Go back to Lake Wobegon and stay there
Garrison Keillor is a jackass.
I am off lingonberries for the time being and Volvos and flat white furniture from Ikea. No meatballs, thank you. Once again the humorless Swedes have chosen a writer of migraines for the Nobel Prize in literature, an author of twilight meditations on time and memory and mortality and cold toast by loners looking at bad wallpaper. It’s not a prize for literature, it’s a prize for nihilism. The Swedes said he’s like Jane Austen combined with Kafka with some of Proust, three other writers you’d never invite to a party.
Jesus, where to begin. I guess at the end. Hello? The point of writers isn’t whether you would invite them to a party or not, it’s what they write. Especially once they’re dead. Also I damn well would invite Austen to a party if I could, although I’d rather invite her to lunch so that we could really talk.
At any rate if he really thinks those three are unbearably dreary and prone to meditations on cold toast, he vies for the philistine prize with Trump.
And that doesn’t describe Ishiguro either.
Finally – that from a boring folksy hack like Garrison fucking Keillor.
The words “Swedish” and “comedy” seldom appear in the same sentence except as a joke. All the Swedes with a sense of humor came to America and so what the Nobel judges recognize is bleak, cramped, emotionally stunted, enigmatic, pretentious. Millions of people around the world understand the concept of reading books for pleasure, but the Swedes think of it as a form of colonoscopy.
Does he think the Nobel in literature is for comedy?
Wait – does he think he should have won?
Meanwhile, it is a beautiful October day and I’m sitting in the kitchen, enjoying a hearty licorice tea and looking at my lovely wife. I don’t recall anyone doing anything like that in Mr. Ishiguro’s books.
Oh well then, there’s no more to be said. Clearly Mr Ishiguro should pull himself together and be a sound, healthy, outgoing, cheerful, married American man who writes about kitchens and looking at one’s lovely wife. Mr Ishiguro sounds like some kind of subversive – has anyone told the FBI about this? The FBI of 1954?
The man who should’ve won the prize goes by the name Philip Roth and what disqualifies him are the many rich descriptive passages revealing a love of the physical world and the elements of storytelling such as conversation, some of which is, since the speakers are American, way too funny, way too connected to the world.
I wonder how Garrison Keillor knows that’s what disqualifies him, as opposed to for instance his misogyny. For that matter I wonder how Garrison Keillor knows it’s a matter of disqualification at all, when there’s only one winner per year and there are a lot of writers of literature in the world. The fact that he thinks Philip Roth should have a Nobel doesn’t make that a fact about the world.
In their long-standing campaign against comedy, the Swedish Academy is doing almost as much damage as old man Nobel did with his hard work developing better rockets, cannon and explosives. They are leading young writers to aspire to vacuity.
Because young writers decide how to write based on planning to win the Nobel?
Please.
Garrison Keillor is a self-satisfied anti-intellectual folksy droning bore – and an asshole.
Philip Roth is a sexist jerk. I hope he never wins.
Roth is the American who should have won instead of Bob Dylan (or, if they wanted a singer with literary chops, Leonard Cohen). The prize is given for literature, not congeniality. But Keillor is unfunny, a poor writer and a self-important jerk.
And come on now, how funny is a name like Garrison? Fort, ok, or Tower. But Garrison? Wouldn’t make the Ikea katalog.
Hey, Katalog has a kinda nice ring to it?
Not to mention Nobel, but that’s been taken already, and minted.
So has Oatmeal, by the way — by a comic. Eat that, Mr Keillor.
And you can bloody well wait your turn to get voted into the Swedish Academy. Like the rest of us. After that, you are entitled to such conversation. In secrecy.
He thinks Ishiguro is vacuous? The author of Never Let Me Go?
That’s sheer projection.
And he likes that vile narcissist Roth. Of course he does.
So, other than this guy’s preference for Roth, nobody had any beef with this guy’s concept of “not vacuous literature”? Granted, I haven’t read anything he’s written besides the blurbs above (nor am I likely to, given this writing sample), but… he is literally saying that “rich descriptive passages revealing a love of the physical world”, “elements of storytelling such as conversation” and “comedy” are key elements that constitute substance in literature (and also that these are the things that make for pleasurable reading). So, for instance, any hypothetical reader will find more pleasure and value in reading about his hearty licorice tea and him looking at [his] lovely wife than, say, Proust’s careful dissection of minute emotional reactions weaving themselves into a tapestry of driving motivation behind momentous life choices. No one has a beef with this, really?
Yes, I can picture a beautiful autumn day, and a rich licorice tea, and a lovely woman, but licorice tea would make me dry heave if I put it in my mouth, imagining — or looking at — lovely women doesn’t cause any warm stirrings in my genital region, and I’m pretty ambivalent about autumn, so even if I were to really commit to following the author through his sensory experiences, they wouldn’t lead me to the same pleasure that he is clearly deriving from them. Even if the author’s tastes happened to align with mine in any given passage, it would still be a matter of a picture being worth a thousand words: sure, maybe the author’s skill makes a difference in how vividly a reader could picture a given scene, but an illustrator or a filmmaker could still do a lot more with the material. On the other hand, processes completely internal to the mind, like meditations on relatively abstract matters, emotions, memories, one’s place in the world, etc, find far better expression in books then any other media, and when skillfully written, seem to draw generation after generation to their perusal. Also, these generations of readers, presumably, do other things for fun and pleasure, like look at paintings, or listen to music as well as enjoy various direct sensory experiences not mediated by any artists, like beautiful scenery, tasty food, soft textures, fragrant flowers, etc. It’s not that there’s no room in a good book for describing physical sensations (Proust’s madeleines are iconic, after all), but what makes such descriptions interesting to the reader (and what makes a Proust novel more than a catalog of pastries, tea, and scenery) is the meaning they hold for the author in a given context. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems Garrison Keillor’s ideas about what constitutes good literature are actually orthogonal to literature-as-a-project, and, as such, can be called just plain wrong, rather than a matter of taste/opinion.
Anna – oh I have every beef with it. But I didn’t want to spoil the rest of y’all’s fun by listing every beef I had. I like to share the labor of dissenting from foolish nonsense like Keillor’s.
Damn right, and beautifully said.
Anna Y
I’m annoyed that you would make that assumption. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.