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Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 665
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - 10:04 pm: | 
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Hello All,
I just peeked this story from Yahoo, from some Swedish yahoo, who is judging the Nobel literature award, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080930/ap_on_en_ot/eu_nobel_literature;_ylt=Atbrrs49f9UFB87WD7OYrdFY24cA
This is some funny stuff. Obviously, he hasn't spoken with Oprah. |
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 3218
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, October 01, 2008 - 08:16 am: |
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Whoa--sounds like they're getting ready to rumble! |
Schakspir
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 1230
Registered: 12-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, October 01, 2008 - 03:13 pm: |
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Ha! At last the word is out about the sucky writing on these shores! |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12901
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, October 02, 2008 - 04:09 am: |
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Sounds like a trickle down effect stemming from how America, is general, is hated by Europeans. Either that or - the Swedes have been checking out hip-hop street lit.  |
Troy
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Troy
Post Number: 1549
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, October 02, 2008 - 01:08 pm: |
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It does seem somewhat analogous to literary fiction v. street fiction battle books or the conscious v. ganster rap in music. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 7454
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 03, 2008 - 10:08 am: |
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Screw that prize. It's BS. All subjective. It's the Best Book Award for whatever the Honky Thought Was the Best Book of the Year.
Stephen King ain't won no Nobel Prize. Terry McMillain ain't won none.
Remeber Pearl S. Buck? They thought she was the Jazz. Where is her books?
How long will we suck ass? Would you rather have the Nobel Prize or have a 2 million seller on the New York Times Bestseller list with a film deal in the works? |
Schakspir
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 1234
Registered: 12-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 03, 2008 - 05:40 pm: |
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Stephen King just writes pop genre fiction. He has never aspired to writing heavy shit, any more than Dan Brown, Omar Tyree or Ann Rice has. Pearl S. Buck was just an Orientalist hack of an earlier generation.
BTW, the Nobel Prize is worth $1.3 million. That automatically means World-Wide bestseller-dom, and on top of that, possible film deals(most likely), and better yet, a NAME in the literary world. Respect. A 2 millon seller on the NYT list is just that--big money, but in order to get on that list nowadays, you usually have to write shit. |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 394
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, October 04, 2008 - 07:42 pm: |
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I read Edward Said's "Orientalism" and took part in a lengthy discussion at the New York Times book forums, and Pearl S. Buck and other authors of twentieth century fiction are completely outside Said's purview in the book. However, it does contain a critique of Gustave Flaubert's "Salammbo," an 1862 novel of Hannibal and Carthage, but it's a limited critique because it's apparently a very artful novel (!), and that fact is evidenced by David Anthony Durham citing it as a influence on his own novel of Carthage (which a few of us read here a couple of years ago).
Durham is slightly ambiguous in not attributing "Spartacus" to its author, Howard Fast. Fourth paragraph:
http://www.davidanthonydurham.com/blog/2004_12_01_archive.html
The idea that fiction writers are supposed to kowtow to some misguided black nationalist ideology of the past in which writers have to stay within their own ethnic and/or cultural boundaries - as determined by some Ad-Hoc Revolutionary Committee - or else risk verbal abuse, is, in my humble opinion, just one more irrational trap that it seems only black writers are subjected to. A little cultural sympathy there!
Naturally, you'll always be able to find some Americans who will agree with the unreconstructed Eurocentric judges like the one on the Nobel Committee.
And why is that? I think it's probably because many European, Asian, African, and other writers want to and are writing American novels - yes, black influences and all - and that's a threat to some people. I'm talking here about quality fiction (and reverse-snobbishness take the hindmost!)
If you look beyond that one judge's opinion, I think you'll see that three of the top six (and four of the top thirteen) odds-on favorites are Americans:
http://www.ladbrokes.com/lbr_sports?action=go_generic_link&level=EVENT&key=21259 3068&category=SPECIALS
The other thing is that Haruki Murakami does not write "Oriental" novels, or traditional Japanese novels, and in the past has received much criticism for that, within his own culture:
Jonathan Lethem's sums it up better than I could:
"It's been clear that Haruki Murakami is the one contemporary writer who, if he'd failed to exist, we would have failed utterly to invent for ourselves. What chance was there that the most persuasive synthesis of American vernacular forms would emerge in translation from the Japanese, or that a writer so remarkably contemporary and international in feel would at the same time speak to us so profoundly of the still unfathomable and beautiful distances between languages and cultures, or to testify so beautifully to the necessity of historical remembrance, while honoring always the primary and intimate mystery of private experience. For all of this, we can only be grateful."
Murakami's novels are jazz-influenced and almost all are improvised (as described in "Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words," by his translator Jay Rubin). |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 395
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, October 04, 2008 - 07:55 pm: |
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I'm reading this excellent novel by Jeffery Renard Allen called "Rails Under My Back," which contains this interesting idea:
"Couldn't stay there. The town was a railroad division point, full of transients, bums, hoboes, hatless men in overalls. A thousand streets that ran as one street. The whiskey went down your throat cold, with no taste. He had been a moonshiner before the Mountain Peak and the over there, and the stepping-off stride, my daddy, my pa, a light-skinned man, lighter than you..."
It could be taken right out of "Light in August" - a novel about a "bootlegger" (close to a "moonshiner," eh?) who fits a similar physical description - that was discussed here last week:
"The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face..."
I'll save my thoughts about this kind of "quoting" (which, in my opinion is comparable to the jazz technique that the great Ralph Ellison, in his requiem for the demise of the famous jazz club Minton's Playhouse, called "rebop," as differentiated from "bebop") for the upcoming discussion of the book.
Nom and Thumper, I'm only on p. 70, but I'm really enjoying it. |
Latimer
Regular Poster
Username: Latimer
Post Number: 18
Registered: 06-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, October 06, 2008 - 07:52 am: |
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Why the hell is John Edgar Wideman's name is not on that list? He is a better writer than most of the writers listed there. Haruki Murakami is a joke. His prose is crap and most of it needs editing. Also he repeats himself. Do you people really read this guy's work? If you need some examples of bad writing, I will give you some from his writing. |
Latimer
Regular Poster
Username: Latimer
Post Number: 19
Registered: 06-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, October 06, 2008 - 07:55 am: |
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Why the hell is Edgar Wideman's name not on that list? He is a better writer than most of the writers listed there. Haruki Murakami is a joke. His prose is crap and most of it needs editing. Also he repeats himself. Do you people really read this guy's work? If you need some examples of bad writing, I will give you some from his. |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 396
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, October 09, 2008 - 09:45 pm: |
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Just finished "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck. Beautiful book. |
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