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.

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