Nobel Prize for Literature - 2016 - Another Miscarriage of Judgment

I have nothing against Bob Dylan. His music has changed the world in ways that politicians and other "influencers" can only dream of. What I do have an issue with is the fact that the Nobel committee keeps compounding their incompetence and overlooking authors of incredible caliber. It seems as if they were doing this on purpose, as if their main goal was to draw from pool of candidates based on the candidates' political weight. I have said here before that the Nobel Prize for Literature has turned into nothing more than a colossal joke, a geo-political, feel-good exercise that ends up not fulfilling its duty, but rather presenting the public with a thin-veiled facade of politically-correct shams... year after year. Bob Dylan is a genius. His music changed an entire generation into seeing what was possible, a world with more progressive and accepting ideas. His songs challenged the orthodoxy and the establishment when it was dangerous to do so. Little by little, people listened and acted... today's world is the result of not only Dylan's music but hundreds and thousands who stood up and really changed the world (a phrase that is thrown around today without reserve). I could list writers whom I believe are more deserving, but I am getting tired of doing this every year. Eventually, when writers like Philip Roth (among many others) pass away, we will collectively regret this geo-political, feel-good sham. Hopefully, the Nobel Prize committee will see the light, but I highly doubt it.

The "Insular" Consistency of Idiocy and Bad Politics

Well, it seems I have been validated, vindicated, gold-sealed and delivered from the evils of an insular society.... Marco Roth of the British newspaper "The Guardian" writes:

"I feel a little sorry for Horace Engdahl, although not too sorry. His comments to American journalists last week gave us a glimpse into how the mind of at least one Nobel literature prize judge works, and it wasn't pretty. American writers, en masse, he claimed, were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture". Then he launched into one of those incoherent anti-American rants that somehow transformed all of American literature into Sarah Palin and George Bush: "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," he said.
It's unclear who "they" are in all of this. Presumably Engdahl meant US publishers, not US authors. Even so, he forgets that one of the largest of those publishers is now a fief of a multinational corporation based in Germany, where the bottom-line decisions are made. The remarks are so general as to be nonsensical. Where does that big dialogue of literature take place, actually, and how does one participate in it?"

Congratulations go out (by the way) to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2008. I've never read anything by you, Monsieur Le Clezio, but I will as soon as I get my hands on a good translation... oh wait, we "don't translate enough" here in the U.S. Perhaps I will have better luck next year... I still have two horses in the race and I am not giving up hope. I'll stop being bitter and insular now.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2008... What a Joke!

Sure, sure... I've heard all about it. It's all over the Internet about how one of the main Nobel Prize for Literature judges called Americans "too insular, too concerned with their media trends" to produce any good literature. "Ignorant, vernacular..." I mean, he called us everything from here to Sunday. It's no surprise that the Nobel Prize has become a massive Geo-Political game. That's no secret. But come on.... imagine that, an American winning the Nobel for Literature? Not with our unpopular foreign policies and our military endeavours, a cowboy for a president and a hockey mom for vp candidate. My God, am I the only one seeing the hypocrisy here?

Go figure. I still have TWO horses in the race... 1) Paul Auster and 2) Haruki Murakami. Yes, yes... I am aware that one of them is American.

The Last Literary Crusader is Dead... where do we go from here?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, father and undisputed champion of the Modern Russian novel is dead at the age of 89. Back in 1993, while on a fishing trip to Vermont, a friend of mine who lived in the area wanted me to "walk up the road" with him to go meet "some writer dude you might find interesting." Adding that he "couldn't pronounce his name even if he rehearsed it for a month." I got so very close to seeing a real life Nobel Prize winner and a holy vessel of literary truth, but a peculiar set of circumstances came between us and the Man.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn lived in exile in Vermont for years. He went back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the times had changed... and at that time, Russia didn't have use for a literary god... there were "other issues" of pressing importance getting in the way. Literature couldn't feed people, that happened to be a simple fact. I wonder how capitalist Russia feels about losing one of its last links to a glorious and momentous past. We may forget (in a digital age) that before we lived off images given to us by technology, there were men and women who by hard work, dedication, art, method or even alchemy, helped us create images in our minds by simply using words. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was such a man. His works outlive him. Now "he belongs to the ages."

I do no justice to his life and work here. The New York Times is running a great article this morning... here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin#