Shiny objects
All prizes are political, except athletic ones. Usain Bolt is the fastest man on earth (that we know of) over a hundred meters, and that's that. But most of the others are the result of somebody's opinion. Prizes exist to celebrate, to rectify wrongs, to call attention, and it seems mostly to cause arguments and break up friendships. I think I like those best of all.
Benedict College, a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina, decided for some unfathomable reason to present its "Bipartisan Justice Award" to the most shamelessly racist president since Woodrow Wilson. It's unlikely Trump would even have noticed, much less called attention to it, had not Kamala Harris refused to participate in the school's "Second Step Presidential Justice Forum" and arranged to appear at a separate event. Now it's a thing. And now even non-alumni have heard of Benedict College. Maybe Morehouse should set up a Strom Thurmond scholarship.
This is just a local slap-fight compared to the 2019 Nobel in literature, which went to the Austrian writer Peter Handke. How controversial was it? Think Elia Kazan's Oscar. I admit to being unacquainted with his work other than that twee movie Wings of Desire, but that's not what started the fight. Handke was an enthusiastic supporter of Slobodan Milosevic and his genocidal regime in Serbia, going so far as to suggest that the Muslims of Sarajevo killed themselves to make Serbia look bad. (Not even the loons who came up with "crisis actors" have implied that the Sandy Hook children shot themselves to pieces so Obama could grab all the guns.) For this reason, and not for his (I'm sure) nice prose, Jonathan Littell called Handke an "asshole," while Salman Rushdie proposed him for "International Moron of the Year." That's just the warm-up. Hari Kunzru accused him of "shocking ethical blindness," while the Slovenian writer Miha Mazzini suggested that he had "sold his soul." Then Slavoj Zizek raised the crazy stakes by denouncing the literature Nobel for Handke while promoting Julian Assange for the peace prize. Sweden, if you're listening...
A feminist writer could get a whole essay out of the way Olga Tokarczuk has been treated. She won the 2018 literature prize, which was held up by a sleazy sexual harassment case involving the husband of a committee member. When her prize was finally announced this year, it was of course overshadowed by the Handke controversy. Then people complained that Tokarczuk, a Polish poet and novelist, was white (although every article commented on her dreadlocks). We were promised a less Eurocentric writer, critics whined. To pile on the distractions and disrespect, somebody trolled the Irish writer John Banville with a phone call telling him he had won. The Guardian sniffed that nobody had heard of her (outside Poland) until she won the Man Booker last year. Worst of all, I can't make this fool Blogger post a picture of her; go and look.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has always been political. Knut Hamsun of Norway was hot for Hitler. Luigi Pirandello re-gifted his gold medal to Mussolini. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were pointedly honored when they couldn't even be published in the USSR. Winston Churchill? Well, they wanted to recognize him for something and Peace wouldn't do. And I really see what the "Eurocentrism" critics mean: of four African-born winners, three have been white (Coetzee, Gordimer and Lessing). So the committee can't argue that they're crazy about Peter Handke's writing even though his politics are just crazy. They will have to live with this one.
Benedict College, a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina, decided for some unfathomable reason to present its "Bipartisan Justice Award" to the most shamelessly racist president since Woodrow Wilson. It's unlikely Trump would even have noticed, much less called attention to it, had not Kamala Harris refused to participate in the school's "Second Step Presidential Justice Forum" and arranged to appear at a separate event. Now it's a thing. And now even non-alumni have heard of Benedict College. Maybe Morehouse should set up a Strom Thurmond scholarship.
This is just a local slap-fight compared to the 2019 Nobel in literature, which went to the Austrian writer Peter Handke. How controversial was it? Think Elia Kazan's Oscar. I admit to being unacquainted with his work other than that twee movie Wings of Desire, but that's not what started the fight. Handke was an enthusiastic supporter of Slobodan Milosevic and his genocidal regime in Serbia, going so far as to suggest that the Muslims of Sarajevo killed themselves to make Serbia look bad. (Not even the loons who came up with "crisis actors" have implied that the Sandy Hook children shot themselves to pieces so Obama could grab all the guns.) For this reason, and not for his (I'm sure) nice prose, Jonathan Littell called Handke an "asshole," while Salman Rushdie proposed him for "International Moron of the Year." That's just the warm-up. Hari Kunzru accused him of "shocking ethical blindness," while the Slovenian writer Miha Mazzini suggested that he had "sold his soul." Then Slavoj Zizek raised the crazy stakes by denouncing the literature Nobel for Handke while promoting Julian Assange for the peace prize. Sweden, if you're listening...
A feminist writer could get a whole essay out of the way Olga Tokarczuk has been treated. She won the 2018 literature prize, which was held up by a sleazy sexual harassment case involving the husband of a committee member. When her prize was finally announced this year, it was of course overshadowed by the Handke controversy. Then people complained that Tokarczuk, a Polish poet and novelist, was white (although every article commented on her dreadlocks). We were promised a less Eurocentric writer, critics whined. To pile on the distractions and disrespect, somebody trolled the Irish writer John Banville with a phone call telling him he had won. The Guardian sniffed that nobody had heard of her (outside Poland) until she won the Man Booker last year. Worst of all, I can't make this fool Blogger post a picture of her; go and look.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has always been political. Knut Hamsun of Norway was hot for Hitler. Luigi Pirandello re-gifted his gold medal to Mussolini. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were pointedly honored when they couldn't even be published in the USSR. Winston Churchill? Well, they wanted to recognize him for something and Peace wouldn't do. And I really see what the "Eurocentrism" critics mean: of four African-born winners, three have been white (Coetzee, Gordimer and Lessing). So the committee can't argue that they're crazy about Peter Handke's writing even though his politics are just crazy. They will have to live with this one.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 1:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home