(no subject)

[proximoception]

Interesting way to respond to those wondering if the Nobel committee even reads the writers they've been honouring these last couple decades.

Also we now can determine the mean age of the committee members who voted in the majority without resorting to much arithmetic. It is 68.41. Maximum variance of 2.5 years.

I wonder what my micro-generation loves that no other has been able to tolerate. Guess we'd be the last to know; the Dylan, Beach Boys and Fleetwood cohorts (somewhat overlapping) have never believed us when we've explained we're not onboard.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I hate Dylan.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

He made the Hendrix All Along the Watchtower possible. I guess.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Dunno if I precisely hate him, but the "Dylan is literature" cadre has always made me wonder if they have the slightest idea what literature is. And I do hate wondering that.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

would've made an interesting choice in, say, 1968. but - really - song isn't going away: it's drama/poetry/fiction that seems increasingly peripheral to human activity these days. the Nobel Prize has traditionally been a reminder that, hey, that stuff *exists* ..

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. Maybe part of the choice was about suggesting it doesn't exist in America? I guess if Roth, McCarthy and Mamet are out for (different sorts of) political reasons, Pynchon and the poets don't translate, genre's still considered trash and they already did Morrison then they really do end up contemplating Joyce Carol Oates type stuff every year. I could see that driving me to Dylan.

They're so fucking transparent, though. Even Pinter's very obviously wasn't about The Birthday Party but about his angry Bush-era doggerel and editorials, which were laudably leftist but could have been written by hundreds of others. Stoppard's always been at least as good, and has actually been putting plays out these last twenty years, some quite remarkable, but we all know he'll never win for being a centrist. They're such a laughingstock at this point, and they think Dylan will help? Possibly in the short term, given who's in charge of the tatters of the cultural establishment, but post-boomers will tend to see this as the moment the curators burnt down the museum after urinating in it for decades. And many will then assume it must not have been much of a museum.