A Case of Two Nobel Prizes

I'm very happy for Anne Carson, and even happier for Canadian literature. A Nobel Prize certainly helps. It's an accolade that generates attention and confers legitimacy.

But I have to admit I'm scratching my head. It's the second time I've scratched my head about the Nobel Prize in Literature in recent years. The first time was when it was given to Bob Dylan.

I can't think of two more different laureates than Dylan and Carson.

Dylan is inarguably the most influential American songwriter of the last sixty years. Whether he qualifies as a "poet," or however else they tried to squeeze him into a definition that would make him eligible for a literature prize, is a matter of conjecture. I argued at the time that he didn't qualify and shouldn't have received it. A Grammy, sure. But not a Nobel Prize in Literature.

Anne Carson, on the other hand, indisputably qualifies. She has devoted her entire career, as a writer, teacher and translator of Classics, to perhaps the most arcane area of literature. Fortunate for her, then, that Classics appear to be having a moment in popular culture these days. Think of Christopher Nolan's recent smash hit film The Odyssey. It even inspired me to read Homer, which is quite a feat.

One might suppose that this cultural moment factored into the Nobel Committee's decision. In the same way that Dylan's award appeared, at least in part, to be an effort by the Committee to keep the prize culturally relevant, Carson's award might be seen as an effort to bring a highly respected but relatively obscure writer to a much wider audience.

And that raises a larger question: What exactly is the Nobel Prize in Literature trying to accomplish? What does the committee represent, and what does it believe literature ought to be?

When Dylan got the prize, I argued that if the committee wanted to give it to a beloved and respected singer, Leonard Cohen would have been more appropriate. At least Cohen was also a respected poet and novelist before he wrote songs and started singing them.

The Carson choice makes me think of Margaret Atwood. I'm not suggesting that Atwood is necessarily a "better" writer than Carson, or that Carson is undeserving. 

But if part of the Nobel Committee's mandate is to recognize writers who have had an enormous cultural impact, Atwood would seem like the most worthy Canadian recipient. She has been nominated multiple times in the past, has been internationally influential for decades, her work has reached an enormous readership, and she has become one of the defining literary figures, not just in Canada but around the world.

Which makes the Carson choice even more of a head scratcher. The committee didn't choose the Canadian writer with the greatest cultural reach. It chose a writer whose reputation is much more concentrated within literary and academic circles.

So, again, is the Nobel trying to recognize writers of great importance and influence, or is it trying to tell us which writers we ought to be paying more attention to?

In Dylan's case, they seemed to want to leverage his enormous popularity and reputation to make the prize more culturally relevant. With Carson, they appear to be doing almost the opposite: leveraging the reputation of the prize to raise a writer out of relative obscurity.

And they've done that many times before. In fact, that may be the more typical MO of the Nobel. Can you name the writer who won it last year? It was László Krasznahorkai, from Hungary.

Dylan didn't need the Nobel to make him culturally important, and that was part of why I thought it was an unnecessary choice. It seemed a bit too much like a marketing move to me.

Carson is the reverse. Her work was already highly regarded, and she had been winning major prizes in Canada for decades. But the Nobel suddenly gives her a vastly larger audience. I like that idea. According to one critic, Carson has more fans than readers, so she can use the boost.

Oddly, one might argue that choosing Carson, because she is so unknown, risks being a step backwards in terms of the Nobel's cultural relevance. Could it be that giving the Nobel to Carson, exactly 10 years after Dylan got it, is a way of atoning for his?

I've tried to read Carson's work a couple of times over the years and found it heady and dry. That's not a criticism of its literary merit, just an expression of taste. Maybe the Nobel will make me give it another go.

The more interesting question to me is why this writer, this year.

As I say, one theory is the renewed popularity of Classics. Another is that the Nobel Committee, like every cultural institution, is conscious of its own relevance. 

And then there's one more theory about this year's prize which always seems to play a role: Politics.

Canada is having a moment on the global stage, thanks to the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney. Our defiance of trump has suddenly given Canada an unusual amount of international attention and enhanced prestige. Could the Nobel committee also be acknowledging this new political leadership? There's even talk of Carney being nominated for the Peace Prize.

Wouldn't that make a nice set of Canadian Nobel bookends?

_________________________

PS. Carney didn't win the Peace Prize. I'm actually relieved. Carney winning would have made trump even harder to deal with for Canada. Maybe the Swedes (or is it the Norwegians) understood.  

My Aim Is True

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his first record,

christened by his manager

'Elvis'

which he thought was a joke,

made worse later that year

when Presley died.

He’d never liked

Presley’s music

all that much,

had Buddy Holly’s square 

spectacled looks,

and preferred the rockabilly

of Jerry Lee Lewis

and R&B of Little Richard

a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop.

That’s when he grasped

inertia:

once things were rolling

there was no real steering

like the arrow aimed

bow stretched to chin

gut touching lip

held tight with all the muscle

you could muster—

at the instant of release

nature takes over

no telling

where it will strike

how deep

and who gets hurt.

He’d have to learn

to live with it.

[From an interview with Elvis Costello on the 50th anniversary of his debut album My Aim Is True. The title is taken from the song Alison, which describes seeing an old girlfriend and the disappointment he feels about the direction her life has taken. He says that in a larger sense it's about how 'your nature may kill the love you cherish most'.]   

the song ends

the song ends:

that's the beauty.

Brother Theodore

Blessed are those who do not know and cannot think. I envy you folks, I honestly do. I would rather be a contented pinworm, than a tormented Brother Theodore.

- Brother Theodore

Lately Brother Theodore has become a bit of a fascination for me. I think it has something to do with this moment we are living through.

I first came to know Brother Theodore from his guest appearances on the David Letterman Show in the mid-1980s. He was an oddity, a darkly mad comic, maybe the darkest ever. An absurdist tragedian.

An energetic older man, seemingly in his mid-80s, who spoke in scholastic English with a heavy accent. I had the impression that he might have been Greek. He had a compact body with an oblong head full of grey hair combed at odd angles. His head sat on a thick, square body—you had the impression that he was constructed out of blocks. He had beady eyes, a wide mouth and pointy nose, and was dressed in black. He looked like a cartoon villain or a ghoul.

In those days Brother Theodore called himself “a philosopher, metaphysician and podiatrist.” People would go to hear his rambling stream-of-consciousness monologues at his weekly appearances at the 13th Street Repertory Theatre in Greenwich Village.

What I hadn't realized in the 1980s was that Theodore had been performing since the late 1940s and had made television appearances for decades on many of the major talk shows—Jack Paar, Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin, to name a few. He'd actually reluctantly come out of retirement when he appeared on Letterman, which revived his performing career and brought him to the attention of a new, young hipster audience.

Brother Theodore was not “God's gift,” as his name suggests, but rather quite the opposite. He called himself the devil's spawn. His famous refrain was, “As long as there is death, there is hope.” And he was not Greek.

He was Jewish. Born Theodore Gottlieb in 1906, he was the scion of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish textile and fashion-publishing family. He said he was born with “a golden spoon” in his mouth. He was also a chess prodigy and played with Albert Einstein, a family friend and frequent house guest after the family moved to Düsseldorf. He lived the high life in Weimar Germany, a dandy and a playboy.

And then it all came crashing down with the rise of Hitler. At the age of 32, Theodore found himself at Dachau concentration camp. Few of his family members survived, and he was forced to sign away his family's fortune to the Nazis for one Reichsmark. Having personally witnessed horrors, some of which he later recounted, his quick wit and abilities as a performer played an important part in his survival. Eventually, family friend Einstein helped him emigrate to America to restart his life after the war.

What made Theodore so compelling as a performer was his unpredictability. When asked a question, he would respond ambiguously—as though even he didn't know what would come out of his mouth next—and soon branch off into some wordy oration, pseudo-intellectual tangential nonsense, which would in turn send him into a fit of rage, on the cusp of violence.

Given his experience in life, it's not a mystery why unpredictability was his modus operandi, the essence of his performance art. Once you started watching him, you couldn't look away. It was like watching a natural phenomenon: the tranquil sea suddenly frothing and rising into storm-tossed waves crashing against the rocks.

A reflection of his lived experience. And he turned it into art. Tragic comedy. Few knew what was behind it.

“We are puppets in the hands of an insane puppeteer,” Brother Theodore said. 

He wanted his audience, sitting on the edge of their seats in the vice grip of his mad performance, to experience the same helplessness that he had decades earlier.

Blaming Us

The old adage is that you can't have great art without great audiences. Great audiences are ones that appreciate depth and sophistication in art.

I thought about this after re-watching the NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. It follows the 30-year-old poet and debut novelist—it was 1964, the year I was born—shortly after his emergence as a wunderkind of Canadian letters. He was not yet a professional musician or songwriter.

In the film, Cohen is seen reading his poetry to large, attentive, receptive audiences. In one scene, the camera moves from face to face in the audience, and they are positively rapt, especially the thickly mascara'd young ladies.

The size and enthusiasm of the audience was one thing. For a poetry reading! But the age was another. They were mostly young people.

By the time I was working at the Jewish Public Library in the early 90s, where I organized dozens of poetry readings and book launches, the average age of the miniscule audience was in its mid-60s. They were probably the same people, now retired, who'd gone to hear Cohen back in the early 60s.

Leonard saw the writing on the wall, pun intended, and turned to songwriting as his ticket to fame and fortune. He understood that poetry had peaked in popular culture back in the mid-50s.

Poetry requires attention to be appreciated and enjoyed. The poet creates a certain kind of space and then invites the listener into that space as a type of communion. In the visual arts, the successful painter does a similar thing with his creation.

But the audience must be willing and able to go there to partake in that communion. It's not a passive engagement, like watching a television screen. It's more like a ritual—the priest presents the Eucharist, the bread and body of Christ, and the audience is an active participant, bringing to the process their understanding and belief in order for it to have spiritual resonance and meaning. Otherwise, it's just eating a wafer and sipping wine.

It's the audience that makes the difference, and that's why, for the last 60 years or so, in terms of art, we've been eating wafers and sipping wine.

The unsophisticated, shallow audience mistakes utility for quality, and superficiality for importance. If great art is being made, and it might be, it's unlikely anyone knows, because there's virtually no audience for it. Without an audience up to the task, greatness becomes indistinguishable from mediocrity, Leonard Cohen from Taylor Swift.

Screen culture is the very definition of 2-dimensionality. That's why every concert these days has a giant one, or rather a bank of giant screens. The audience needs to have the performance technologically shoved down its throat. And performers like Taylor Swift, in her bright shiny costumes and hair extensions, are tailor-made—pun intended—for the screen. Try to picture a crooning Leonard Cohen on a giant screen.

You get the picture.

But I'm not here to trash Swifties. I want to eulogize our culture, and point a finger not at the artists, but rather at the audiences, at us, for killing it. We're the ones who demanded and accepted drek for decades. We're the ones who've been burying our heads in devices and becoming trained out of our desire or ability to distinguish a real-life singer from AI-generated slop. We're the ones paying thousands of dollars to fly to Paris to watch Celine Dion bombastically lip-sync her way to a career comeback.

Well, not me anyway.

But maybe there's some hope. Maybe culture works like agriculture. After commercial farming saps all the nutrients out of the field with its pesticides and poisons, it will lay fallow for a time, the natural elements will take over, and eventually restore the land so that it can produce a rich harvest once again.

At least, I hope that's what happens, and not desertification.

Heaven

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Heaven

is a small room

in some forgotten, dilapidated

part of town,

where the buildings

are ramshackle,

and there's an old movie theatre

like out of 

The Last Picture Show,

a sprawling marquee

with a cryptic message 

of missing letters,

canopy necklaced 

in luminous pearls,

and next to that 

a folksy general store,

with brooms for sale 

in the window,

and hats

(everyone wears a hat in heaven)

and next to that a strip bar,

next to a wooden church

with bell tower 

and vaulted stained glass.

Main Street is dusty

because it never rains

in heaven,

and everyone is unemployed,

of course,

they sit around all day

collecting heavenly welfare

and spend it on

booze and smokes

or whatever they want,

which isn't much,

and they smile

all the time 

because they relish

having

nowhere to be

and nothing to do

except to remember

and talk;

And they talk

endlessly

about everything,

share memories

and opinions,

and nobody minds,

they just listen

and laugh,

and laugh and listen,

at all the silly

things being said, 

no one gets angry

or offended,

because after all

they're in heaven

and slowly getting high

and know 

they’re never

coming down.

Hendrix Opened For The Monkees

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I’ve dumpster dived and made love

On the same day

I’ve dumpster dived and made love

On the same day

Sometimes you get nothing 

Sometimes you get grace.

You can see continents

From thirty thousand feet

You can see continents

From thirty thousand feet

And never think about the people

Living on the street.

You might imagine the future

You might remember the past

You might imagine the future

You might remember the past

But one thing I know for sure 

The present doesn't last.  

The most valuable thing you have

Is always your attention

The most valuable thing you have

Is always your attention

Someone else is wanting it  

With their own intention.

The machine is not answering

And nobody's home

The machine is not answering

And nobody's home 

The house is furnished, the lawn is mowed, 

And everyone's gone.