Thursday, September 21, 2006

A little more on Oriana Fallaci

I have discovered that Andrea Bocelli's music is something like a cure for sadness if played loudly enough and to the exclusion of everything.

I was reading a website about Oriana Fallici , the Italian journalist who recently died.

She amuses me, although I wouldn't have contemplated laughing in front of her. Amuses me and yet, in this funny politically correct world we're sometimes caught up in, I also find I want to shout 'Bravo'.

She wrote: "I do not feel myself to be, nor will I ever succeed in feeling like, a cold recorder of what I see and hear. On every professional experience I leave shreds of my heart and soul; and I participate in what I see or hear as though the matter concerned me personally and were one on which I ought to take a stand (in fact I always take one, based on a specific moral choice)."
from, the preface to Interview with History

And I find that I have to admire a woman who believes the following in a world where ineffectual idiots can often rise to the top and lead a nation:

Fallaci defends her unique approach on the grounds that she is not simply a journalist but a historian as well. She told Bonfante: "A journalist lives history in the best of ways, that is in the moment that history takes place. He lives history, he touches history with his hands, looks at it with his eyes, he listens to it with his ears."

To Jonathan Cott in a Rolling Stone interview, she explained:
"I am the judge. I am the one who decides.
Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?"


Thanks for the link Rob .

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