its technological and linguistic texture; its science and its religion; its mass-media and its consumer culture.
And American writers have a natural advantage in this - one they exploit - because the lion's share of all these things is American. The defining ideological clash of our age pits Islamism against a specifically American form of modernity; it wasn't an accident that the prime target was the World Trade Center in New York. The primary battleground in the fight between secular and religious world views is in American classrooms and American abortion clinics and the pages of American newspapers. The collapse of the global financial system originated - again - guess where? We may be in a period of the collapse of American power in favour of Russia or China or (dream on) a federal Europe, but the story - the cultural story - is still the eclipse of America rather than the rise of anything else.

French theorists have been good - perhaps better than any - at describing (often from a hostile or sceptical perspective) the weird, hypertextual, multiply mediated experience of modernity. But in terms of fiction, it's the Americans who have plunged right in. In Don DeLillo there's mediation, there's political spectacle, there's the extreme abstraction of global capital, there's the broad sweep of history and there's the age of terror. The science fiction of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson introduced virtual reality to literature; and Richard Powers's scarily clever, high-concept novels - Plowing The Dark collides cyberspace and Middle Eastern terrorism - took it further.

And look how David Foster Wallace and his ancestor Thomas Pynchon incorporated hard science into phantasmagoric cultural vaudeville. Foster Wallace's footnotes are the nearest thing you'll see to hypertext in fiction. Pynchon's latest book is an appropriately demented international history of the turn of the 20th century.

Parochial? Jeepers. If these guys look parochial from where Mr Engdahl's sitting, it really is time for me to start learning Swedish. Or I'll do him a deal. We can both start learning Chinese. My treat.

[OrphanPip]

Just saying:

Each year, the Nobel Lit Prize recipient is rarely on the list of authors most critics expect to receive the award (the "greatest," most well-known, bestsellers, award-winning, pillars in acadamia). Then too, some of the greatest writers in world literature (James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, and W.H. Auden) have not received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

These criticisms aren't really fair though. Are any of the winning authors really bad authors? The value of an award is not in it having recognized every great living author in history, but if the award is given with a consistent eye to quality and worth.

First of all, the award was written by Nobel with the intent of originally being given to authors who put forward a certain utopian idealism that Nobel wished for. That's why a lot of critical darlings of the early 20th century were ignored, the award quickly grew to be about literary worth though. The critique is also being levelled from it's own anglo-centric perspective. Orwell, Greene, Hardy, and Huxley are not important authors outside of English (and it's tough to make a case for Greene being very important at all). Huxley isn't even a very good author.

Even Ezra Pound, who is certainly a very good poet, is a problematic figure because most critics ignore the majority of his output, and his active support of Mussolini and the Fascist in WW2 makes him a figure no award committee would reasonably touch during his life. Besides, does the committee need to award two American Modernist poets out of all the literary movements in the world? Eliot is the superior poet out of the two. Auden is good, but a minor poet. Edith Wharton only wrote one novel of any significant worth, and it came late in her life. Proust was not widely read during his lifetime and most of his work was published post-humously.

The critique from the Telegraph misses the point entirely anyway. Engdahl's position is not particularly controversial either. Do Americans imagine that their literature is widely read outside of the English speaking world. Americans have not had a major impact on international literature since the 30s. If I wanted to name the most influential Western author of the 20th century I'd probably have to go with Borges. Borges' reach is expansive, he is the central literary figure of post-modernism, reaching even into Asia as a major influence on Murakami. Can any American match him? If there is a place American literature is dominant in the 20th century it is in poetry. In my opinion, Spanish has been the dominant literary language of the 50s onward.

I think it equally ridiculous that Europe be considered the center of the literary world. However, all of this is a pointless debate. Are the Nobel prize winners bad writers? No they aren't, the prize is an expansive list of a number of fabulous writers from diverse cultures. It is easily the most diverse literary award in the world, despite its obvious eurocentrism.

Really if the best options America can present as living giants are Wallace, Stevenson, and DeLillo then there is good reason the US hasn't won a Nobel in literature recently. Wallace and DeLillo are not bad writers, but are they being read outside of the English language to a significant degree.

[Pix]

my neighborhood is full of democrat/anarchist yahoos who hate conservatives or ignore them

Anarchists and Democrats typically dislike each other as well. I'm just pointing this out because you seem to be equating them as interchangeable groups.

there was a group of black kids who attacked a white family in Ohio?toledo? on the 4th of july 2009 and beat them and Obama said nothing

they were yelling"this is now a black country now"

Link?

i dont feel very safe really--i think racism is up

I'm not sure this is true. It seems to me that racism--by whites--is up to me as well, but maybe they just never felt embolden or panicked enough to express themselves before Obama.

i think obama makes blacks look stupid

Herman cain is brighter than him

This is a pretty serious statement given that I consider my teenager brighter than Cain. Can you justify this statement? For example, can you show how Obama has failed to identify countries on a map or seem as clueless on countries like Libya as Cain is? Or do you think Obama is dumber because he doesn't base his policies (like "999") on the Sims game? Or because Obama can't quote the Pokemon theme song?

whats Obama done to help the serbs persecuted in kosovo? nothing i bet

Probably not. Especially as Obama has excused the Bush administration and went on to endorse his own atrocities.

the Somali pirates have a low rate of killing the hostages like zero to 2-i dont even think Obama should have killed the pirate -he could have taken him alive

What are you talking about? The only thing I can think of is Obama authorized the Navy SEALS to take whatever actions necessary to defend US citizens, not strap on his guns and personally lead the mission, or authorize drones that would kill automatically. Seriously, with all the REAL stuff you can sling at Obama, why do you stick to Serbs and pirates? :confused:

[Inchante]

What are you talking about? The only thing I can think of is Obama authorized the Navy SEALS to take whatever actions necessary to defend US citizens, not strap on his guns and personally lead the mission, or authorize drones that would kill automatically. Seriously, with all the REAL stuff you can sling at Obama, why do you stick to Serbs and pirates? :confused:

I think there is a tendency among people to place everything they don't like about what the government is doing under the President, especially if they don't happen to like the President or are of a different political party than the President.

For instance, not too long ago I came across a man trying to justify the booing of the First Lady at a NASCAR event, because "the president had tried to ban military sponsorship of NASCAR". I don't really follow the "sport", so I tried to find information on the topic. It turns out that a representative from the house had tried to get a bill passed that would prevent the military from sponsoring NASCAR. After finding all this out, I asked the guy if he thought the President had recently undergone a sex-change operation, had his skin bleached white, and was now living in Minnesota under the name Betty McCollum.