Apparently, there was a major stand off the other night on German TV between Barack Obama's half sister Auma and ridiculous former punk Countess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis - who, after spending the crazy 1990s with pink hair and dressed in a latex dirndl has turned to prim propriety in recent years (good Vanity Fair article on her "conversion" here). According to her Royal Whatever, arranged marriages are a good thing and condoms do not prevent HIV infection.
You don't want to know. This is Germany in 2008.
But - We have a remedy (We have .... a remedy):
3 comments:
Ridiculous (you have a gift for understatement) isn't the only r-word I which describes the arch-catholic Mrs TuT.
BTW wasn't there a bishop who recently claimed that condoms were deliberatly infected with HIV?
How do you translate "der Schwarze an sich schnackselt halt gern" to English?
Nele
"You have a gift for understatement" - Thanks for the compliment, Christoph: one tries to maintain a certain level of decorum in one's writing!
Which other r-word are you thinking about? "Rumbustious"? "Rabied"? "Rotunds"?
I don't know about the jiffy-bishop, but it would appear that he and Gloria would find an apt compadre in Michel Foucault. In her review of a book on poststructuralist philosophy in the current LRB, Elif Batuman mentions allegations that "Foucault initially discounted Aids as a mythical homosexual-targeting disease invented by the medical superstructure to control male homosexuality".
I have the feeling that certain colleagues of mine, too, would go so far as to believe that human beings are interpellated into illness.
Nele,
I was wondering whether we shouldn't ask our students to translate that line in one of our next state exams. Would be fun, no?
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