Book ends
There will be no Nobel Prize in literature this year, because of a sexual harassment scandal involving the husband of a member of the Swedish Academy. If that makes very little sense, neither does the prize itself. A short list of writers who never won it would include Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka (all right, most of his work was published posthumously), Henry James, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, W.E.B. DuBois, Willa Cather, and now sadly Philip Roth -- all being read and taught and argued about, all landmarks on the royal road of literature. The long list of winners would make you smirk, or just wonder who the hell most of them are.
I don't suppose very many Americans felt something go out of our lives when Roth and Tom Wolfe, opposite in so many ways, died within a week of each other. Critically acclaimed and derided about equally, they sold a lot of books ("units"), the real measure of success in their native land, but nothing like the product moved by Dan Brown or Stephen King, much less movies and music. (Acknowledging the primacy of electronic entertainment, the Academy honored Bob Dylan two years ago, so this year's laureate may well have been Woody Allen or Aaron Sorkin.) Did they matter to any but the despised "elites" who still read fiction, or even watch the movies derived from books, other than comic books? Are books over, apart from the narrative-heavy tales read by actors and absorbed on the treadmill at the gym?
Yet novels are published -- excuse me, released -- every day, and they sit on the shelves of libraries and bookstores waiting for something to propel them into our crowded lives, as Trump-Pence misogyny turned a spotlight on The Handmaid's Tale. Of course, people are reading 1984, too; must a dystopian nightmare come true before we pick up a book? Roth's The Plot Against America has been much discussed in the past year. I hope he derived some grim satisfaction from that. (Nobody seems to be reading It Can't Happen Here, by Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis.)
It made me sad to see a news item about children being taught to write letters, with a pen and a piece of paper, in cursive script, which was as alien to them as Linear B. This was treated as an accomplishment of the leisured, like embroidery or piano lessons in an earlier time. No doubt Thorstein Veblen has something trenchant to say about this kind of thing. Does anybody read him anymore?
I don't suppose very many Americans felt something go out of our lives when Roth and Tom Wolfe, opposite in so many ways, died within a week of each other. Critically acclaimed and derided about equally, they sold a lot of books ("units"), the real measure of success in their native land, but nothing like the product moved by Dan Brown or Stephen King, much less movies and music. (Acknowledging the primacy of electronic entertainment, the Academy honored Bob Dylan two years ago, so this year's laureate may well have been Woody Allen or Aaron Sorkin.) Did they matter to any but the despised "elites" who still read fiction, or even watch the movies derived from books, other than comic books? Are books over, apart from the narrative-heavy tales read by actors and absorbed on the treadmill at the gym?
Yet novels are published -- excuse me, released -- every day, and they sit on the shelves of libraries and bookstores waiting for something to propel them into our crowded lives, as Trump-Pence misogyny turned a spotlight on The Handmaid's Tale. Of course, people are reading 1984, too; must a dystopian nightmare come true before we pick up a book? Roth's The Plot Against America has been much discussed in the past year. I hope he derived some grim satisfaction from that. (Nobody seems to be reading It Can't Happen Here, by Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis.)
It made me sad to see a news item about children being taught to write letters, with a pen and a piece of paper, in cursive script, which was as alien to them as Linear B. This was treated as an accomplishment of the leisured, like embroidery or piano lessons in an earlier time. No doubt Thorstein Veblen has something trenchant to say about this kind of thing. Does anybody read him anymore?
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 1:21 PM
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