So Now You Care About Literature; or, Suddenly Everyone's Illiterati

[If you've arrived here via Daily Kos, I urge you to read this once you've finished with this post.]

Today Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature .... and now everyone cares about the written word again.

"Now it's become the Ignobel Prize, says one commenter so sure his fellows will miss his pun he feels compelled to add "[sic] is intentional." 

Another acknowledges that no one "takes this stuff seriously anymore. I can't remember the last time I read a literary novel by a living writer or attended a play by a living playwright." 

Others remains unconcerned about this sudden upswell of interest in matters literary: in the immortal words of "GoatGuy"—or as he's known in his native Mexico,  el chupacabra—no matter how many Nobels some people places on their mantles, "we are protected from runaway liberalism by the very real revolution in interpersonal and distributed communications, just such as this BLOG."

Some, however, still care enough about poetry to examine the work they condemn.  As Pinter's "American Football" memes arounds certain comment sections, "Carolyn" declares it unworthy of a Nobel because her "son could have done that when he was 10 years old and I would have washed his mouth out with soap."  Only a true poetic soul like Carolyn could birth a son so gifted in the poetic arts that, at the tender age of ten, he was capable of penning these immortal lines:

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

Pinter's award inspires a poetic response from the well-known poet Mark Coffey of Decision '08:

A fool, yes…
A jackass I am called
Yet awards, I win them
And nothing’s left but this stale bowl of Fruit Loops
Pain
Money
Dreams
Chomsky!
My destiny awaits.

(Just think: Mark Coffey will never get those three hours back.)  Such sweet prosody I expected from Carolyn's foul-mouthed poetic prodigy, but from Mark Coffey?  How can so many so patently blessed remain so anonymous? 

How many mute inglorious Mark Coffeys must we bury before acknowledging the provinciate artistry of Nobel winners? 

When will the poetry of the 21st Century manifest itself in full? 

When will the drama of the 21st Century fly off the shelves at the speed of Dan Brown? 

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

I saw a play by a living playwright -- a premier, actually -- less than a month ago.

That's because I live in Chicago, rather than in some godforesaken incest-blighted hellhole where children have nothing to do but write poetry about blowing shit out their ears.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Stop the poetry-quoting from wingnuts right now. Not another word.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Well, Rich, you're pretty handy with the quill and ink. How about you pen us a response? And I must admit: the hour I spent silently trolling conservative sites, reading about how concerned they were about the degraded state of the literary entertained me more than anything else has of late. People seriously lamenting that the award for literature--LITERATURE!--went to someone like Pinter! Oh! The offense to my delicate literary sensibilities!

Anyhow, just be glad I didn't break out the Brecht. That even would've landed el chupacabra's goat.

[Rich Puchalsky]

No, sorry. In order to poetically parody someone, there has to be something there. Matt and CR were natural sources because they combined over-the-top aggression with a certain fluency. This would be like working with wet cardboard.

[Adam Roberts]

"To poetically parody" is a split infinitive. You see, that's what's wrong with left-leaning literature, right there ...

[Rich Puchalsky]

See, that's what I meant. An echo of the deranged Yodaism of the second and third lines above that I'm not going to quote even one word of.

[Adam Roberts]

In a way I envy them. Any literature with a political dimension is to be judged as good or bad literature according to whether its politics are right or wrong. Swish, there goes the gordian knot. Just think how this must simplify life. Take the recent time-consuming discussion of Gene Wolfe on these very pages, for instance. Looking back it seems obtuse of all concerned not to have resolved it into haikuCrit:

"Republican vote I.
Catholic rightwingly.
Crap my novels must be."

[Matt]

Dear Rigorous Rich,

We're still waiting for you to make an actual argument (preferably the one that's going to convince me, you know, that analytic philosophy has anything valuable to say). As we are for Scott's response to dangling questions. Common courtesy Scott, the readers seem to think you've left the building.

When you get a chance.

Piddle-paddling race of critics, rhizome-fanciers
digging up other's poetry, pusillanimous bookworms
coughing through brambles, aristophobes and Erinnaphils,
dusty bitter barkers from Callimachus' kennels,
poet's-bane, nightshade of the neophytes,
bacilli on singing lips: get off, get down, get lost!

-Antiphanes, trans. Edwin Morgan

from the excellent 99 Poems, ed. Harold Pinter

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt, I'm incorporating my responses to their dangling questions into my second post...which I haven't have time to finish yet. Maybe I should just say that?

Also: Welcome readers of Kos! You have broken my sitemeter, but I still love you.

[Matt]

Scott, if you please. You know where:

http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2005/10/on_the_kind_of_.html

Sorry to hear about the swarm of politicowankerhobbiest. Don't worry, their attention spans are finely honed down to nothing.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Wow, Matt, such a jones for attention you've got. Acephalous has been linked from Kos -- so you rushed out and put in a link to an unrelated thread on your site (as if Scott didn't know where it was) and tried insulting the Kossacks to get them to come over and flame you. That's ... interesting. Too bad the link's broken, better post another comment with the right one quick.

[Matt]

Oh, sorry there, captain. Thought I would make it easy for Scott by dropping a link to his post. By all means, please stay here, Kossacks (are there Kossacks here?) Or if it's highbrow flames you're after, perhaps try this:

http://thevalve.org

[Matt]

As it happens, you really needn't be worried, Dick. Not a single visit yet, or rather all of two clicks this entire afternoon and evening. Scott's blog is a very deserving blog. Please stay here.

But I must say, these people don't read; it's like they're meme-spewing, skimming drones only. It would blow their fragile hivemind circuits (honestly Rich, have you ever read an entire thread on Kos?) But oh shit, I forgot about the vow of silence for fear of unseemly self-promotion. How would the blogosphere ever recover, you ask.

[Ahistoricality]

Apparently the guy at LGF doesn't know: we already have Ig Nobel prizes, and the Ig Nobel for literature this year went to Nigerian spammers....

I was disappointed by the choice, though. I got my hopes up early in the year when there were rumors that children's lit or Fantasy might get a nod (I was rooting for LeGuin, who does both, and a lot more very respectable mind-bending writing besides). By that standard, Pinter is such a safe choice....

[Rich Puchalsky]

If only LeGuin had switched to poetry for her late-career works, she might have a better chance. Since she stuck to novels, they now have to be explained away somehow. I know that if I ever again read one more book of hers in which a fugitive from a liberal society gone totalitarian finds refuge with a communard primitive culture that helps him find the psionic powers needed to defeat the totalitarians, I'm going to start tossing out her earlier books. It's like she's become a vaguely more political Andre Norton.

[Ahistoricality]

Oh, right! Like repetitive and political themes have ever doomed a Nobel candidate before. NOT.

Seriously, though, LeGuin's short story material is considerably more diverse than her novels -- still winning genre awards with great regularity -- and, honestly, anyone who wrote Left Hand of Darkness, Dispossessed and the Wizard of Atuan series doesn't need a lot of justification in the diversity department.

[Mia]

This is soooo fake, do you really believe that bulls***