Yes, that is a good speech, Doug, I especially like the story about her and Fritz
at the end, that unlikeliest of coincidences,
best,
Rebeccca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 09:04:41 -0700
>From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Sontag/tsunami/compassion
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Connected to that article, is Sontag's own very fine acceptance speech
>for the German Booksellers' Peace Prize: thoughtful, questioning, still
>necessary:
>
>http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1031
>
>Doug
>On 3-Jan-05, at 2:24 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
>
>> Great tribute to Sontag, reflecting on the tsunami and other
>> disasters, by
>> Rebecca Solnit at Tom Dispatch
>>
>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2095
>>
>> Sontag wrote beautifully about the images that we see, particularly
>> those of
>> suffering and of war. Now I wish she had said more about what we don't
>> see,
>> about how photographs must be weighed against the obliviousness they
>> dispel
>> as well as against the callousness they might generate, the
>> exploitation
>> they might cause, and the perils of interpretation. In her most recent
>> book,
>> Regarding the Pain of Others , Sontag writes, "Being a spectator of
>> calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern
>> experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's
>> worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as
>> journalists. Wars
>> are now also living room sights and sounds." And then she took up her
>> old
>> argument, in On Photography , that there should be an "ecology of
>> images" to
>> keep "compassion, stretched to its limits" from "going numb." She
>> argues
>> with her former self, "There isn't going to be an ecology of images. No
>> Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its
>> ability
>> to shock." But the images of Abu Ghraib were shocking anyway, and the
>> images
>> of the tsunami are harrowing.
>>
>> What is now most striking now about Sontag's argument is that it is
>> not so
>> much about photography but about compassion, an emotion and an ethic
>> that
>> photographs can awaken or undermine. Elsewhere in Regarding the Pain of
>> Others , she writes, "Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be
>> translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with
>> the
>> feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been
>> communicated.
>> People don't become inured to what they are shown -- if that's the
>> right way
>> to describe what happens -- because of the quantity of images dumped on
>> them. It is passivity that dulls feeling."
>>
>> Alison Croggon
>>
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>>
>>
>
>
>Douglas Barbour
>Department of English
>University of Alberta
>Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
>(780) 436 3320
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
>We both know the reason why you called
>So stop wastin’ time tryin’ to soften up my fall
>I know you wanna sweeten up the taste
>But if you don’t mind I’ll just take my sorrow straight
>
> Iris DeMent
|