Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

.....

kadare is such a nobel winner he might as well be given it now

fairly sure he would be given it now if he had cancer or something

Shaun Hutson or gtfo

What makes Murakami such a likely pick? He doesn't seem particularly more Nobel-ish (idealistic, oppressed) than plenty of others.

Murakami would be a populist pick. After a populist pick last year, maybe that's the way the current committee leans. Kundera at 25-1 seems like appealing odds.

the more i think about it, the more insane murakami seems a pick. his protagonists are mostly slacker everymen who get dragged into a world of sexuality and the unconscious, only to return from it mostly unchanged: a little humbler in some ways, maybe, but in a more important sense more self-assured. this is the same as judd apatow movies.

In truth, the most insane pick on that list would be Svetlana Aleksijevitj, at least from a historical standpoint. The only two solely nonfiction writers the award has ever gone to have been Winston Churchill and Theodor Mommsen (the second ever winner of the award). Would be nice to see them expand their horizons though.

awards are terrible why do we do this to ourselves

xp to myself, wind up bird chronicle is the same as this in every respect but integrating the stuff about the japanese occupation of china has interesting consequences. you discover that the placelessness of murakami's books, where most of the cultural reference points are american and characters all speak in the same inflectionless faux-naive manner, is a thin facade concealing a history that has been violently repressed. japanese identity is what the narrator is looking for in the well, i think, but he doesn't find it and eventually he stops looking. this solution to japan's national shame might be unsatisfying but it seems preferable to mishima's fate. although, murakami wouldn't be murakami if he was capable of the sort of un-ironic, literal commitment to an ideology that undid mishima in the end.

it's interesting to me that america hasn't had to reckon with its atrocities in the same way. i mean, in the wind up bird chronicle it seems that both the violence in nanking and the shame of the atom bombs are too traumatic to integrate into a coherent national identity. better to be global citizens. why isn't slavery like this? why aren't the atom bombs like this from our end? are we just assholes or do history's victors just never have to explain themselves?

also he goes into a well and then the book is over or something

plus he has to kill his brother-in-law in a dream in order to fulfill an oedipal fantasy that will bring his wife back to him and also kill this brother-in-law in real life.

yeah i dont really get/remember that part

treesh u are reminding me why i read so few novels

i liked when the one guy was skinned alive and then the other guy went in the well tho

they had to kill all the zoo animals by firing squad

Bob Dylan can fuck off too

bob dylans book is pretty good tbh

bob dylans book is pretty very good tbh

With (Roy Orbison), it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.

bob dylans book is pretty very good the best book that has been or will ever be written tbh

“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.

i could read 10,000 pages of this kind of prose

ya he shd do another one

He sang like a professional criminal

this is the line that always made me laugh

“I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”

these kinds of lines are really funny to me too. his transparently disingenuous "golly gee" mode

kinda mad that Marias isn't more highly favored

in re: Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature

This man has sold a gazillion units of vinyl, CD and downloadable whatnot. It's like he hit an oil well that never stops pumping money. The committee that awards the prize kind of regards that kind of commercial success as too crass to deserve Nobel recognition. Modest plaudits among the public at large, complemented by a high esteem within academia, seems to be the best way to punch your ticket.

dude lives on a tour bus 11 months out of the year

dude could buy his own fleet of Lear jets if he wanted to

ITT -_------->>> pictures of william t vollmann (no shops allowed)

if Dylan bought a fleet of Lear jets it would bankrupt him tbrr

i don't think he should win the prize, but if the issue is him being "compromised" by corporate success i don't think it's applicable in his situation. he was destined to spend his life trying to expand the possibilities of the folk song whether it led him to fame or poverty. this is what i think based on everything i know about him.

his success seems coincidental and sort of arbitrary to the music he creates. not totally arbitrary obviously, but relatively so. much as could reasonably be expected

http://i.imgur.com/HYksNIp.png

this thread went in a great direction

now i am wondering what would happen if lagoon revealed that i was worth 180 million dollars. would ilxors resent this? would they opportunistically try to become closer to me? or, a third option, would they treat me exactly the same?

i actually sincerely think the third option is what would happen, and that is why ilx is superior to the nobel prize selection committee

can i have like a million dollars

just interjecting to say nobody who has done a chrysler commercial should win the Nobel prize for literature

well aren't you just blah blah blah and et cetera

sorry i need to go to sleep

i live by a simple code

I don't especially care that Mr. Zimmerman has a vast net worth derived from his artistic endeavors. I've always enjoyed a large fraction of his output. But I suspect a certain gaggle of self-important Swedes would never see him as a worthy recipient, so I'd never risk a penny betting on him getting it.

lol peace activist

tbf, they list it after disc jockey

he makes money at that one!

paul muldoon >>>> bob dylan

Bob Dylan should get the peace prize

He seems peaceful enough

"All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell."

The odds make little or no sense, but that's novelty odds I guess

get the sense that Murakami's chances are increasing year by year, but I think it's dumb money that really pushes him to favourite (the heuristic seems to be something like "is non-anglophone, have heard of, is literary/rated").

I'm a bit surprised that Kundera's down with the long shots (20/1 and longer, say), but then no-one seems to talk about him now. Did people just switch off when he moved into French?

Don Paterson being on the list at all is quite odd. Maybe ppl thought a Scot would get it if they voted yes?

Handke at 12/1 seems v short, given the fuss over the Ibsen award.