2006 Nobel Prize in Literature Thread

http://www.almaz.com/nobel/literature/literature.html

Ashbery is probably the most influential poet since WWII--not just on English speaking writers--and more critical studies have been published on his work than on that of any other living writer, but the slant against experimental writing on the Nobel jury will probably prevent him (or someone like Pynchon) from ever getting the award.

"The secretive group of intellectuals who award the Nobel Prize for literature have delayed their decision for at least a week amid reports of a split over honouring the controversial Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk.

For the first time in at least 10 years, the literature prize was announced neither in the run-up to, nor in the same week as the four other main Nobel awards - medicine, physics, chemistry and peace.

The suspected row over Pamuk - which is officially denied - comes amid revelations about the secretive workings of the committee that, since 1901, has chosen Nobel winners. The literature award is now due to be announced on Thursday.

Pamuk's latest novel, Snow, has been widely acclaimed for addressing Turkey's internal clash of cultures. His earlier work, My Name is Red, established his literary prowess. But the author is controversial for an assertion he made in a newspaper interview earlier this year that the Turkish state was guilty of a 20th century genocide against Armenians and Kurds. He faces trial for the comments in his country on 16 December."

Pamuk ended up going on trial for his factual statements about the genocide. Pinter ended up getting the Nobel. This is a bit like denying the prize to a writer who speaks about the Holocaust while a German government is officially denying that it ever occurred.

munro, no matter how good a writer she is, is still provincal.

And Ashbery doesn't have most of those qualities. I also find him boring, for the most part (I liked "Girls on the Run", which seemed to be different from most of his books, and there are parts of "Tennis-Court Oath" where his schtick is still exciting and new), but that hardly would disqualify him from winning a Nobel.

"More specific reasons"? Obviously the media promotes this prize as going to the "best writer OMG" so I hope they'll be more specific about what actually goes into the selection process. "Not a great writer but we hadn't given the award to anyone from the Balkans recently" or "really hates Bush" in the award text would steer us toward the truth.

There is the possibility that they actually think "What a great writer, even despite the fact that she's from the Balkans, which means a lot of USians won't have heard of her yet"

Yes, one of America's most boring writers ever clearly must win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Alfred Bernhard Nobel, maker of dynamite, died in the year 1896, and by his will gave the bulk of his great wealth to benefit mankind, by these remarkable provisions:---

"With the residue of my convertible estate I hereby direct my Executors, to proceed as follows: They shall convert my said residue of property into money, which they shall then invest in safe securities; the capital thus secured shall constitute a fund, the interest accruing from which shall be annually awarded in prizes to those persons who shall have contributed most materially to benefit mankind during the year immediately preceding.
"The said interest shall be divided into five equal amounts to be apportioned as followes:--
"One share to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention in the domain of Physics;
"One share to the person to have made the most important Chemical discovery or improvement;
"One share to the person who shall have made the most important discovery in the domain of Physiology or Medicine;
One share to the person who have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealist tendency;
And finally, one share to the person who shall have most or best promoted the Fraternity of Nations and the Abolition or Diminution of Standing Armies and the Formation of and Increase of Peace Congresses." etc.

"Idealist" is the "new word" in the title of Upward's book. It's somewhat interesting to peruse this, since the Nobel Prize was still pretty new when the New Word was published. "Striking works of an idealist tendecy are not being written at the rate of one every year, or, if they are, they have not been brough to the notice of the Trustees of this bequest. In the dearth of such works the Trustees have done doubtless what the Testator might have consented to, if not what he directed, in awarding this Prize as a testimonial to distinguished men of letters, at the close of their careers." He gets into a philological discussion of the word "ideal" and so on.

How do you know how well-informed or not my opinion is? And don't give me that "merely contrarian bullshit" bullshit.

Ashbery even said in some interview or other that he was puzzled as to why people bother to read his work, and I think his assessment of his work was correct.

Anyway, I'm not interested enough to go beyond: boring. I don't give a fuck about his slippery indeterminacy or his flattened indie voice. I think there might be some old discussion on ILE that gets into more detail.

If you are really interested in hearing why someone finds a writer boring, perhaps demanding that they spend thirty minutes writing up a few well-justified paragraphs because they owe it to you -- when they know full well that they owe you no such thing -- isn't the best approach. And perhaps labelling someone a contrarian just because they don't like a writer that you like is a bit insulting. If someone insults me, the last thing I usually will do for them is a huge favor, such as writing a detailed essay on why I think Ashbery is boring.

I wouldn't consider an Ashbery take-down a "favor," I merely hoped that on a book board people would go beyond something like "Ashbery (rolls eyes).)" No one forced you to insult my opinion, but you did and yet you find my "approach" insulting. I call you fellows contrarian the same way I'd call someone on ILM who dissed Bob Dylan that--it sounds like someone trying to sound cool by hating a critical darling.

I was obviously kidding about wanting to read a lengthy explanation of why you guys find great writing boring, but it is telling that each of you responded that you have nothing of substance to say and were merely being assholes on a message board (like me.)

Saying you don't like someone's work is not the same as trashing them.

Since there are plenty of places on this board where you will find us going off on lengthy explanations as to why we do like or dislike a particular author, I think it is telling that we reacted like that, and I was trying to explain what I thought it told.

This is something like an ILX First Principle!

Pollute the world by saying I think John Ashbery is boring? You are a fucking psycho.

This doesn't improve the situation, incidentally. You are being very idiotic in assuming that someone puttin down Ashbery is trying to sound cool. I have, unfortunately, read a ton of his work, and heard him read at least once. Like a good deal of other modern and contemporary poetry (especially past the first generation Modernists), I don't find him enjoyable.

Why is "Oh that's cool he put those words together" not enough?

You have a point, though: my own poetry is usually nothing more than an interesting-looking assemblage of words, and I resist attempts to treat it as anything else.

In my fiestier moments I'd argue that if there is something "more to it than that" then that surplus is not the poetry of it. Which is not to say the surplus is bad.

Actually my biggest dissatisfaction with modern/postmodern poetry in general is that I don't feel most of it has found an adequate musicality to replace the musicality found in traditional meter and rhyme and so on. So even though Ashbery is doing this and that with language, I generally haven't found the results satisfactorily musical, on top of my other issues with his poetry. Whatever one thinks of my opinions, they aren't knee-jerk reactions, one way or another, to existing literary reputations. They are the result of my own experiences reading and writing poetry, and my loss of enthusiasm for much of what had interested me. I think my passion on the subject is similar to the passion of an x-cult member.

(I'm probably persona non grata on this thread for flipping out at fernando, but I feel he crossed a line. Though I probably wouldn't have resorted to direct attack if I hadn't already been in a bad mood.)

I agree with this, although my reaction has been more to not worry about meaning.

Did I say that everyone had to like Dylan? No, just that there seems to be a lot of glee had by folks who diss a critical darling which leads me to distrust the opinion (especially if all it consists of is "He bores me." Who cares what bores you?)

"Bores me" or "dull" in regards to authors--I find this offensive usually because it reminds me of when I taught literature to a bunch of mid-Western college students & they could only respond to it as passive consumers--making judgements on Flannery O'Connor etc. only based on whether she bored them or not. I guess I started to take the attitude that it doesn't say a damn thing about the quality of O'Connor's writing that a kid from the suburbs of Chicago who has all of Adam Sandler's CDs memorized thinks her writing is boring. Good
writing has to be engaged on a different level than even good pop culture stuff, like, say an episode of "Lost"--and when I hear very
personalized evaluations-"Doesn't do it for me," "I find it boring,"
"Not what I look for in poetry"--I don't see the use value or even why someone feels the need to share such a thing.

This isn't an academic setting, though, it's a chatty coffee klatsch, and it's mostly all about personalized reactions to books. Because it's I Love Books, not I Study Books.

But even if we wanted to play it your way: So far I've said Ashbery bores me and is therefore meh, and you've said Ashbery is a critical darling and is therefore sacrosanct. So, I mean, at least I've done my own work with my argument.

Anyone may determine for themselves whether a work of art accomplishes any of these ends in regard to themself. After all, who else could determine this? One has only to say, I am not persuaded, instructed or moved and who is to say otherwise?

The fundamental job of the critic is not to dispute with individuals over their personal tastes or to browbeat them into accepting artificial standards or canons that have no connection to the reader's personal appreciation of the art in question. Rather the critic's job is to reveal how they themselves are persuaded, instructed or moved and to convey this understanding to the reader.

If the sole point of the critical exercise is to persuade the reader that the critic is smarter than they are and knows better what is good, then the critic has indulged in a sterile bit of showoffery. If the critic leads the reader to a greater personal appreciation, one which arises from the critic having changed the reader's heart or mind, then the critic is worthy of all praise.

Ocarina sales plummeted.
Believe you me it was a situation
Aladdin's lamp might have ameliorated.

This is the contemporary version of cutesy (that first line in particular), if you ask me.

Anyway, the link:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/ashbery.html

Whether something bores an individual and whether it is of "high qulaity" is obvioulsy not the same question. Not even in the same ballpark. If Helen Vendler or Perloff or Bloom or anyone took such a
subjective stand on a poet as "bores me" I would stop reading right away. I'm sorry if I've overstepped the casual nature of ILB.

"But even if we wanted to play it your way: So far I've said Ashbery bores me and is therefore meh, and you've said Ashbery is a critical darling and is therefore sacrosanct."

Way to completely miss the point. There are a thousand legitimate reasons to dislike Ashbery's writing. I was hoping for one other than "dull." Where did I say he was sacrosanct? I find this "insulting."

"So, I mean, at least I've done my own work with my argument."

You deserve the Nobel.

-- Casuistry (chri...), October 21st, 2006.

Someone earlier was correct--we shouldn't keep going on about Ashbery here. If someone wants to start an Ashbery thread to beat this disagreement further into the ground, be my guest, otherwise I'm tired of debating him in the context of the Nobel prize.

If you have never had a teacher who operated on the assumption that literature must be crammed into his students' heads for no better reason that that certain authorities say it is important to do so, then I envy you your good fortune. To answer your question, that is where the browbeating is most often located, in my experience.

Now, allow me to repeat: if you would provide a link to some critical appreciation of ashberry you find particularly illuminating, or share your own sense of how and why you are enamored of him, then I would find that helpful. It seems to me you are still caught up in bitching about how we bore you and are lazy. This is perhaps emotionally satisfying to you, but rather ironic.

Anyway, Aimless has the dignitas and elegance that I shall never have, so I will try to shut up now.

In reading what Marjorie Perloff had to say, I found that she was almost exclusively concerned with placing Ashberry into the context of this or that tradition or movement. The major thrust of her piece, as I read it, was to dispute with another critic who placed Ashberry into the modernist camp. To the degree she had any demonstrated interest in his poetry at all, it was to use it to demonstrate that he was better described as a postmodernist than as a modernist.

Now, this sort of criticism may have some kind of relevance within the academic world, where professors jockey for pre-eminence in contests for position within the pecking order, but such criticism has absolutely zero interest or relevance in the world of non-academic readers of poetry. (I really do think that the preceding statement is objectively true by any measurement one could devise.)

To the extent this kind of criticism is other than trivial, it is just sad in my opinion. I am sorry for Marjorie Perloff, who feels she must indulge in this sort of nonsensical sparring over empty categories. Poetry ought to be so much more than that to one whose professional life is devoted to it.

I think academic writing inevitably takes place as part of extended dialogue. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. I am sorry for Perloff not so much for being caught up in that but for apparently finding Ahsbery's games so entertaining.

So her interest isn't so much in categorization, I think, as approaches to reading.

This is also one reason why bizarre typographical poems stymie me. There is not always an obvious oreder in which to read the words, and this simply makes my brain reject them, as I cannot use my normal method.

While this admission may sound humorous to some, I am only speaking the truth. I suspect this painful literalness is also a factor in how highly I score on IQ tests, which tests tend to be equally literal-minded and linear as I am.

And, after all, Ashbery's whole schtick is the carefully modulated disjunction, small changes in tone, topic, pronoun, tense, vocabulary, etc., which mildly tickle and lull you along. That's default Ashbery, at least (and the poem in the Perloff seems pretty typical); when he snaps out of that mode, sometimes he achieves more interesting results.

http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=871104

Some of this year's odds

Oh man, what's the point in even speculating? It could be anyone, and so far as I can tell there's never any clues to work from. I'd like it if they just gave it to Dan Brown or someone, except that he really doesn't need the money.

Don't be nihilistic!

But no, don't bet either. You'll have more luck in the Nathan's Hot Dog Contest.

Hopefully it will be someone who needs some translation to come back into circulation in the English speaking world (Assia djebar bring it on!) V selfish of me, but er Philip Roth holds no interest - would be hilarious if Pynchon won it, but he's the kind of guy who has a er healthily cult-ish following and those people never really win: Kawabata, not Mishima; Jelinek, not Bernhard

If I were a betting man Elias Khoury looks quite good to get it at some point.

they are late!

Que?