The winner will be the guy that wrote the Black Panther movie.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/05/02/comic-hero-popular-sweden-mocked-fighting-polish-nationalists-gay-pride-flag/

>Philip Roth
>white guy
This Portgoy’s got a Complaint.

Nobel for literature is good only for recipient’s finances. Otherwise, it is worthless. Considering that Tolstoy & Ibsen, Proust & Joyce, Musil & Broch, Conrad & Lawrence, Woolf & Yourcenar …went to their graves Nobelless, while Pearl Buck, Werner von Heidenstam & Carl Spitteler got Nobels – evidently, it doesn’t affect anyone’s literary “immortality”.

So, octogenarian white guys Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, and Tom Stoppard, try not to die before October 2019 because Nobels aren’t given out posthumously

Don’t forget Pynchon. He’s not for everyone, but he should get the Nobel for ‘Mason & Dixon’ alone.

Why are white guys so creepy and perverted?

No wonder white women are in dreading it preferring Men of Color

Off topic you guys NEED to read small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

(((American))) cultural influence

Who is the greatest American author born since the end of WWII?

Who knows what the standards are for the meaningless Nobel literary prize but Morris is an excellent writer and prolific over the years, so they could do a lot worse.

He should get it for services to overinflated English Literature departments

New episodes of this story appears in the Scandinavian newspapers every week. Last I heard, Arnault was accused of not only sexually assaulting the wives and daughters of various members of the Swedish Academy: apparently, he also groped Crown Princess Victoria herself – on some accounts, while she was standing next to King Carl Gustav. Of course, the King has long had quite a reputation as a philanderer himself, so maybe he did not think there was anything inappropriate about it.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Ffe6a558c-3ce3-11e8-b8eb-a2b1e54e4e88.jpg?crop=1045%2C588%2C54%2C36&resize=685

In the end too many academy members resigned as part of this circus — including the hapless Sara Danius, who in her brief tenure also led the academy to hand the prize to Bob Dylan. However, Göran Malmquist, an old warhorse of the academy, told the press that work was ongoing as usual and two prizes will be awarded next year(!). The main reason not to award it this year is instead that it would be tainted by the current affair. Make of that what you will.

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/ledamoten-om-orsaken-till-att-priset-skjuts-upp/

Nobody should need to say this, but all in all, the academy should take this as an opportunity for reflection on their responsibilities and that they should elect suitable members and leaders for this purpose. Not just any old 1968 marxist pothead wino street trash.

Jan Morris can get it on the merits

Not to mention the Academy’s allergy to Catholic writers: no Nobel for Chesterton, Waugh, Greene, Tolkien, Endo, Godden, or O’Connor, just to name a few who wrote in English.

Nobel’s most explosive invention
Was these Mothers of Endless Contention.
Mathematics wins none;
Swedes just wanna have fun.
How prestige dripped away they won’t mention.

Mostly artsy landscapes, far as I can tell, but whatever his merits as an artist may have been, it seems like he primarily made his living by (ab)using his wife’s position on the Swedish Academy to get funding etc. for his art center. Otherwise, he is basically just an ugly dude with big hair, like most of the other prominent MeToo abusers: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/king-s-sadness-as-sex-scandal-leaves-nobel-academy-in-ruins-plxmg0ptp

I always think of Jan Morris as the Deidre McCloskey of British historiography. Since James became Jan about two decades before Donald became Deidre, though, I guess one should rather call McCloskey the Jan Morris of economics.

Cormac McCarthy deserves the Nobel more than any living person, including the many 2nd and 3rd rate winners.

A tranny who adores Empire: perfect for choice for Scandinavians being raped to death by Numinous Negroes and swarthy Mohammedans.

Not sure Phillip Roth warrants a Nobel. At best, he is an okay writer. Mixing Hawthorne and Freud was not that impressive. I would like to see Tom Wolfe get recognized. His stuff is actually original and unique in many ways Roth isn’t.

O/T

The Grapes of Wrath returneth evermore

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hurts-californias-agriculture-industry

GARCIA: So Tom Deardorff has had to compete for workers. He’s raised their pay by actually quite a lot. Back in 2006, working the celery field paid about $8.70 an hour. Now it pays more than $21 an hour. We couldn’t speak to any of the workers on Tom’s farm. But Tom says his workers all are documented and that even doubling wages hasn’t solved the labor problem.

Crops, not yet rotting, but soon…

…. while Pearl Buck, Werner von Heidenstam & Carl Spitteler got Nobels

Peal Buck was a superb novelist.

Have you read any of her novels?

Eternal bridesmaid Haruki Murakami will be declared a double winer in 2019

Or it could be whatever rapper is popular this time next year.

According to Baby Name Wizard, Thomas was the 9th most popular name for boys born in the 1930′s and ranked 8th in the 1940′s. Today it’s all the way down to 52nd place.

Cormac McCarthy should be on that list too.

Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth are all dull and pedantic. Only Wolfe, among them, is a good writer. While I’m on the subject, Cormac McCarthy should get the Nobel. He won’t of course. His work is too masculine, violent and American.

OT

My rephrasing and extension of a recent article by Oxford philosophy professor Amia Srinivasan

Come the Revolution, the fat, the disabled, the short, trans women, Asian-American men with small penises, Leslie Jones, and others imprisoned in the current patriarchal racist-sexist-homophobic nightware society in which we now live will be considered sexually hot and pursued by those cishets who in our current societ are considered attractive.

Sort of a corollary to Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism in Douthat column:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/incels-sex-robots-redistribution.html

But Hanson’s post made me immediately think of a recent essay in The London Review of Books by Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right To Sex?” Srinivasan, an Oxford philosophy professor, covered similar ground (starting with an earlier “incel” killer) but expanded the argument well beyond the realm of male chauvinists to consider groups with whom The London Review’s left-leaning and feminist readers would have more natural sympathy — the overweight and disabled, minority groups treated as unattractive by the majority, trans women unable to find partners and other victims, in her narrative, of a society that still makes us prisoners of patriarchal and also racist-sexist-homophobic rules of sexual desire.

Srinivasan ultimately answered her title question in the negative: “There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want.” But her negative answer was a qualified one. While “no one has a right to be desired,” at the same time “who is desired and who isn’t is a political question,” which left-wing and feminist politics might help society answer differently someday. This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex, exactly, but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.

Related Robin Hanson links from the Douthat article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html

http://amp.slate.com/business/2018/04/economist-robin-hanson-might-be-americas-creepiest-professor.html

The two Nobel prizes for literature and peace would be a couple of obscure, if rich, prizes today if it hadn’t been for the Nobel prizes in science.

The science Nobels lucked out in terms of quickly establishing a reputation because they were instituted at the start of the 20th century.

In particular, the prizes in physics and chemistry were established at start of the golden age of physics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Science had a steady supply, for decades, of truly titanic figures on whom to bestow the prize. It didn’t hurt that the 20th century saw huge advances in medicine and the biological sciences as well, increasing the supply of great men in science available for recognition with a Nobel.

The literature and peace prizes bask in the reflected prestige of the science prizes, despite a relatively large number of damp squib awards in those two categories over the course of a century.

He has been accused of groping the heir to the Swedish throne, Crown Princess Victoria.

He must be a chins man.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43942106

He didn’t get the title right but at least he correctly identified the author. As it so happens, writer Jodi Picoult is jewish.

The story line involves an African-American labor/delivery nurse in charge of newborns at a Connecticut hospital. She is ordered not to touch the baby of a white supremacist couple. After the baby dies in her care, she is charged with murder and taken to court.

A must read! I imagine Picoult’s Nobel is a mere formality at this point.

Off topic you guys NEED to read small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Having read one of her books – Nineteen Minutes – I can safely say that Jodi Picoult is a hack.

If there were a cheesy Lifetime movie about a Columbine-ish school massacre, then Nineteen Minutes would be its novelization.

The main characters are three 17-year-olds – Josie the pretty preppy, Matt the Haven Monahan-ish jock a**hole, and Peter the geeky butt-monkey. Josie, outwardly perfect but secretly miserable, is Matt’s girlfriend and Peter’s ex-friend. (She dumped him as a buddy after the Mean Girls let her into their clique.)

SPOILERS AHEAD

The narrative has a convoluted structure – it keeps skipping back and forth chronologically – but the basic plot is simple enough: the Mean Girls (and Boys) make merciless fun of Peter until one day he brings a gun to school and blows them away.

The massacre lasts exactly nineteen minutes. Matt dies. Josie survives. Peter is taken alive and eventually goes on trial. Angst ensues. At the end comes a “shocking” twist (a Picoult trademark, or so I’ve heard).

This excerpt is representative:

Matt was leaning against the refrigerator in the corner; he must have let himself in through the open garage door. Like always, he made her head swim with seasons – his hair was all the colors of autumn; his eyes the bright blue of a winter sky; his smile as wide as any summer sun. He was wearing a baseball hat backward, and a Sterling Varsity Hockey tee over a thermal shirt that Josie had once stolen for a full month and hidden in her underwear drawer, so that when she needed to she could breathe in the scent of him. “Are you still pissed off?” he asked.

Josie hesitated. “I wasn’t the one who was mad.”

Matt pushed away from the refrigerator, coming forward until he could link his arms around Josie’s waist. “You know I can’t help it.”

A dimple blossomed in his right cheek; Josie could already feel herself softening. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you. I really did have to study.”

Matt pushed her hair off her face and kissed her. This was exactly why she’d told him not to come over last night – when she was with him, she felt herself evaporating. Sometimes, when he touched her, Josie imagined herself vanishing in a puff of steam.

He tasted of maple syrup, of apologies. “It’s all your fault, you know,” he said. “I wouldn’t act as crazy if I didn’t love you so much.”

At that moment, Josie could not remember the pills she was hoarding in her room; she could not remember crying in the shower; she could not remember anything but what it felt like to be adored. I’m lucky, she told herself, the word streaming like a silver ribbon through her mind. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Many schools have made the book required reading. Some parents have objected to their kids’ being exposed to it.

(Matt and Josie get it on several times. Picoult describes their encounters with surprising explicitness.)

Basically, it’s one big pile of meh.

Has a black person ever won a Nobel Prize in any of the sciences? It seems to me in the more subjective categories (i.e. the categories where they can fudge merit) Lit and Peace, they load up on “people of color” and women. We see the same things in academia. “Our university boasts a large number of black faculty! Yes, they’re all in the bullshit departments, but…a large number!”

Steve, that HuffPo item you discreetly linked behind Tennessee Coates’ name was pretty funny. Coates actually does seem reasonable and modest next to the pompous and un-self-aware ethnic prison camp guard/Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who basically says that what is acceptable to publish is whatever he says is acceptable to publish, which he will decide on an ongoing basis with no objective references. Also, straight white males need not apply, and old white dudes just die already, sorry James you can stay.

Bingo! Still I commend the absolutely amazing 1928 (if memory serves) winner Sigrid Undset. Her “Kristin Lavransdatter” covers the lifetime arc of the heroine with surprising deepness, the same for the three men in her life, particularly her father. The complete, unadulterated story of a soul’s path to God.

We get in a lot of trouble when we fail to remember that we descend from chimps not Bonobos.

Homo split from our common ancestor with chimpanzees about seven million years ago. About one million years ago there was a geological event that moved the Congo river. Since chimps can’t swim those caught on the south shore diverged from the main population and came to become the Bonobos.

These were important events in the history of human sex. Bonobos resolve disputes with sex. The females dominate the males and Bonobos are remarkably less violent than their northern shore cousins the Chimpanzees.

Chimps are aggressive, violent and treacherous. Male chimps beat the females before and after sex. This behavior is maintained in the lineage because it is well known that the females who have been beaten have more offspring than those who escaped being beaten. So female chimps have evolved to seek being dominated and beaten. The ones who don’t like “rough sex” have lost out from natural selection.

Humans descended from the nasty and vicious chimps not the politically correct Bonobos who didn’t arise until human were well separated off onto another line when the Congo river arose. So it should be no surprise that human sexual patterns resemble those of chimps more than those of Bonobos. This resemblance is probably the root of human BDSM. Otherwise BDSM is very mysterious. Many women like to be spanked and spanking hurts.

Women also like to be respected and cherished. So women present men with a mixed message. They evidently feel a pull towards the dominant assertive and sexually aggressive men but also have gentler feeling that probably arose only with civilization.

You know, I thought a Swedish princess was going to be hot. She’s quarter-Brazilian.

Piltdown Man above makes an excellent point, but there are two additional problems with taking the Nobel Prize for Literature seriously.

The first is that the prize is awarded “”in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” This is a quote from Nobel’s will and this is what the prize is awarded for on its own terms. It is NOT a lifetime achievement award for being a good writer, was never intended as such, and by its own terms you don’t have to be a good writer to be awarded the prize. People keep wanting to treat it as a lifetime achievement literature award when its never been that.

It probably should have been awarded from the start to specific books, not authors, which would have cut down the solution and also solved the porthumous award problem.

The second is that it is supposed to be an international award, which you just can’t do with writing because by definition it means reading tons of books in translation if you really want to consider writers on a worldwide basis.. The jury would have to be able to “get” works in other cultures, which is hard. You can have, for instance, an English language only literature prize but not an international one. That the awarders are Swedish probably doesn’t help.

As it happens, they did generally give it to great or at least really good writers from the 1920s through the 1960s but otherwise the prize has been a joke. If you are wondering, there are issues with the science problems too but this comment is already too long.

I just read T Genius first black panther comic book. I liked it! Part of the appeal is that I see it as a satire on conic book characters. He should have gotten a Nobel prize for this. Only Racism prevented this.

Does this mean there won’t be any Academy Awards next year?

Who is the greatest American author born since the end of WWII?

Jay McInerney? There is by no means an obvious answer.

O/T

Amazing how the laws of economics magically reappear when a country isn’t white!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-03/finding-jobs-for-young-malaysians-will-be-key-for-next-leader

Foreign labor has underpinned that rebound. The central bank estimates that about 82 percent of the net jobs created in 2016 went to non-residents. Unemployment among 15 to 24 year olds stood at 10.8 percent last year, according to the World Bank, while joblessness among local graduates has increased more sharply than non-graduates since 2011, data from the central bank shows.

This is the Malaysian version of VDARE’s Ed Rubenstein, published in an oligarch’s journalist outfit

I don’t think you really need to do a Bonobo versus Chimps comparison.

Women often normally enjoy a bit of drama more than men do but also very rarely want to be treated terribly.

I find I end up a little tetchy if I haven’t exercised in a while. I also find that most women seem to have their outlook lifted by the occasional emotional workout.

Hence the well-known phenomenon of women bursting into tears at the gym:

When the song ends, Toomey directs the group into child’s pose, torso folded over the knees, forehead on the floor, arms spread forward. Coldplay comes on, and there is a moment of rest. “Inhale. Exhale. Feel your center,” Toomey says. Heads slowly come up, and suddenly, tears are streaming down the faces of half the room. A woman in front of me is physically trembling. “I just let it all out,” a middle-aged woman in leggings and a tank top whispers.

http://time.com/3525030/women-yoga-exercise-classes-soulcycle/

Needing more emotional exercise can lead to many women finding dangerous and mean-seeming guys magnetic. I’ve yet to meet any who actually want physical ill-treatment though. A bit of sexual throwing around with consent does not count.

The really top grade guy will notice when she needs catharsis and will guide her to it by discussing a subject about her life that has been bubbling under the surface.

Not coincidentally, the highest level of female sexual development according to Jung was when a woman could see a man as a spiritual mediator and guide.

Then again, as a therapist he probably would say that!

More relevantly for this site, the highest level for a man is merely to be able to see individual women as individuals with good and bad propensities.

You joke but it’s at least going to be nominated for best screenplay and best picture at next years Oscars. If stuff at the level of The Shape of Water can win best picture for political correctness, then Black Panther is going to sweep the boards. But maybe Trump will be at war with Iran by then and a ‘strange new respect’ will descend over all the ‘progressives’ and ‘liberals’ and the anti-Trump tone will mysteriously vanish.

Literally every category they can will at least have a nomination for Black Panther. Maybe only best screenplay, best picture, best wardrobe, best actor, best score and best supporting actress if Trump attacks Iran.

You got to have money.

You cannot make this up: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/leak-the-atlantic-had-a-meeting-about-kevin-williamson-it-was-a-liberal-self-reckoning_us_5ac7a3abe4b0337ad1e7b4df

Blacks literally have a veto over whites now.

Good, the entire Nobel organization stinks to high heaven and needs to go die.

We already know who will win every year, either a black, a Jew or a gay.

Why are white guys so creepy and perverted?

Let me guess, you caught a glimpse of your face reflected in your computer screen, and suddenly that question came to mind?

Yeah, that article deserves its own dissection by Steve.

I saw his post and thought, ya know, anecdotally, the secret sexual interests of (a) the greatest black rock star (Chuck Berry–in to piss/shit degradation of white women) and the greatest/most famous black comedian/actor (Bill Cosby –into drugging and raping primarily white women)…

are nothing to write home about.

P.S. The most famous black woman in the world (Oprah Winfrey) was raped by her uncle/s.

These are remarkable coincidences.

Soul Cycle.

Nobel for literature is good only for recipient’s finances. Otherwise, it is worthless. Considering that Tolstoy & Ibsen, Proust & Joyce, Musil & Broch, Conrad & Lawrence, Woolf & Yourcenar …went to their graves Nobelless, while Pearl Buck, Werner von Heidenstam & Carl Spitteler got Nobels – evidently, it doesn’t affect anyone’s literary “immortality”.

The Nobel Academy definitely has a knack for missing the immortals. Note, for example, how they skipped over both Mark Twain and Henry James in favor of Sinclair Lewis as the first Yank Lit Laureate.

What’s really odd, though, is that a bunch of Scandinavians denied medals to both Ibsen and Strindberg…..

Pretty slim pickings.

TD, speaking of small “things”…guy walks up to the librarian and asks, “Do you have the new book about small penises ?” Librarian replies…”I don’t think it’s in yet.” Guy says…”Yes, that’s the title.” You have a nice day. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to our resident troll.

Oh, I am very aware of Soul Cycle. Chicks dig it but goodness is it over-priced! One visit to sit on a bike and have loud music for an hour costs more than my monthly gym membership.

Nobel Lit is BS.

And please suspend the Oscars too.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/05/better-late-than-never.html

Red Swan?

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-red-swan.html

Enoch was right, the black man has the whip hand over the white man.

The Nobel Prize lost all relevance when they awarded the Peace Prize, pre accomplishments, to Obama, who went on to become the most divisive president in US history. I believe his hatred, maybe too strong a word, for whites in general, led to the murder of six police officers in Dallas.

Don’t forget the immortal literature created by Italian cartoonist Dario Fo. Or was it Po?

I don’t want to write a long comment, so just a few rambling thoughts….

Lit Nobels are generally anti-religious, and Catholic writers are the most vital among religiously-minded authors. Virtually only “Protestant novelist”- I mean explicit Protestant Christian- was John Updike, and he didn’t get Nobel either. Judaist (religious) Jews are very scarce & didn’t get the prize, too.

Muslims, Hindus,… marginal.

Also gays (Gide was an exception) & right wingers.

Among greatest 20th C imaginative writers of the highest rank, most were either cultural Catholics or converts (Proust, Joyce, Musil, Rilke, Broch, Conrad, Karl Kraus, Garcia Marquez..) & great technically Protestant authors (Thomas Mann, William Faulkner) not infrequently used Catholic themes (probably some sort of cultural attraction).

Tolkien invented high fantasy, but this type of writing is not susceptible to canonization- the same with science fiction; Endo wrote in Japanese; Greene was ostracized for too many reasons (in comparison with him, Hemingway was a PC prude); Chesterton did not fit well in any conventional genre (though, Nobel for Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill is absurdity); O’Connor died too young; Waugh was…well, he was unacceptable.

Nobel for literature, peace & economics should be abolished and prize for mathematics, technology/inventions & perhaps earth sciences or agriculture instituted.

Of course, this won’t happen …

The literature prize lost a little gravitas with Bob Dylan, whose latest gig is huckstering whiskey.

Tom Wolfe richly deserves any honor he gets – his observations of America and the world have been spot on for more than 50 years, he was the main inventor of the New Journalism, and he writes really, really well – but it will never happen; he’s conservative and, more importantly, known to be conservative. (Bob Dylan, by many accounts, is somewhat conservative but is not known as a conservative.)

Thomas Pynchon would be a good choice though; Mason & Dixon is a modern masterpiece, as is Gravity’s Rainbow, and the rest of his stuff is at least very good.

Neal Stephenson is pretty damned good, much better than the overrated Cormac McCarthy IMO.

The state of fiction nowadays is pretty dire though.

Given the standards of the past, I doubt there is an American author born since WWII who would qualify for the term “greatest.”

Yup, the supremacism of delusional self-righteousness.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/05/04/narcissism-liberal-belief-fake-news/

For this award to have meaning, surely there must be years when they see no worthy candidates? Isn’t the Fields medal awarded somewhat irregularly?

You can buy into the common ancestor thing if you want to, but I don’t. I don’t believe the Bible-thumper version either, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than us descending from a single celled animal created by the result of a “big bang” of an unknown object, form an unknown source, at an unknown time, for an unknown reason.

The fact that Australian Aborigines are now considered to have the oldest DNA, and that DNA has been found in remains covered in bat guano from Russian caves shoots a big hole in the out of Africa narrative, as does the fact that no Africans have Neanderthal DNA, and recent finds in Greece and Bulgaria predate the alleged out of Africa time period and are actually found going INTO Africa.

An ancient Scottish joke:
“Ahm I hurtin’ ye, Mary?”
“Is it in, Jock?”

At least there’s nothing to be ashamed of there. Imagine all those grandpa Bradens, Jadens, and Kaydens in 2060.

I have no doubt that many of the earlier Nobels for Literature would today be considered shockingly “right-wing”.
The prize-winner though would surely be either Yeats or Hamsun.

Barf! says Sandy.

https://goo.gl/images/SwXwWh

And your father, of course, was right.

The prize is given for a body of work, not a particular book so there are many to pick from. Basically, there’s about 200 candidates every year, several of them having been proposed multiple times; 20 get put on the longlist; 5 on the shortlist.

The real fun is when the selected winner then declines the prize, like Sartre did. (He wanted the money though, but didn’t get it.)

Kipling won too.

A penetrating observation. My Dutch cousin won it for the electrocardiogram – would a Dutchman winning the prize for literature have anything like that sort of an impact?
As it happens, the Dutch writer of some consequence who was perhaps as worthy as many an actual winner to be awarded the prize, Marcellus Emants, was also a cousin. We’ve all had electrocardiograms, but which of us has read Lilith?

Something is rotten in the state of Sweden.

Waaay off topic

http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/03/22/at-least-a-million-sub-saharan-africans-moved-to-europe-since-2010/

Quarter Portuguese and mostly German is probably the best description. Her maternal grandfather was a Nazi if you believe the narrative in Sweden. Quite a few on the paternal side too for that matter. Not that anyone really cares.

The name Lillith is massively over-used because feminists illiterately decided that the lilitu were the Jewish goddess of feminism. I have not heard of this, is it available in English? The only novel I know by that title is the one from midcentury about the nymphomaniac who collects prisms.

So if I understand this correctly, three “aides” to the Swedish Royal Family, claimed that they saw Arnault “grope” a Swedish Princess, so Arnault’s wife should resign. “Touching” a Royal unless one offers a hand for a handshake, is a gigantic no-no, much less groping one. If Arnault was groping, you can bet that more tan a slap on the hand would have happened. There’s a big credibility gap in that narrative. That aside, resigning for something a family member may have done is nonsensical, if there is no direct cause-effect. Does a teacher resign if a family member beats the crap out of a neighbour?
As for the alleged “leaks”, his wife may have “leaked” the names to him. If he then repeats the information, he is not the leak, she is. Unless there is evidence that she leaked the information to him, they need to STFU.

Anon, $21 p/hr that’s GM assembly line starting wages. But probably no benefits.

As a grad student, I invited Junot Diaz to speak to a workshop on issues of representation in literature. I was an unknown wide-eyed 26 yo, and he used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me. I'm far from the only one he's done this 2, I refuse to be silent anymore.

— zinziclemmons (@zinziclemmons) May 4, 2018

“Genius” Grant Recipient Junot Diaz got metoo’d.

Prizes and awards derive their prestige from their awardees, not the other way around.

However, the Nobels are a bad iteration of the genre, poorly thought out and over-hyped, and the Nobel Estate was unable or unwilling to take legal action to prevent the Bank of Sweden from calling its economics prize a “Nobel Prize”.

PS:

Where’s my namesake with the obligatory Leonard Pitts joke? It seems particularly apropos here. I wouldn’t want to half-ass something he does best, of course.

$21 per hour doesn’t seem excessively high considering that picking vegetables can be grueling work.

A toughie. Neal Stephenson’s not a bad choice; which means we can probably count him out. I also like James Ellroy, but he’s not really their type, either.

Those are the only ones I can think of with something like universal appeal. But literature has become so splintered since that a list of “best American writers born since World War II” would probably include a bunch of writers I’ve never even heard of.

I keep meaning to read Cormac McCarthy, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

Your musings about the one celled animal are embarrassing all of us the collective iSteve commentariat but I agree with Sailer’s observation that for practical purposes it’s easier to reach an understanding with someone who thinks Jehovah created non-equal human races in 6 literal days than it is with someone who thinks evolution worked for billions of years and then magically stopped working when humans appeared, just so that egalitarian mankind may remain unmolested by natural selection.

On second thought, as straight white guys you were all pretty much out of the running anyway, not with talents like Ta-Nehisi “The Genius” Coates around, so don’t worry about it.

What a moronic criticism. 5 out of the last 10 winners are white men, and 3 of the last 10 are white women. Of the 2 non-whites, one writes in English and is a UK citizen.

You are right. My favorite is Richard Price, but he would not be on anyone else’s short list.

Cormac McCarthy is, I just realized, the only living writer of fiction I read.

I used to follow Anthony Powell while he was still alive and writing Dance to the Music of Time.

Nowadays I’d rather disappear into 19th century India with Kim, or into …

Oh wait. I recently read Derbyshire’s Coolidge novel. Got him to autograph it in exchange for several billion Zimbabwean dollars. So two living novelists.

DeLillo has feet of clay. I’d call him a fraud if postmodernists can be frauds. (They can, but just to be on the safe side…)

Philip Roth I could live with, though the three books of his I’ve read I either despised or didn’t much care for.

Wolfe and Stoppard, heck yeah.

I think they both came off pretty badly. As I understand it, the meeting was to address whether the Atlantic acted correctly in hiring Kevin Williamson, and in firing him soon afterward, in light of his pronouncements about abortion. Coates opens the meeting by talking about how The New Republic was racist 20 years ago because it published Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, and then segued to his article in the Atlantic about racial reparations and then to complaining about the lack of African-American writers who think and write the way he does. He only gradually drifts into talking about Williamson. He admits that he disagrees with Williamson but admires him as a vigorous writer. But he buries this under a ton of vague nonsense about defining acceptable versus unacceptable discourse.

He only comes off okay because he was sharing the stage with Goldberg. Yeah, I think Goldberg says that whatever is acceptable to publish is what he says is acceptable to publish. But, you know, that is the job of an editor. That is what an editor does. But an editor should take responsibility for his choices. Goldberg tries to make it sound like he had no say in the matter. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his decision. It is just that there are these standards, and Williamson fell outside them. But, hey, he had nothing to do with that. It was really the fault of the women in the room who felt “uncomfortable” with Williamson’s views. What can he do?

McCarthy is sentence fragments and pseudo-Old Testament.

Does that tickle you?

Also, it’s certainly not year-round work, more likely just a few weeks during the harvest.

All born pre-1945. The dearth of writing talent produced in the last seven decades is pretty remarkable.

I like the leftist historical crime novelist David Peace who has this very severe version of the cut-up technique. Definitely an acquired taste, I didn’t get it on my first attempt. His stranger-danger-era quartet Red Riding was made into three movies of varying acceptability.

Chicks can’t say “no” to maple syrup.
But yeah the 4chan-esque video game they made was more accurate and relevant (the one where you have to fetch a copy of Ecce Homo for Nietzsche in hell: it had a lot of details in the cut scenes and dialogue); the only book on rage killings that is worth knowing about is Going Postal by Exile publisher Mark Ames.

Junot Díaz is Dominican, not Puerto Rican. Might seem like a subtle distinction from afar, but try telling that to people from either country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Dubin

He’s not getting any Noble Prize .

Is the Deirdre related to Robert McCloskey?

Much of today’s news and culture reads like an adult parody of those wacky Homer Price tales.

I refuse to wait until a convenient time with no danger of repercussions anymore

Tiny says “No wonder white women are in dreading it preferring Men of Color”.

But do they really?

This from Ron Paul’s site….(my bold)

“November 20, 2013

The data shown above come from the Facebook dating app, Are You Interested (AYI), which works like this: Users in search of someone for a date or for sex flip through profiles of other users and, for each one, click either “yes” (I like what I see) or “skip” (show me the next profile). When the answer is “yes,” the other user is notified and has the opportunity to respond. It’s very similar to another dating app, Tinder.

The graphic shows what percentage of people responded to a “yes,” based on the gender and ethnicity of both parties (the data are only for opposite-sex pairs of people). Unsurprisingly, most “yes’s” go unanswered, but there are patterns: For example, Asian women responded to white men who “yessed” them 7.8% of the time, more often than they responded to any other race. On the other hand, white men responded to black women 8.5% of the time—less often than for white, Latino, or Asian women. In general, men responded to women about three times as often as women responded to men.

Unfortunately the data reveal winners and losers. All men except Asians preferred Asian women, while all except black women preferred white men. And both black men and black women got the lowest response rates for their respective genders.

Perhaps most surprising is that among men, all racial groups preferred another race over their own.

AYI analyzed some 2.4 million heterosexual interactions—meaning every time a user clicked either “yes” or “skip”—to come up with these statistics. Its users skew older than Tinder’s—about two-thirds of AYI users are older than 35, according to a spokesperson.”

White women responded most to white men and least to black men. In fact, black men got the lowest response from women of all races except black women.

Here’s the link if you want to see the graphics.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?504751-The-uncomfortable-racial-preferences-revealed-by-online-dating

William Gibson is not to be overlooked.

This is a good challenge. It’s surprisingly difficult to think of even possibly great writers who fit both categories, and all the candidates seem to come from science fiction (perhaps this reflects my own reading habits? don’t know).

Neal Stephenson seems a possibility, though he suffers heavily from the weaknesses of his time. Tom Clancy is good, but probably not great, although he exceeds the limits of his genre fairly often.

Thomas Pynchon, Tom Wolfe and Phillip K. Dick weren’t born after the war. Michael D. O’Brien is Canadian, and perhaps not quite “great”. Vox Day has done some interesting work, I think; perhaps one to watch, though like Ezra Pound, it will take a very long time before his literary reputation can be stronger than his political one. John C. Wright is entertaining and good at what he does, but I don’t think that I could call him great — maybe he needs time.

Perhaps it’s too early to say. Usually, greatness of this sort is only clear after many years. The opening chapter of Chesterton’s book on Charles Dickens is interesting evidence of that. This is why the Nobel Prize in Literature, being restricted to the living, can never be a solid indicator of greatness.

I agree that Piltdown Man explained it well.

One of my favorite books is Lilith, but my Lilith is the novel by George MacDonald, who is a different writer than your cousin.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Mark Helprin were both born after WWII and both are better than most of the recent Nobel winners (at least the ones with which I am familiar). Gene Wolfe, a Korean war vet, and (trust me on this) the cartoonist Schulz and the great radio preacher J Vernon McGee were at the Nobel level too for much of their careers.

If they were going to give it to somebody like Dylan, they should have given it to Eric Rohmer or Ingmar Bergman first. I would think that if some successful Hollywood guy or gal had been lucky enough to have a Boswell we would have had a great work like the Life of Johnson , with our new Johnson being some successful and witty Hollywood fixture, published by now, but that does not seem to have happened. I was disappointed with the Orson Welles table talk books. Anita Loos was pretty good at what she did, though.

I absolutely have to second the commenter who described Kristen Lavrandsatter as a great novel with maybe the best depiction ever in a long novel of what the author wanted to describe – in her case, the long life of a Christian soul – anima naturaliter christiana, sort of – with all the details that are so important.

Rosie just came out of nowhere and made the entire thread shit itself. Spectacular. Hahaha.

… that dig at JAN MORRIS is undeserved – Jan is a first rate writer – and she climbed EVEREST …

… the reliable ever present Updike seems to have gone into eclipse …

How does Jan Morris compare to Paul Theroux?

… on merit alone – and she climbed Everest …

I’ve become 100% anti-awards prizes/television spectacles. They are generally converged-to-the-point-of-parody nowadays. They provide captive eyes for preening SJW-writers/actors/lip-synchers for their various appeals for ($) causes.

Anytime

I tried McCarthy and Pynchon several times and didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Long winded, deliberately obscure, etc. Tom Wolfe will be remembered more I think. I hope he lives forever.

Also, I would propose a “left field” (also, Joo) candidate for the prize: Stephen Dixon. For 50 years the guy has quietly been publishing a nearly monomoniacal account of the modern, urban, hyper sexual male constantly hemmed in by feminism, crime, mass architecture, academic clericism, etc. He’s published something like 30 books and 500 shorts.

He’ll never win a Nobel in a million years.

Yep. The king of Sweden should remove all the drama-causing judges, and replace them with people who understand that the story needs to be about the author who won the award, not the drama among the judges.

In the current moral panic of #MeToo, the lucky ones are the guys who got exposed before the furor reached its peak–they got off relatively easy. I’m think of David Letterman, Chuck Berry, and a few others. They don’t seem to suffer as much opprobrium as the current crop.

I heard Goldberg interviewed by radio host Hugh Hewitt. He denied that lefty outrage on Twitter had anything to do with his decision to fire Williamson; he said, in fact, that tweetstorms were pretty much par for the course and had been expected. He said that in discussions with Williamson before he’d been hired, Williamson had made it sound as if his controversial tweet — about hanging women who’d had abortions — had been a one-off, written, perhaps overhastily, to make a point (i.e., that if one genuinely regards abortion as the killing of a human being, one logically ought to treat it as a homicide). Only later, Goldberg claimed, did he learn of the podcast — Williamson in conversation with Brown U. professor Glenn Loury — in which Williamson had said much the same thing. It was this second expression of his opinion — more or less affirming the tweet — that was, for Goldberg, apparently the dealbreaker. (Hewitt failed to probe this further; I wish he had.)

After reading several of Bill Bryson’s books, I’ve concluded that the purpose of travel writing is to persuade you that you’re better off staying at home. Let someone else experience all the hassle and discomfort of travel and then tell you about it. Thanks to Bryson, I have given up all thought of ever hiking the Appalachian Trail or visiting Australia.

I’ve read The Happy Isles of Oceania and The Pillars of Hercules by Theroux. I’ve read a lot of mountaineering accounts, many about Everest, including Walt Unsworth’s Everest. But not Morris’s book. Which of Morris’s travel books is most recommended?

A really good but quirky book about Everest, pre-conquest, is Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. Davis is a professional historian, unlike most mountaineering writers, and dug up diaries and a lot of primary source material nobody else had bothered to look for. His book covers the devastating effect of World War I on young English men in some detail, as well as incorporating a lot of material about Tibetan society. But it’s really thrilling to read about these Englishmen wandering around Tibet climbing unnamed peaks nobody had ever set foot on trying to find a path to Everest.

That gives Roth a chance. He started off strong, then frittered away his prime, then wrote many of his best books after he’d been written off as a has-been. But now the #MeToo stuff is likely to block him, just because his books make him sound like he’s got a few skeletons in the closet regarding women.

I can confirm that lots of female academics (Jewish ones included) absolutely loathe Roth.

It helps to make a late comeback like Hemingway with The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway was massively influential in the late 1920s at making English language prose style less verbose. But then he got drunker and drunker. But he pulled himself together to write his fine fish story and was rewarded with the Nobel.

Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) is almost laughably bad…..which made The Old Man and the Sea (1952), as a comeback, all the more impressive…..James Michener read it in galleys, and noted how relieved he was to see that Hemingway had managed to recover some of his old prowess…

Peter Boardman was a well-regarded English mountaineer and writer.

In the 1990s I found a ratty paperback copy of his book The Shining Mountain: Two Men on Changabang’s West Wall in a used book store, and read it. It was about an expedition with Joe Tasker, his frequent climbing companion, who also wrote a couple of books. They later joined with Chris Bonington and others to try to climb the North East Ridge of Everest, and Boardman and Tasker disappeared on the ridge.

The paperback was signed by both Boardman and Tasker. At one point I found a mountaineering bookseller online and sent off an email. After an exchange of detailed photos of the book and signatures, he offered me $100 for it, to be further sold to a customer of his, and I accepted it.

There is a Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, sort of a mini Nobel Prize for this niche. The Shining Mountain had won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1979. Maybe I should have asked for $150!

The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) by an author from the Commonwealth aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Established in 1942, it was the second oldest literary award in the UK.

Since 2011 the award has been suspended due to funding problems. The last award was in 2010.

That annoying thing when your literary prize goes bankrupt! Someone should buy the rights to it just like Chinese companies buy the trademarks for defunct American companies.

I suspect that the Man Booker prize (best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK) killed off the Rhys by being more diverse, inclusive, and politically correct.

What else have you read by Pynchon? I liked Gravity’s Rainbow, but thought his 3rd lap breaker, Against The Day was bloated and not as good. Liked his short novel Bleeding Edge. Haven’t tried Mason & Dixon.

The best parts of Gravity’s Rainbow are worth a read. I started a Twitter thread posting them, but no one was interested. In fact, the whole novel holds together a lot better much better than most people realize, thanks to the ~150 or so pages of crap stuffed in. Pynchon is also relevant and was ahead of his time with his focus on deep state conspiracies. If he had it in him, the real history of this century so far offers plenty of material for another big novel (his normal sized novel, Bleeding Edge, was set in the early aughts).

Tom Wolfe is almost in his own category. Maybe the only other novelist to capture the American zeitgeist in the last few decades is Jonathan Franzen, but unlike Franzen, Wolfe wrote about cultural moments before they happened, which is some kind of wizardry.

‘Nobel for literature, peace & economics should be abolished and prize for mathematics, technology/inventions & perhaps earth sciences or agriculture instituted.”

Maybe some rich guy can fund a new literature prize or science prize if we actually need it.

The number of well-written mountain climbing books is immense.

As is the number of British travel writers who write well. It seems to be a thing with them.

V.S. Naipaul’s non-fiction is often overlooked as, or is said to transcend, travel writing, but that’s exactly what it is.

I can’t imagine reading Shakespeare in Russian or Chinese or any other language. It’s just not the same as you say. It’s not just the plot but the actual words used.

Bill Bryson is the Dave Barry of travel writing.

I suspect that the Man Booker prize (best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK) killed off the Rhys by being more diverse, inclusive, and politically correct.

After they gave the prize to Salman Rushdie they really started to focus on giving prizes that would please the Londonistan crowd. Not that some of the Commonwealth writers who’ve got the prize are bad, but the Bookers now aim to please a certain constituency.

The Norwegian Abel prize in mathematics is held in as high regard by mathematicians as the Fields medal (which is for under-40s) but no one else knows about it.

Poor John Nash picked up his Abel prize from the King of Norway some years ago, but was killed on the New Jersey Turnpike in an airport limo crash on the way home to Princeton from Newark airport. But the papers barely mentioned why he had been traveling.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Thank you, that was the best laugh I had all day.

Mark Helprin’s novel A Soldier of the Great War has some wonderful descriptions of mountain climbing. If I was on the Nobel committee he would be short-listed.

Put the homeless junkies to work in the fields.

Sir Vidia’s Shadow

There are new science prizes all the time

Note that the foremost of those act as feeders for the Nobel science prizes.

Tom Wolfe would be an interesting dark horse because of his unique sensibilities, but IMO he writes too self-indulgently. (Fiction, at least.)

You have to take into account additional factors: narrowness & incomprehensibility. Apart from clearly political & “cultural statements” Nobel prizes (Alexievich, Dylan-Zimmerman), regular prizes to great or significant writers (Mann, Canetti, Hamsun, Hemingway,..) indicate there is something universal about these authors, although some, like Faulkner & Garcia Marquez are essentially regional mythographers. But, they are universal authors, too, and their local & regional associations are not such a big hurdle for average readers.

Though they differ in their subject-matter & literary treatment, Updike, Wolfe (not old Wolfe), McCarthy, perhaps Roth.. are too “American”. In the global world of literature, they’re all parochialists, soaked in provincial Americanness very few readers in Europe, Latin America, Asia…find either enjoyable or relevant.

Of course not, but most readers are clueless about baseball or American socio-cultural fads & anxieties. The same goes for an imaginary Hindu novelist writing about intricacies of caste system. Who knows, who cares….

Once I started any one of The Border Trilogy I didn’t put it down until it was finished. I am in my fifties. How often does that happen with any book if one isn’t a teen.

http://www.unz.com/isteve/john-nash-rip/

Tastes have changed & documentary value has diminished. Now, hardly anyone cares about Trollope, Thackeray, F.M. Ford or Gissing. Wolfe, essentially a satirical novelist, has much to offer to American readership; outside of US, most of his social & cultural references are incomprehensible or simply uninteresting. If Italo Calvino & J.L. Borges had not gotten Nobel, Wolfe’s prospects for it are miserable.

And this goes for popular culture, too. Some American products are highly exportable (Gibson’s Passion & Apocalypto, Game of Thrones); others are barely noticed (Black Panther/Wakanda, Miley Cyrus, virtually all superheroes,..).

Perhaps I’m too catholic in my racial tastes, but to me, Rubio is white. He’s not exotic enough to be considered “almost white”. But, so are Stalin & Mikoyan & Netanyahu, so I may be wrong on this issue…

Phenotype is, in everyday life, more important than genotype.

There probably is some degree of biological attraction to rough and powerful mates, I would agree. There’s also an endorphin rush from the pain in a particular environment, and it seems to assuage guilt–look at self-cutters, or medieval flagellants or ascetics in India.

That and with the pathologization of masculine behavior, well, making it a roleplay with a safeword makes it ‘just a game’ and hence the formerly forbidden fruit is now acceptable. But that has more to do with the recent popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey and its copycats–malesub/femdom romance novels are not popular among women from what I can see, though the theme seems popular in pornography (aimed at men).

Making it ‘transgressive’ lets quite a few women who would be ideologically opposed enjoy being dominated. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience here…

OK, but what about submissive men? Eh, sometimes the wrong program gets turned on. Besides, a lot of the beta feminist guys probably think it’s the only appropriate relationship.