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

I wouldn't care about the prize so much except it came with £740,000.

one year short of the centennial of knut hamsun's nobel prize for literature!

Does anyone have a link to what he actually said about the Srebrenica massacre?

what would be awesome is if bob dylan returned his nobel prize for literature (which i believe was awarded to him in recognition of "christmas in the heart") in protest

hmm - some details here:

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/18/world/german-writer-sets-off-storm-on-serbia.html

jmm sorry autocorrect strikes again

More here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/leland-de-la-durantaye/taking-refuge-in-the-loo

Thanks. Also some details here: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/congratulations-nobel-committee-you-just-gave-the-literature-prize-to-a-genocide-apologist/

When writing about Srebrenica, where several thousand Muslims were executed by Serb forces after they captured the enclave, he allows that what happened there was the most “abominable” massacre in the war, but he swiftly pivots to saying that we should also “listen to the survivors of Muslim massacres in numerous Serb villages around Srebrencia.” This is the same “all sides do it” canard, which equates the extremely few with the very many, and fails to acknowledge that this war was started by Serbs and Milosevic in particular.

Yeah no one is saying Handke isn't a cunt.

I was asking because some articles (e.g. BBC) made it sound like he had denied that the massacre ever even happened. His comments in the Libération piece sound more like the standard apologist line.

one year short of the centennial of knut hamsun's nobel prize for literature!

Yup, he won in 1920. But seeing how the Beer Hall Putsch wasn't until 1923, it would have been difficult for the prize committee to foresee Hamsun's embrace of the Nazis. In contrast, Handke tipped his hand a while back.

The inevitable defence of Handke

https://thegoaliesanxiety.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/nobel-prize-for-peter-handke/

it's sully prudhomme i feel bad for

I like that text because it links Peter Handke's literary project with his political idiocy, thereby showing why it should discredit him from receiving a Nobel. But I know it's not what it tries to do. I just don't get why anyone can write with a straight face: Peter Handke has spent a lifetime attacking the kinds of ideological absolutisms that produce nationalism, hate, and war. He spoke at Slobodan Milosevic's funeral? Like, seriously, come on everyone. We don't have to be gaslit by obvious dishonesty.

http://littleatoms.com/was-peter-handke-revisionism-lost-translation

This piece backs up my point that the Nobel prize judges read in English as well as Swedish. That explains both Olga Tokarczuk and Handke.

It's an odd explanation for Handke though. Surely they would've known or gotten informed about his later work. But what seems true is they don't care enough about it.

I suspect the Academy, which is like 75% men over 75 (seriously, it's 12 men and 2 woman as far as I can tell, most women resigned or was forced out because they didn't want to defend rapists) is able to read German as well. Probably French too. It's true that questions of translation definitely impact the prize, I think with Mo Yan there was a controversy that the translator was a good friend of several members. He wasn't the rapist who used Academy apartments to rape interns, that was the husband / friend of another crew. Seriously, the whole thing should be abolished.

I couldn't let this go so I read the first third of Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia today, and it's just completely idiotic... And Handke explicitly says that he is following his usual artistic program in writing it. And it's just pointless, petty shit about who wrote what in Le Monde, and analysis on why Muslim victims are photographed in close-up, while Serbian victims are photographed in profile. It's shit.

I got an idea, though, which is that they really should separate artist and art, and give the ten million to a foundation that would then be invested in the oeuvre, to be used on translations, research, stipends, etc. I would honestly support that type of award being given to the work of Handke, because I find it essential to figure out how the fuck his apparently really impressive avantgarde ideas from the seventies turned into pro-Serbian shit.

because I find it essential to figure out how the fuck his apparently really impressive avantgarde ideas from the seventies turned into pro-Serbian shit.

― Frederik B

we should give ten million euros to a foundation to figure out how a Very Smart White Man turned into a defender of genocide?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/12/dont-buy-the-champagne-booker-prize-winner-targeted-by-phone-hoax

lmao

we should give ten million euros to a foundation to figure out how a Very Smart White Man turned into a defender of genocide?

― Spironolactone T. Agnew (rushomancy), 12. oktober 2019 21:17 (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That and on a stipend for me to write Danish subtitles for Die Linkshändige Frau

Shit. Sara Danius, who was essentially forced out of the Academy because she was too anti-rape, has died. They are really having a week.

Died?? She wasn't old or anything, was she? And she wrote a respected standard academic book about modernism and the senses or something - years before giving Dylan the prize.

she was 57, which is younger than me hence not old at all :(

the wikipedia write-up (which is all i know about this) somewhat complicates fred's summary of her role (tho of course fred may well be correct and wikipedia quite wrong): The three members resigned in protest over the decision by Sara Danius, the board secretary, not to take what they felt was appropriate legal action against Arnault.

(sorry the blue lines bit shd be in quotes, it's from wikipedia not my judgment)

Yeah, but she was then forced out by the even more pro-rape faction afterwards. While she had cancer. Then shithole Horace Engdahl bragged about how powerful he was, and speculated women just wasn't cut out for this kinda thing.

This is the essential part of the NYT article that that wiki-thing leads to: On the other side are two former permanent secretaries, Sture Allen and Horace Engdahl, who have made lacerating statements in recent days, calling the reaction to the allegations overblown and denouncing Ms. Danius as a weak leader. The 'allegations' lead to a conviction and a sentence of two years, for rape committed in an apartment owned by the academy.

Do you think she was right not to take legal action against Arnault?

(I've run out of free access to the NYT for this month so I can't check up what it says about that)

I don't really think it was her choice. But it's impossible to say, the institution is so secretive.

I can't imagine very many people are happy about the composition of the Academy these days. Based on what Fred's saying it doesn't seem like taking a year off did them any good at all. What are the options here? Who are the Academy responsible to?

Literally nobody. Until recently, they weren't even allowed to resign (two chairs has been empty since they fucked up the Rushdie Fatwa situation). You should see the footage from the big yearly meeting, they have this large table where all these Academy members are sitting, writers, artists, philosophers, and around them every other powerful person in Sweden is gathered. Here to pay tribute to the greatest spirits of the country (and in the corner, the rapist, always there. Rumors have it he groped the crown princess one year). They are supreme, there's nothing anyone can do.

This just seems to me to fit so well into the standard modus operandi of the 21st century right wing. Take advantage of the weaknesses of hated liberal institutions to gain power. Once in power exacerbate those weaknesses. That part I get, but why do they always work so hard to undermine themselves just as strongly as they're undermining the institutions? Fascism is supposed to offer an _alternative_ to liberalism, not a cartoonishly dystopian exaggeration of it!

My question is really about the money. Where do they get their money? Sure, they can stay in power forever, but the prize money, it fluctuates, right? Two years from now are they going to be handing out a coupon for a free Happy Meal?

No, the money will last forever. It's the Nobel heritage, it isn't going to run out. And that's not the only money they have, they are handling tons and tons and tons of art stipend money, and a lot of it goes to their friends. The latest story was that people who had backed them up on the 'rape isn't so bad' take was being paid quite well.

It has changed a bit. Iirc correctly, it used to be an unpaid position, which meant that a lot of members, who really were among the best and brightest on the art scene, were awarding money and prizes to themselves. This culminated in 74, where the prize, and the money, was shared between Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, both members. I like Martinson's poem Aniara, which was recently turned into a sci fi film, but it was obviously a big scandal. Martinson killed himself four years later.

Before departing from Zurich, I bought a small Langenscheidt's dictionary (1992 edition) . Where it once said "Serbo-Croatian" on the familiar yellow cover, only "Croatian" now stood. I asked myself, while thumbing through, whether I would have found "DIN, Deutsche Industrienorm" in the back under "Common Abbreviations" even during the time when Serbian too played a role. It was newly revised by "Prof Dr. Reinhard Lauer," who, more or less that same year, hired by the F.AZ there repeatedly accused the entire Serbian people, along with its poets (by­passed by the Enlightenment from, shall we say, the Romantic Njegos to Vasko Popa-see identification with the wolf!; see Popa's wolf poems!) , of the most dangerous myth complexes.

This must be the worst writing by any Nobel laureate ever? Apart from Wiggle Wiggle, perhaps

Does anyone have a link to what he actually said about the Srebrenica massacre?

― jmm, 11. oktober 2019 15:37 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

So this is from the Epilogue of the Justice for Serbia book:

"You aren't going to question the massacre at Srebrenica too, are you?" S. commented, in response, after my return. "No," I said. "But I want to ask how such a massacre is to be explained, carried out, it seems, under the eyes of the world, after more than three years of war during which, people say, all parties,even the dogs of this war, had become tired of killing, and further, it is supposed to have been an organized, systematic, long-planned execution." Why such a thousandfold slaughtering? What was the motivation? For what purpose?And why, instead of an investigation into the causes ("psychopaths" doesn't suffice), again nothing but the sale of the naked, lascivious, market­ driven facts and supposed facts?

So he is not so much a 'no genocide' person as he is a 'yes genocide, but...' person. Also, whatever you think about the war and the massacre, he never deals with the idea of 'ethnic cleansing', which is the very common explanation I saw for the genocide.

wiggle wiggle is good writing

^^^

Sometimes he's a no genocide person: he told Bosnian Muslims that the Srebrenica massacre was faked and said “You can stick your corpses up your arse!” when questioned further about it.

Danius was also pro Bob Dylan, so she should have been fired for that alone.

bob dylan seems better than this guy. i think they should give it to him again next year to be safe and avoid this kind of error.

I hate Bob Dylan, but I would agree he's a better human being than Handke.

"better human being"? but that is not what the nobel prize for literature is about. as wordsmith handke has definitely a bigger stamina than dylan. he is very obsessed by himself though. like dylan.

let's have a quick selection of nobel literature laureates and bad stuff about them:

knut hamsen: eulogized hitler
thomas mann: paedo who fancied his son
t.s. eliot: anti-semite
winston churchill: responsible to some extent for a famine, suggested gassing arab villagers.
pablo neruda: praised stalin in his obra maestra canto general
gunter grass: member of the waffen ss
bob dylan: domestic abuser

alice munro: is canadian

hey buddy

Wasn't Sartre a worse stalinist than Neruda?

just a random sample off the top of my head

Plus Sartre was French. You really haven't thought this through, Jim

Neruda recounts raping a maid in his memoirs.

naipaul was a racist
bellow was verging on intellectual dark web territory in old age

Neruda recounts raping a maid in his memoirs.

― by the light of the burning Citroën, Thursday, October 17, 2019 1:18 PM (two minutes ago)

i had forgotten about this!

well not really forgotten - i've both read the book and followed the controversy last year around the plan to rename the main airport in chile after neruda - more slipped my mind when compiling this list.

kipling! by a long way the greatest eng lang writer of his day (say 1890-1915ish), very very terrible politics

if sartre was a stalinist at all he was a VERY weird stalinist (and whoever awarded it didn't IMO plough through long reaches of being and nothingness, which no one can really call well written)