I don’t know Lessing’s work very well, but I remember being blown away by The Golden Notebook when I was in my twenties. I probably missed a lot of the message, but I was carried along by the sheer audacity of the thing. This piece in the Telegraph reminded me of a couple of other things I’d read & made me want to go look at some of those SF novels. (In my twenties I was very “literary” & had a certain disdain for SF. As Jonathan Mayhew says, many good writers have been overlooked by the Nobel committee, but then many good writers have been overlooked by many prize committees of various sorts for various reasons. And John Ashbery, whom Jonathan mentions, has certainly won a big boxful of prizes, not thaty I’d be sorry to seem him get the Nobel, nor Adonis, either. Others on Jonathan’s list of committee-neglected writers certainly have / have had a legitimate claim. On balance, though, Lessing seems a reasonable choice. As a side note, I am surprised that the American Right is not using the Literature prize to “radical feminist” Lessing as a club to beat the Nobel committee because it gave Al Gore — you know, that radical leftist — the Peace Prize. But I don’t think the American Right reads all that much.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
I Am So Hip (for an Old Guy)
Getting in the blogroll of This Recording may not be up there with the Nobel Prize, but then I’m no Al Gore or Doris Lessing. Maybe not up there with an NEA grant of a Fulbright, quite, but making the TR blogroll is so much cooler than getting invited to Yaddo. Blogs are the new art colonies. Not to mention the street cred. (Does the internet have streets?)
Contemporary Short Stories, Music, Poetry
I really enjoyed this essay by Jean Thompson responding to Stephen King’s (predictable) take-down of the “literary” short story. The same argument about “elitism” & “difficulty” has been made (endlessly) about contemporary poetry. Not directly related, perhaps, but I was reminded of my old friend Davy Rakowski’s remarks about writing contemporary music:
I write music. Concert music. Texas tea. The music is difficult (it’s not just hard, it’s damn hard, or in Maine, wickid had), not tonal in the traditional diatonic sense (“tonal” is an imprecise word, and in many senses, my music IS tonal — it has also been called “atonal,” “with more tonal centers that you used to have,” “sounds like it’s in a minor key,” “pretty,” and “unremarkable”), and somewhat traditionally structured — and it has lots and lotsa notes. People who use language imprecisely call the music “Modernist.” Others have called it “Romantic”, “total rockout” and “borderline Neoclassical”. Go figure.
I write poetry. Literary poetry. The poetry can be difficult . . .
Peppers
Brought in the last of the peppers yesterday since we’re now having freezing nights. We’re drying them in various places around the house, including beneath the spice cabinet.
Lenny Bruce’s Birthday
Steve Gimbel reminds us that today is Lenny Bruce’s birthday & links to a great You Tube video / audio clip. Bruce is one of the great poets of the 20th century.
