I've been waiting so long to find an article like this! I know that a handful of you will appreciate it. http://www.theawl.com/2012/10/how-to-win-the-nobel-prize-in-literature
I just read the article, by which I mean telephone book thick tome. Amusing, but surprisingly accurate in how people in Europe perceive the US.
Europe here. The Nobel Prize in literature the way it's used now, I guess, is to give unnoticed writers with long careers and broad appeal some recognition before they die. Usually North-Americans, sexiness and time-machines are doing very well on their own. I wouldn't be surprised if Joyce Carol Oates really did get it one of these days though, and Doris Lessing from a few years ago was actually a science-fiction writer, so I guess occasionally wookies work if you make sure to have a feminist agenda. I think the far greater problem is that like 15+ Swedes have won it and there have been like 2 winners from all of Asia. I guess I do find it a bit sad that there is no prize that actually does what people expect of the Nobel Prize though, which is to only award the greatest among the greatest, as much as I sympathize with giving undeservedly ignored writers a helping hand ... Random, possibly unknown trivia: There was a Swedish journalist who would yell out, "FINALLY!", every year at the press conference when the winner was announced, and everyone would laugh because typically no one had ever heard of the writer before. Eventually he was forbidden entrance at the conferences, so other journalists started doing it for him, or in chorus. Apparently now it's just an expected tradition that even the people who give out the prize have begun to appreciate.
I fail to see the point of the article. It just doesn't make much sense to me, why give a high award to someone who has not done anything that will make the world a better place. (Now don't go making that producing reading material makes the world a better place, argument. So lets stay focused.) So from what I read is basically, if you write a ton of books and a few aren't bad while you become a semi big writer. Then you have a minuscule chance at winning an award for making the world a better place, even if the writing does absolutely nothing outside of entertain? Well that seems like a peacock fest for something that holds little to no reason. Like I said I fail to see the point of the article. Seems like if you are not a semi famous author, that pumps books out like a machine. Then who gives a shit, give them an award because...well because we have a surplus of nothing better to do than hand out awards for mediocrity. So what if you are read around the world. Did you bring some paradigm shifting message to those readers? No, then you got an award for being an entertainer of sorts, and the biggest accomplishment is your work by volume. Yay, humanity is evolving backwards! The next decade is going to be highly entertaining then, isn't it.
