Professor David Peimer
Why You’ve Got to Love Mark Twain!
Summary
Thomas Edison said, “An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain’‘.
Mark Twain was simply unique - full of wit, intelligence, and paradoxes. He famously said, “courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear”. This talk will explore the life of a man who spoke his mind, his mastery of writing, and his insights into life, the world and the Jewish people.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Whoa, that is another whole talk. And I don’t want to sit on the fence here, but I always believe when it’s to read literature of its era and see it in its historical… I’ve always believed in context. You know, you can look at Shakespeare, and of course, it’s universal and there’s remarkable writing, the greatest writing ever. But Shakespeare is also on the cusp of the end of feudalism and the beginning of individualist capitalism and the rise of the psychology of the individual. You can also see that with the advantage of hindsight and advantage of seeing historical context. I don’t think one ignores the other. I think they’re of their time and are beyond their time. So I think the revisionist versions are polemical, as opposed, whatever the revisions, as opposed to one’s got to see context, I think, in order to really understand human society, culture, history. Context is or is crucial.
You know, I’m against banning, I’m going to say it outright. I don’t believe in banning in a free country, in a free democracy, free speech, et cetera. I don’t believe in it. And I think it needs to be taught in context, and the historical context, the cultural context. Otherwise, how do we ever learn anything, you know? How do we understand anything? We will never understand the connection between history and identity and culture. The great post-colonial theorist, Stuart Hall, who I revere, had this wonderful phrase that identity is always in production. And he meant that identity is always changing, always shifting, moving, like in constant production because of the constant interventions of history. And because history is constantly changing in a culture, so identity is always going to change and shift. It’s never just either or. It’s always. We are not the same as we were when we are 12 years old as 40 or 50 or 70. Muhammad Ali, “If I have the same thoughts at the age of 50 as I had at the age of 20, I got a serious problem.” Identity is always in production.
Well, you know, one of the great phrases, cynicism is the last refuge of the romantic. I think we are all born of dualities inside ourselves, which makes us profoundly human. All too human. We have the romantic, we have the cynic, we have the individualist, and we have the conformist to the group ethos. We always have a combination of both, I think.