Zhang Shihe

‘My Responsibility to History’: An Interview with Zhang Shihe

Ian Johnson, NYR DAILY; 30 January 2018

 

 

“Tiger Temple” (Laohu Miao) is the nom de guerre of Zhang Shihe, one of China’s best-known citizen journalists and makers of short video documentaries, many of them profiling ordinary people he met during extraordinarily long bike rides through China, or human rights activists who have been silenced but whose ideas on freedom and open society he has recorded for future generations. ...

Debussy & Co.

Music Without a Destination

Matthew Aucoin, December 6, 2018 Issue NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

reviews:   
 

Debussy: A Painter in Sound
by Stephen Walsh
Knopf, 323 pp., $28.95

 

A pure pleasure to indulge in this thoughtful review by the musician and composer Matthew Aucoin on a book by Stephen Walsh, who has been acknowledged as best informed and learned author on Igor Stravinsky, and now on the French composter Debussy.

For once not the necessity to focus on the Orang Wotan and his followers, not on war & crime as daily business, but on the somehow remote field of music and composers. A mirror of cultures and societies and, of course, of personalities with all their faults and gifts.

Here some paragraphs from the review:

Walsh also makes the astute decision to focus on Debussy’s music, rather than on his social life, precisely to the degree that Debussy himself neglected personal obligations in favor of the inner world of his work. Walsh announces in his introduction that he has set out “to treat Debussy’s music as the crucial expression of his intellectual life”; he has an understandable horror of his book amounting to “a slightly annoying series of incidents.” In this, he sounds for a moment like his subject: to a near-pathological degree, Debussy regarded most of life’s responsibilities as mere annoyances, which could surely be wriggled out of with the right blend of slyness, reticence, and charm.

These lacunae are not mistakes; rather, they perfectly match Debussy’s own blind spots, his tendency to act as though other people didn’t exist unless he wanted something from them. Walsh notes that Debussy often seemed to act on “the instinctive feeling…that emotional ties are a nuisance unless kept firmly in the drawer marked ‘when I need them.’” Whenever he was caught behaving badly and had to suffer the consequences, he evidently reacted with annoyance at the inconvenience of other people’s emotions. Caught having an affair, Debussy, in a letter to Pierre Louÿs, impatiently referred to his wife’s anguished reaction as “bad literature”: “All this is barbarous, pointless, and changes absolutely nothing.”

It’s curious that Walsh, who is clear-eyed about Debussy’s personal flaws, seems to have a blind spot about his artistic integrity. Walsh, despite citing evidence to the contrary, paints him as an uncompromising perfectionist, a freethinking, anti-institutional rebel: “Everything depended on his own sensibility,” Walsh writes, “and he could not—would not—fall back on traditional best practice to help him over awkward joins or moments of failing inspiration.”

One of this book’s guilty pleasures is the inclusion of Debussy’s unfailingly accurate, often brutal summations of other composers’ music. Schubert’s songs, in his eyes, are “bits of faded ribbon, flowers forever dried, and photographs of the departed”; Richard Strauss has “the frank and decisive appeal of those great explorers who walk among savage tribes with a smile on their lips.” When Debussy noticed real talent, though, he seems to have put aside all feelings of petty competition.

The biographer focuses mainly on the work and less on the biography or aspects of the personality. This is remarkable, especially in our times. On the other hand: one must not overlook the personal limitations, the flaws, the asocial, egotistical aspects of this almost closed, personality who was using (and thereby abusing) his counterparts, the people in his environment in a very mean way. One should keep in mind Debussy's opportunistic compliances and his often narrow-minded, bigoted views on the work of others. All these aspects denounce him as person. And yet, and yet.

Besides the great achievements in music we receive an image of Debussy which corresponds to the modern man of today: nervous, egotistical, abhorring emotional involvement, giving in to drives and deep anchored impulses but not having the energy for ordered, responsibel fulfillment of his choosen tasks. His journay is open, there is no goal, everything is temporary, and the journey is the reward, because there is no destination. Today he probably would be a cyber junkie, cold, nonattached but pouring out his translated emotions in controlled productions...

 

Debussy by Stephen Walsh review – a fine biography of a painter in sound

The French composer was once dismissed as a Romantic or ‘impressionist’ who prioritised mood and feeling. This life digs deep into his innovations 

Kathryn Hughes, THE GUARDIAN,Sat 24 Mar 2018 

 

 

See also:

‘Stravinsky: the Second Exile’

Robert Craft

September 21, 2006 Issue NYRB

In response to:

All in the Family from the August 10, 2006 issue

Read about Robert Craft in Wikipedia

The great, informative book on Debussy by Stephen Walsh is in our library Gleichgewicht as well as the two volumes of Walsh's biography of Igor Stravinsky and his Book "Musorgsky and his Circle".

 

Read about Stephen Walsh in Wikipedia and the Cardiff University

Read about the Cardiff  University

At The Existentialisit Café und die Verallgemeinerung

2016 erschien von Sarah Bakewell ihr gepriesenes Buch "At the Existentialist Café", das in der amerikanischen und britischen Presse begeistert rezensiert wurde. Diese Besprechungen weckten mein Interesse und ich orderte die Originalausgabe. Meine Erwartungen waren hoch, lobten doch die Autorinnen (z.B. Janet Maslin, NYT) oder Edward Mendelson (NYT) oder in der NZZ Oliver Pfohlmann das Buch über alle Maßen.

Meine Enttäuschung wäre ohne Kenntnis der Rezensionen wahrscheinlich geringer gewesen, meine Nachsicht mit dem Pauschalbild sicher positiver. So aber sprangen mir die bedingten Limitationen einer Teil-Gesamtgeschichte einer Epoche und Bewegung ins Auge und in den Sinn und minderten meine Begeisterung. Ich vermochte auch nichts von dem belobigten philosophischen Verständnis entdecken, jedenfalls nicht in der hohen Qualität, die hervorgehoben worden war.

Eine Textstelle über Heidegger soll mein Unbehagen verdeutlichen:

Auszug S. 176-177 als Hinweis, wie pauschal und nichtssagend Aussagen werden, wenn sie in einem überlangen Werk so viele Aspekte zusammengerafft umfassen und erklären sollen. Aber die Summierung von Trivia, vielen Allgemeinheiten, die ohne Tiefgang aneinandergereiht werden, können doch die Phänomene weder repräsentieren noch erklären. Wozu also? Als allgemeiner Überblick? Was heißt hier „allgemein“? Worin soll der Wert dieses Allgemeinbildes liegen?

„He [Heidegger] kept with him only a few manuscripts, including his recent on Friedrich Hölderlin, whom Heidegger read obsessively. The great local poet of the Danube region, born in 1770 in Lauffen and suffering from bouts of insanity all his life, Hölderlin had set much of his visionary poetry in the local landscape, while also evoking an idealized image of ancient Greece – the very combination that had always fascinated Heidegger. The only other poet who would ever be so important to him was the even more disturbed Georg Trakl, an Austrian schizophrenic and drug addict who died aged twenty-seven in 1914. Trakl’s eerie poems are filled with hunters, young women and strange blue beasts stepping through silent forests by moonlight. Heidegger immersed himself in both poets, and generally explored the question of how poetic language can summon forth Being, and open a space for it in the world.”

Höchst fragwürdig oder falsch:

local poet of the Danube region

Transportiert das Bild des Provinzlers.

suffering from bouts of insanity all his life

Nicht belegt, dass er sein ganzes Leben daran litt. Klischee.

local landscape, while also evoking an idealized image of ancient Greece

Wiederholung des lokalen Images, als ob das sein Hauptaugenmerk neben der Griechen-Orientierung gewesen sei. Diotima und Hyperion als „land scape“? Und die  epochalen Übersetzungen? „land scape“?

Hölderlins Sprachmeisterschaft, die Heidegger faszinierte, und nicht primär die sprachliche Landschaftsmalerei, wird damit übergangen. Der Gehalt und Hintergrund des Fokus auf Griechenland, seine Werte, wird nicht bedacht, sondern in der kurzen Erwähnung gekappt.

the very combination that had always fascinated Heidegger

Nein, Heideggers Faszination war nicht sei je (was soll übrigens so eine dumme Behauptung?) dieselbe wie von Hölderlin, er unterscheidet sich von Hölderlin. Was ihn faszinierte, war das Sein des Seins und die Sprache, die spricht. Hölderlin war ein herausragender Vertreter, ein Hoherpriester davon.

the even more disturbed Georg Trakl

Woran bemisst die Autorin die Grade der Schizophrenie oder Geisteskrankheit? Auf welche Belege stützt sie ihre Behauptung (Hölderlin gestört, Trakl noch mehr oder extrem gestört [krank, wirr, wahnsinnig]?

 

Trakl, an Austrian schizophrenic

So einfach machten es sich nicht einmal Feinde des Poeten!

Trakl’s eerie poems are filled with hunters, young women and srrange blue beasts stepping through silent forests by moonlight.

So beschreibt ein High School kid, ungebildet und beschränkt, etwas durch banale Aufzählung, was verstehend nicht erfasst worden ist. Peinlich. Trakls Gedichte sind vielleicht auch „eerie“, aber es bei dieser Etikettierung zu belassen heißt, falsch attributieren und klischiert kategorisieren. 

Wie soll ich da noch Vertrauen aufbringen und weiterlesen? Liefert Bakewell überall ihre Oberflächenmalerei vom schielenden Sartre, der rührigen Feministin de Beauvoir, des zum Feind gewordenen Camus', des Magiers von Meßkirch, des armen Husserls, des gescheiten Merleau-Ponty oder des religiösen Jaspers? Soll es beim Bild von Cocktails schlürfenden  "Revolutionären" bleiben, die im Café von Freiheit und Sein quatschen, während die Gesellschaft in Brüche geht, zum X. Male?

Nein, kultürlich nicht, denn "Nothingness has a certain something" (Maslin) und die Autorin "asks demanding questions about the ways in which people think about themselves" (Mendelson). Vielleicht ist das Niveau in den USA schon so gesunken, dass die biografischen Narrationen schon genug sind fürs Verständnis?

The Vietnam documentary on PBS as seen by John Pilger

The Killing of History

by John Pilger Counterpunch, September 22, 2017 

One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.  Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”.
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”, Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans”.  Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising.

Read on here

Die Dokumentation lief in neun Teilen auf arte.tv (Frankreich und Deutschland). Der Kommentar bzw. die Kritik von John Pilger ist lesens- und bedenkenswert.

 

North Korea and war

A Murderous History of Korea

Bruce Cumings

More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population:

Read on at the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

History: The General v. the President

The Greatest Person then Living

Andrew Bacevich

• BuyThe General v. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by H.W. Brands
  Anchor, 438 pp, £21.00, November 2016, ISBN 978 0 385 54057 5

H.W. Brands is a well-known and prolific historian of an old-fashioned sort. With no axe to grind and no agenda to advance, he is all about telling stories, which he does exceedingly well. In The General v. the President he recounts a remarkable episode in American history: the clash between President Harry S. Truman and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur that culminated with MacArthur being sacked in April 1951.

Read more at the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Ian Johnson on Yu Jie's New Biography of Liu Xiaobo

China’s ‘Fault Lines’: Yu Jie On His New Biography of Liu Xiaobo
Ian Johnson, NYR Blog, The New York Review of Books, July 14, 2012

Ian Johnson writes about Yu Jie’s latest book and writes in his interview with the author, who lives now in the US:

“In the West, if people know anything, they might think of him as conservative. For example, he supported Reagan and, later, George W. Bush’s Iraq War. He was very similar in many ways to the Republicans. I felt I had to write this and explain his thinking and show why he’s like that. Why did he support the Iraq war? You can’t just put him in the European environment and say that everyone who supported that war was a bad person.
He thought of the war as an extension of his opposition to dictatorships.
Yes, and he wasn’t alone. Havel also supported it, and Michnik too. So there are very confusing issues and they can’t be simplified.”

* * *

Several aspects are quite interesting:

Firstly, the old view “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Concerning Liu Xiaobo’s stand to the Iraq-war.

Secondly, the comparison and linking with two Europoean political figures to support Liu Xiaobo’s questionable war endorsements: Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik.

But does this elevate Liu Xiaobo? No. It is too simple a manoeuvre to justify his war oriented  supportive position. Liu Xiaobo was supporting war. Period. The same is valid for many Western intellectuals and politicians, not only the mentioned Havel and Michnik.* We should remember that persons like the famous Ralf Dahrendorf were in line with the inhuman, self-righteous position led by the US and her puppets, the liberal philosopher Richard Rorty and so on. A big part of the Western intelligence surrendered under what seemed “rational” and “necessary”. These dark figures are of no weight to support a wrong position taken by the Chinese dissident.

• * Adam Michnik über den Irak-Krieg: [Frage des Interviewers]„Sie haben vor einem Jahr über die amerikanische Irak-Politik gesagt: ‚Eine schlechte Regierung hat mit schlechten Argumenten eine sehr gute Intervention gemacht.‘ Was wollten Sie damit sagen?
  Antwort von A. M.: Dass man für den Sturz Saddam Husseins sein kann, obwohl auch Bush und Rumsfeld dieser Meinung sind. Dass dieser Krieg gerechtfertigt sein kann, obwohl auch Bush und Rumsfeld ihn befürworten." [In einem Interview in der Schweizer WELTWOCHE, Ausgabe 17/2004] 

Neben kriegsorienterten Intellektuellen, Politikern und Geschäftemachern waren auch viele westliche Staaten unterstützend tätig in der sogenannten “Koalition derWilligen”.

Das Friedenstaubenimage, das der Westen dem braven Vaclav Havel verpasste, verlangt nach Korrektur, zumindest nach Gegenüberstellung mit anderen Deutungen. Eine findet sich in WSWS (World Socialist Web Site) in einem Beitrag von Peter Schwarz vom 21.12.2011. Vielleicht doch nicht überflüssig sie zu lesen? Das wiederum könnte einen hellhörig machen in der Beurteilung von vom Westen gepriesener Dissidenten. Was nicht heißt, dass ihre Positionen unannehmbar wären, sondern nur bedeutet, die instrumentalisierenden Begleitgeräusche zu dämmen und sich mehr den Personen und ihren Aussagen direkt zu widmen sowie Kontexte herzustellen.

Eric Hobsbawm remembers Tony Judt

After the Cold War
Eric Hobsbawm remembers Tony Judt

London Review of Books, Vol. 34, No. 8, 26 April 2012

Tony Judt, who died August 6, 2010, and of whom we published his text "Words" in our Driesch issue # 4 "Zukunft + Dossier Ost" (December 2010), was a well known and acknowledged historian.