Nobel Prize for Literature

[Pause]

[ho ho ho]

[If any of your other Bristol readers are wondering what happened to a certain volume of plays in the Oxfam bookshop at the top of Park Street, I would remind them that I do after all speak Zwedish.]

1.) “I had a bit o’ bad luck.”

2.) “What do they call the cowboys in Argentina?”

“Ponchos.”

“No, those are their raincoats.”

“No, their raincoats are called cloaks.”

Well, not from a play but a screenplay.

I thought the winger mutterings about El Baradei getting the Peace Prize was the usual paranoia. This however is starting to look like a pattern.

For American readers especially, here is the new laureate’s most recent poetry:

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America’s God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn’t join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who’ve forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America’s God.

The acceptance speech should be fun.

Those absolutely desperate to know more about Harold Pinter can find more extensive and illuminating biographical detail here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Pinter

The Wikipedia entry includes a reference to a seven-year affair between Pinter and Joan Bakewell, a well-known TV presenter in Britain who was once (rather aptly) described by the humourist Frank Muir as “the thinking-man’s crumpet.”

The playwright is known for speaking out on issues like the war on Iraq.

Pinter told reporters: “I’ve been writing plays for about fifty years and I’m also pretty politically engaged. And I’m not at all sure to what extent that fact, that fact had anything to do with this award.

I’m so surprised. At least he is honest enough to admit that it might be his politics that got him the nod.

It’s likely that something beyond Pinter’s literary work is relevant to the timing of the prize, but it’s not (only) his political views. Pinter has cancer, and the academy has moved to honor him before it is too late.

The [London] Times, a Murdoch owned paper, seems to think that the award to Pinter is timely and well merited:

“HE HAS been showered with awards and is revered worldwide, but Harold Pinter, one of Britain’s greatest playwrights, received the ultimate accolade yesterday . . ”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1825147,00.html

John, the question is not whether there is any political content, but what form the political content takes. With the peace prize, the larger message was that multilateralism and rule-based process offers the best approach to proliferation. By implication, the unilateral use of force doesn’t.

As I mentioned, I thought the twitterings of the wingnuts who saw this as decadent anti-Americanism were signs of paranoia. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Pinter’s plays do nothing for me. And as the verse above shows, he’s hardly been nominated for services to poetry.

“Does everything have to be about the Iraq war?” It’s not just the war. 9/11, and what the Bush administration made of it, are disasters on a historic scale. The tendency to deal with criticism by seeking to destroy opponents, often resorting to the dirtiest of dirty tricks and with the gutless compliance of the domestic press, has allowed the disaster to worsen unchecked. If the Nobel Committee is now deploying its principal asset – its international prestige – to shore up the defences, good for them.

They may just really like his plays.

Fair enough, suppose.

Which is the odd one out: Tolstoi, Chekhov, Pinter, Proust?

Answer: Pinter – he was also a poet

If the Nobel Committee is now deploying its principal asset – its international prestige – to shore up the defences, good for them.

This is an amazing sentence. If it is true — and I have no idea whether it is — that the Nobel Committee is awarding a prize ostensibly for literary merit primarily in order to further a political agenda (however laudable), how long do you think its ‘international prestige’ as a literary prize will last?

Hey Sebastian

“I know some philosophers who would envy you your certainty”

Two points, Jimmy.

The first, already made above, is that I honestly cannot explain this prize purely as a recognition of literary merit. John M made the fair point that everyone’s a critic and I could well be wrong.

The second is that Pinter himself would probably question your view that his work can be divorced cleanly from its political content.
While he was about it he’d probably call you a bloody bastard. About which he might well be wrong as well.

What sickens me is the way they keep giving the Peace Prize to anti-war people.

Merely ok. The spoof from the BBC website was MUCH more Pinteresque:

Jack: So …. [pause]
Jack: So he won then. [pause]
Jill: Yes.
Jack: Yes. [longer pause]
Jack: He waited long enough.
Jill: Yes.
Jack: Yes … he did. [pause]
Jill: Yes, he certainly waited long enough.
Jack: Words. [pause]
Jill: What?
Jack: Words, in conversion, he was good at that. [pause]
Jill: Yes … he waited long enough.
Jack: I think… [pause]
Jill: …and pauses, he was good at that too.
Jack: Yes.
Jill: Yes. [pause]
Jack: Yes. [pause] I think his word/time ratio was the smallest ever heard.
Jill: Yes.
Jack: Yes. [pause]
Jill: Yes, he waited long enough…
Jack: Well done, that’s what they say…
Jill: Yes, they do say that…
Jack: Well done, like the toast… [long pause]… How’s your cornflakes, then?
… and so on..

Gunter Grass has a huge body of exceptional work, and a deep and complex mind. The criticism of him seemed shallow to me.

so they’re gonna keep putting philip roth off until he gets cancer?

No, just until he writes something worth reading.

Of course, feel free to come back at me, Alison or anyone else. Not cutting you off. If the thread’s still going tomorrow I’ll doubtless pitch in.

Abb1, you’re a fixture round here and I know as far as you’re concerned no criticism of Bush is too strong. To my ears though, Pinter sounds plonking and babyish. In a similar way, Michael Moore’s theories about pipeline contracts seem convoluted and redherringish.
There is an overwhelming case to be made against Bush that is at the same time coherent and reasoned. The centre ground can be rallied against these vermin. It was tragic that the one person needed to make that case in those terms – John Kerry – utterly failed to do so.
As a result I’m left halfheartedly applauding the Nobel Committee for shaking a puny fist on our behalf.

The most dangerous power that ever existed … There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.

To me that’s overcooked.
But then again, you liked the poem.
We settled the aesthetic differences on this thread by chalking it up to personal taste. Might be the best course here.
And its just possible Bush might come up again on this site … look forward to picking the discussion up then.