Funking, Reading, and Musing about the Nobel

Looking alarmingly cute in a cocoa guayabera, my husband James played his first public gig last night with the new funk band Spyboy at Duggan's Pub.   With Tom Martin on guitar, Stan Martinez on drums, and Tory the 17-year-old wunderkind on bass, Spyboy rocked the house--or so I hear.  I had to miss it due to a family commitment, but I'll be catching their next show at Duggan's, which is tentatively scheduled for October 30th.  Maybe we'll see you there?

This Wednesday evening, if you're in Omaha, swing by the Missouri Valley Reading Series at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and say hello.  My reading will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Dodge Room in the Milo Bell Student Center on campus, and I'm excited about what will be my first public reading in my new home state of Nebraska.  Many thanks to UNO faculty member and poet Miles Waggener, who made it happen.

You probably heard that the Nobel was awarded last week to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio of France.  You may not have heard of Le Clezio, but for me, that's always the fun of the Nobel:  learning about someone wonderful, usually from another country, whose work I might not otherwise have heard of. 

Or sometimes not so wonderful:  I remember immediately ordering three Elfriede Jelinek paperbacks (I fell in love with her because she said openly that her social anxiety prevented her from making the trip to Stockholm to accept the Nobel in person) but only making it halfway through the first--Wonderful, Wonderful Times (no truth in advertising in that title, believe me)--before deciding I'd need to go on antidepressants to read any more of her work, and quitting.   (I'm weak, weak.)  And then there was José Saramago's Blindness, which was hailed as a penetrating depiction of social breakdown in a crisis, but which bored me as all predictable allegories do, and which has now been made into a major motion picture, etc.--I guess it comes as no newsflash that Hollywood's okay w/clichés.  (And hey, at least I got to read a copy that didn't feature Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Danny Glover with a black pirate's patch--heaven and saints preserve us--and Gael Garcia Bernal staring blankly from the cover.)  Plus, maybe I'm too much of a literalist, but as a childhood devotee of the 1976 chapter book Follow My Leader about a boy and his seeing-eye dog, I didn't really buy it that becoming blind would, in and of itself, turn people into rampaging savages.  Turns out, neither did lots of blind people, who are protesting the film. 

Anyway, I stray.  For me, the fun of the Nobel is sampling new writers.  Whether their topics and worldviews are to your taste or not, reading their prose broadens your sense of what can be done on the page, and most of the time--since the Nobel Committee has a great big world full of writers to choose from--it jolts you out of your own American narrowness. 

But apparently, not all Americans feel that way.  Rather than reading Le Clezio's work and entering the conversation about him, David Orr in this morning's New York Times fretted about whether the Nobel was fair to American poets in "Yet Once More, a Laurel Not Bestowed."  (Maybe poets would get farther in the world if their supporters avoided musty phrases like laurel not bestowed.  Just a thought.)  In a piece bluntly called "Le Clezio--Who's He?," David Ulin in the L.A. Times grumbles:

Last week, Engdahl, the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, called American literary culture "too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature" -- comments widely seen in the United States as evidence of the insularity of the Nobel itself and proof that American writers would be shut out again. . . .

It's hard to say where Le Clezio fits into all this; I've never read his books. In fact, until Thursday morning, I'd never heard of him -- and I'm not alone. Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards, said the same thing, as did David Kipen, literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts.

On the one hand, that might seem to support Engdahl's claims of American isolationism and insularity, but I'd suggest this unfamiliarity cuts both ways. How do we make the case for Le Clezio as representative of the best that literature has to offer when so many are unacquainted with his work?

Oh, Mr. Ulin, have you "never read his books"?  Have your very important literary friends never read his books?  Is it merely coincidence that your two big guns administer the National Book Awards and the National Endowment for the Arts?  Might this mean that they have to be fully immersed in and fully knowledgeable of the national scene, which might not leave them tons of time to rove through world lit?

Ulin quotes Adam Kirsch in Slate:  "Unless and until [Philip] Roth gets the Nobel Prize, there's no reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the Swedes."  Ah, nothing like a little hubris.  Mmm-mmm, delicious.  It's done Americans so much good recently.  Ulin then waves away the other significant U.S. contender, Joyce Carol Oates, "because, to be frank, she's just not good enough."  That's it.  No explanation, no support.  She's "just not good enough."  David Ulin has spoken.  So let it be written; so let it be done.

¡Hijole!  This all strikes me as bizarre.   As a dreamy postnationalist aware that the U.S. has consumed its share of the world's goodies and then some, I have no stake whatsoever in ensuring that my countrymen (and women, if they're "good enough") get Nobel recognition.  And to assume that one is worthy of the Prize, and then stomp around angrily when one doesn't get it--or lobby for it, as Roth has done--reminds me (in an admittedly  reckless leap of logic) of the spoiled American teenagers profiled in today's NYTimes Sunday Styles.  These teens, accustomed from birth to having their every desire sated, their every whim indulged, are throwing fits when faced with their parents' recent belt-tightening measures to cope with our failing economy:

"I tried to tell Kaitlyn, 'We'll get the Hollister jeans at a thrift store,'" Mrs. Postle recalled.  "She got angry and said:  'That's gross!  Other people wore them!'"

My, my, my.  (If you're a parent, you've got to read the piece.  If you were an indulged teen, brace yourself.  Your kind doesn't come off pretty.)

But maybe the same thing will eventually happen with the Nobel.  Maybe American authors and their indignant supporters will stomp off, permanently disenchanted with the Nobel:  "That's gross!  Non-Americans won it!" 

But oh, wait!  Roth-supporter Kirsch already has:

The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature. America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become.

Sigh.  Nothing like calling an institution a "sham" when they don't pick your guy.  Well, the rest of us can keep being grateful for and interested in the news the Nobel brings.

I also have to wonder about the way in which so many disgruntled commentators keep pointing back to Toni Morrison's Nobel win in 1993, saying varied versions of, Has there been no one that good since then?  Um, how about contemplating this answer:  Maybe not. 

It reminds me of conversations with more than one highly educated white man who's been very angry about the fact that neither Philip Roth nor John Updike has won the Nobel, while Morrison has.  "And we all know she's just not that good," one kept saying.  "We all know why they chose her."  He never said race.  He never said black.  He never said woman.  He didn't have to.  

I wonder if the recent rash of irate, nationalist Nobel commentators feel they don't have to, either--if they feel that their affirmative-action insinuations about literary merit don't need to be articulated.  Maybe they intuit that the majority of their readers share their assumptions.

Or maybe that's just me being paranoid about the presence of deep racial politics, preferences, and prejudices still at play in the United States.  Maybe I'm too suspicious, too skeptical.

But you know, just watch the campaign coverage.


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Many thanks for the Ulin link to Julie Holden, who coined the term Amerocentric for the occasion!