Some French dude. I'd never heard of him. He seems okay. I've read something by almost all of the Literature Nobel Laureates, and I like most of them very much -- one of the long, long list of reasons why I should get one: my good taste in literature.
Patrick Modiano is his name:
But anyway, we're talking about me here. This is getting ridiculous, I'm aging over here, I need that million bucks or two. The amount of the prize in Swedish kroner fluctuates, and of course the kroner-dollar exchange rate fluctuates too. This year's prizes are 8 million kroner, and right now 8 million kroner will get you about 1,105,600 bucks. AND I'M TIRED OF BEING POOR. And of course, in addition to the cash, a Nobel is great publicity and will increase the sales of all of your books.
All of my books? Are you kidding me? I'm autistic, I'm business-impaired. At the moment I don't even have an agent. Yet another example of the Tom Petty Principle of Ab-So-Lute-Ly Backwards Economics: If I had a really good agent, he could get lots of my books onto the shelves in the bookstores and in Amazon's warehouse and into the Kindle thingies and so forth, and the more books I had in all of those places, the more likely I would be to catch the attention of people such as the one who hand out Nobel prizes. But of course -- the backwards part -- the more books I had in all those places, and the more National Book Awards and MacArthur and Guggenheim grants and Bookers I had won, which also seems to catch the attention of the Nobel people, the more money I would have, and the less badly I would need the Nobel! Don't kid yrslvs, kids, Sartre wasn't taking a vow of poverty when he turned down the Nobel, he really was rich enough that he didn't miss it.
And that's fine, he was a great writer and a great man and he deserved his great successes.
And Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai, who are sharing this years' Nobel Peace Prize? I couldn't be happier for them (especially as we weren't in competition for the Lit prize). They're wonderful people doing great, important work. What could be more glorious than freeing children from oppression?
I deserve great successes too, that's all I'm sayin. I'm great at the creative part, the actual writing -- obviously -- but I'm no good at business. I need to team up with a great businessman or -woman, a great agent, who can hook me up with publishers so that all us can ride the Wrong Monkey Gravy Train together and split an immense amount of cash between us.
But I'm so inept at the business part that I need someone to help me get that great agent.
You don't know. You don't know. You haven't seen the times when I've attempted to take the reins of this or that business enterprise, instead of staying on the creative side where I belong. Oh, the horror. You don't know!
So, in conclusion, hurrah for Patrick Modiano, yada yada yada, he probably is a very good writer, most of the Nobel lit winners are very, very good, bla bla bla, and on to business: I need help. Just like Gene Wilder when we first see him in Blazing Saddles,
I need all the fucking help I can get. I mean it. (Gene Wilder's part had been offered to John Wayne. Can you imagine, John Wayne hanging upside down in the jail call, John Wayne saying, "Yeah, but I shoot with THIS hand!" and so forth? Would that have been awesome or what? I know, I've probably mentioned that on this blog before, maybe more than once, but would that have been just about perfect? Hm?) So -- help me! When you're talking about your short list of predictions for the 2015 Nobel, casually toss my name in there alongside Murakami and Pynchon and Marias and whomever. If you happen to be having lunch or a torrid love affair with Andrew Wylie, tell him, "Do you realize that Steven Bollinger doesn't have an agent right now?!" If you rub shoulders with the people who give the Nobels or the MacArthur genius grants or the Bookers, mention my name and how effin brilliant I am. If you are one of the people who award the Nobels or MacArthurs or something, or the CEO of Simon & Schuster -- what exactly are you waiting for? Don't you want to be a part of turning the literary landscape all topsy-turvy and bringing joy and solace to millions?! Do yr effin job, I'm doin mine!
Showing posts with label nobel prizes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nobel prizes. Show all posts
Friday, October 10, 2014
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Dawkins' Tweet About Islam, Cambridge And Nobel Prizes
Richard Dawkins is a bit of a roller-coaster. I never know whether the next piece of his writing I'm going to read is going to be brilliant, stupid or somewhere in between. This recent tweet of his:
"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."
is one of the stupid ones. The reasons why it's so stupid are so perfectly summed up in a headline in the form of a rhetorical question over a column by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman that I could simply link Nelson's column, quote the headline, "Why do so many Nobel laureates look like Richard Dawkins?" and quit, and have a half-decent blog post.
But I have a little bit more to say. First of all, "the world's Muslims" are over a billion people, living in hundreds of countries, including people attending many thousands if not millions of schools, and, as Nelson adroitly points out, those schools now include Trinity college, Cambridge. As I have often pointed out when discussing Catholicism with simpleminded anti-Catholic bigots, any group of over a billion people will of necessity contain an extremely wide diversity of religious viewpoints, political orientations, levels of formal education, degrees of sophistication in approaches to science, etc, etc. I'm still not nearly as impressed by Francis I as many of my fellow atheists seem to be, but there's no denying that he provides a strong contrast to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and that makes it much harder for those anti-Catholic bigots to get away with referring to all one billion of the world's Catholics as if they all agreed with John Paul II and Benedict XVI about everything.
It's similarly ridiculous to refer to all one billion of the world's Muslims as if they were one homogenous group. I myself know that I cannot in any meaningful way keep up with the intellectual achievements of any group of one billion people, and much the less so when the majority of them have as their first language a language which is not in the same Indo-European language family as my first several languages. Furthermore, I dare to doubt that Richard Dawkins can encompass such vast activity within his mind. Using the famous Socratic principle properly, the first step for someone like Dawkins or myself toward understanding what intellectual activity is current among the world's Muslims is to acknowledge a great dark zone within our knowledge. And is it even necessary to point out how many Muslim intellectuals are Muslims pretty much in name only, because they were born into Muslim families? Or how many Muslim intellectuals, whether in countries which are majority Muslim, or majority Christian, or majority Hindu or Buddhist or majority something else, live and work daily alongside non-Muslims? Unfortunately, tweets such as this one by Dawkins make me think that it is urgently necessary.
I don't just dare to suspect that the people who award the Nobel Prizes, over the course of the more than 110 years in which it has been awarded, have been drastically ignorant of what's gone on in the world outside of Europe and North America, I assert outright that it's obviously the case, although they've gotten a bit more multicultural in the past few decades, like the rest of the world. Scandinavians have won a number of prizes wildly out of proportion to their numbers compared to the entire world's population. Does this mean that Scandinavians are generally more brilliant than others? No, it means that the prizes have been awarded by Scandinavians, and that Scandinavians will obviously and naturally be more familiar with the work of other Scandinavians than with the work of, for example, Kazakhs. They're also naturally going to be more familiar with the work being done in relatively nearby Trinity College, where the native language tends to be the world's, and especially Europe's, most widely-used second language, than with the work being done in, for example, Kazakhstan.
The obviousness of all of this is what makes Dawkins' tweet so stupid. Dawkins defended it by pointing out that the part about the numbers of Nobels won by Muslims and by Trinity college was factually accurate. But you can be factually accurate and stupid at the same time, by assigning an inaccurate significance to facts. I'll give you an example: "Year in and year out, a team from the United States of America wins the World Series."
One other thing which urgently needs to be pointed out is the hypocrisy of Westerners who, quite rightly, criticize human rights abuses and backwardness of education in other countries, some of which happen to be majority Muslim and whose rulers are Muslim, without criticizing at the same time, in the same breath, the governments of their own countries who maintain friendly relations with those other countries for the benefit of multinational corporations, whether we're talking about oil, or sweatshops, or clear-cutting old forests.
"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."
is one of the stupid ones. The reasons why it's so stupid are so perfectly summed up in a headline in the form of a rhetorical question over a column by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman that I could simply link Nelson's column, quote the headline, "Why do so many Nobel laureates look like Richard Dawkins?" and quit, and have a half-decent blog post.
But I have a little bit more to say. First of all, "the world's Muslims" are over a billion people, living in hundreds of countries, including people attending many thousands if not millions of schools, and, as Nelson adroitly points out, those schools now include Trinity college, Cambridge. As I have often pointed out when discussing Catholicism with simpleminded anti-Catholic bigots, any group of over a billion people will of necessity contain an extremely wide diversity of religious viewpoints, political orientations, levels of formal education, degrees of sophistication in approaches to science, etc, etc. I'm still not nearly as impressed by Francis I as many of my fellow atheists seem to be, but there's no denying that he provides a strong contrast to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and that makes it much harder for those anti-Catholic bigots to get away with referring to all one billion of the world's Catholics as if they all agreed with John Paul II and Benedict XVI about everything.
It's similarly ridiculous to refer to all one billion of the world's Muslims as if they were one homogenous group. I myself know that I cannot in any meaningful way keep up with the intellectual achievements of any group of one billion people, and much the less so when the majority of them have as their first language a language which is not in the same Indo-European language family as my first several languages. Furthermore, I dare to doubt that Richard Dawkins can encompass such vast activity within his mind. Using the famous Socratic principle properly, the first step for someone like Dawkins or myself toward understanding what intellectual activity is current among the world's Muslims is to acknowledge a great dark zone within our knowledge. And is it even necessary to point out how many Muslim intellectuals are Muslims pretty much in name only, because they were born into Muslim families? Or how many Muslim intellectuals, whether in countries which are majority Muslim, or majority Christian, or majority Hindu or Buddhist or majority something else, live and work daily alongside non-Muslims? Unfortunately, tweets such as this one by Dawkins make me think that it is urgently necessary.
I don't just dare to suspect that the people who award the Nobel Prizes, over the course of the more than 110 years in which it has been awarded, have been drastically ignorant of what's gone on in the world outside of Europe and North America, I assert outright that it's obviously the case, although they've gotten a bit more multicultural in the past few decades, like the rest of the world. Scandinavians have won a number of prizes wildly out of proportion to their numbers compared to the entire world's population. Does this mean that Scandinavians are generally more brilliant than others? No, it means that the prizes have been awarded by Scandinavians, and that Scandinavians will obviously and naturally be more familiar with the work of other Scandinavians than with the work of, for example, Kazakhs. They're also naturally going to be more familiar with the work being done in relatively nearby Trinity College, where the native language tends to be the world's, and especially Europe's, most widely-used second language, than with the work being done in, for example, Kazakhstan.
The obviousness of all of this is what makes Dawkins' tweet so stupid. Dawkins defended it by pointing out that the part about the numbers of Nobels won by Muslims and by Trinity college was factually accurate. But you can be factually accurate and stupid at the same time, by assigning an inaccurate significance to facts. I'll give you an example: "Year in and year out, a team from the United States of America wins the World Series."
One other thing which urgently needs to be pointed out is the hypocrisy of Westerners who, quite rightly, criticize human rights abuses and backwardness of education in other countries, some of which happen to be majority Muslim and whose rulers are Muslim, without criticizing at the same time, in the same breath, the governments of their own countries who maintain friendly relations with those other countries for the benefit of multinational corporations, whether we're talking about oil, or sweatshops, or clear-cutting old forests.
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