Pinter wins Nobel literary prize

[muriel_volestrangler]

Controversial British playwright Harold Pinter has won the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature.

Pinter, 75, whose plays include The Birthday Party and Betrayal, was announced as the winner of the $1.3m (£723,000) cash prize on Thursday.

The Nobel academy said Pinter's work "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4338082.stm

Well, my response was a quite appropriate "fuck me".

[non sociopath skin]

1. Quite (pause)

pleased (pause)





for (pause)




him (pause)




actually (pause)

The Skin.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. I thought the hour and a half pause before anyone replied

was also suitable.

[Taxloss]

3. Bloody hell, out of the blue or what?

NOT my favourite poet, but a good playwright. Craig Brown wrote a very funny essay about his obsession with excrement.

[evermind]

4. His acceptance speech has the potential to be quite interesting

if he chooses to use it as a platform to put his political views... :-)

[mr blur]

5. I don't suppse

there'll be a victory parade through the streets of London, a stamp and a photo-op on the steps of No. 10 to rival the recent ridiculous fuss over a game of cricket, by any chance? Not that Pinter would be keen on being in the same room as Blair, unless it was to slag him off. Sadly, few in this country give a fuck about the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Now, if they could get him in the pages of the Sun with a scantily-clad Celebrity Winner of some kind draped around him it might be a different matter. ("Busty Mandy says,'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.' Phwoah!! Mandy can be my Caretaker any time!!!")

[Kipling]

6. I love Sweden.

They're so right about everything, dammit.

[...of J.Temperance]

7. I don't like Pinter for the way he treated Vivien Merchant

Who was his first wife and rather an excellant actress, she later appeared in Joseph Losey's FANTASTIC film 'Accident' with Dirk Bogarde and also in Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Frenzy' with Barry Foster.

Pinter left Merchant for Antonia Fraser, and Merchant never recovered from this and spent something like the next eight years slowly drinking herself to death.

So yes, Harold Pinter was and is a fabulous writer, but as a human being I think he's a total piece of crap.

Sorry, I just had to be honest in my opinion about him.

[non sociopath skin]

8. Leaving your partner to go off with someone else ...

... may not be the kindest thing in the world to do, JT, but I'm not sure that it qualifies someone as "a total piece of crap."

[...of J.Temperance]

9. I wasn't meaning the leaving part

I was meaning that Pinter was aware how messed up it left Merchant and that she was drinking herself to death because of it, and yet he didn't even seem to care. So I see him as devoid of compassion and humanity, he should have at least tried and helped Vivien Merchant.

[non sociopath skin]

10. Maybe. But sometimes it just doesn't work anymore.

Once heard a very wise statement that said, "marriages don't break down because people commit adultery: people commit adultery because their marriage is breaking down." An important difference.

Great artists are neither more nor less human than the rest of us. Most of their lives stand up to scrutiny about as well as would anyone else's. Doesn't stop them being great artists.

I was reading Heidegger the other day as part of my college course. Heidegger was a Nazi sympathiser who - at least for a time - was willing to go with the system and seek for preferment within it. Didn't stop him being a brilliant thinker in other ways. So am I do deny him that? Should I dismiss Wagner and Saint-Saens as crap musicians because they were anti-semitic? Or boycott Fellini's movies because he wasn't overtly anti-Mussolini as a youth?

It's not easy, but I think that sometimes you have to take the artist out of the context.

The Skin

[...of J.Temperance]

11. Okay

You make some excellant points, in particular about Wagner and Fellini.

I do like Pinter's writing, which I already said, and I'll try and be kinder to him. Afterall, none of us are perfect...NOT even ME, shocking as THAT must seem to just about EVERYONE ;)