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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Wred Fright...
Cheer Up Hacks! There’s Always Next Year!
Last year, I wrote a Monday Report for the Underground Literary Alliance
entitled “No Nobel For You, Yankee Doodler!” which argued that no
American author should expect to win the world’s most prestigious literary
prize since American literature was no longer worthy of world class
consideration. In the face of British playwright Harold Pinter winning this
year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, we could pretty much rerun that article
again. But we won’t. We don’t want anyone to think we’re happy that
contemporary American literature isn’t worthy of attention by anyone
outside the USA anymore (hell, most of it isn’t even worthy of attention by
anyone inside the USA anymore either--what we have is a regional
literature, Manhattan literature, passed off as a national literature and that’s
the crux of the problem). Instead, we want to propose a solution.
This year, things looked up for the Americans initially. Ladbrokes and
literary bloggers had Joyce Carol Oates at 7-1 odds to win, Phillip Roth at
9-1, and Don DeLillo in the running as a White Noise dark horse. Alas, it was
not to be. Those wacky 15 Swedes (there should be 18 in the Swedish
Academy that decides the award but three members have quit in protest
over the years, including this month’s well-publicized departure of Knut
Ahnlund, who thought last year’s winner Elfriede Jelinek to be undeserving
of the prize) apparently decided the matter based on literary quality instead
of prolificacy (sorry, Oates), kicking historical figures in the nuts when
they’re long dead and can’t defend their reputations (as Roth did to Charles
Lindbergh in his last novel), and hype based on past glories (ah, DeLillo).
But cheer up red, white, and blue hacks! You might not need ideas or have
to be interesting or be able to tell a good story after all. It might be a good
bet that the criticism that this year’s Nobels have a tinge of anti-
Americanism (for example, Pinter correctly views the Iraq War essentially as
an armed robbery/confidence scheme), may incline those Swedes to throw
a mercy award to an American next year.
However, the Underground Literary Alliance would suggest that whining
about Eurocentricism and anti-Americanism is not the best way to bring the
Nobel Prize in Literature back to the land of the free (at least as free as the
Patriot Act lets us be). Instead, we suggest that a better approach is for
American writers to stop worrying about academic careers and pleasing
corporate masters and instead start writing imaginative works full of
interesting ideas that are socially relevant beyond the borders of New York
City. I mean I like New York City and rich people as much as most
Americans but that doesn’t mean our national literature has to be
exclusively devoted to such topics (leave them to Bret Easton Ellis). Why
not a novel about a plumber in Iowa? A grocery store clerk in Montana? A
garage band in Ohio? (O.k., I already wrote a novel about the last topic but
the first two suggestions remain unwritten as far as I know). Of course, one
might have to leave an MFA program to experience life beyond the
academy, but that’s all right. It’ll be good for you. And American literature.
However, until American literature becomes relevant again (even to fellow
Americans), we might have to forego competing for the Nobels and leave
them to more deserving writers such as Indonesian master Pramoedya
Ananta Toer or Vietnamese novelist Duong Thu Huong. So, my fellow
Americans eligible to nominate writers for the Prize, such as past laureate
Toni Morrison and professors of literature, please don’t keep nominating our
current crap writers. It’s embarassing. Instead, just like in baseball--our
national pastime remember?-- let’s focus on rebuilding for a few seasons
instead. Let’s clear away the cutesy creeps like the McSweeneyites (at
least to the margins of American literature from the center they currently
occupy, presumably due to the intellectual bankruptcy of corporate
publishers)! Let’s put the old fossils like Updike out to pasture (if they want
to keep writing, that’s fine, but let’s stop pretending they still matter)! Let’s
pay attention to the good academic writers such as Mark Winegardner even
when they aren’t writing sequels to past classics (The Godfather Returns)!
Let’s put the Beats, Kathy Acker, and other deserving writers into our official
literary histories and anthologies! Let’s publish great writers from the
underground and elsewhere, and not people whose only qualification is that
they know (usually in the biblical sense) people in the publishing industry!
Let’s tear our critics away from the corporate promo trough and have them
look beyond what Rupert Murdoch and other beancounters think is good
literature! And for Uncle Sam’s sake, instead of the great “hopes” of
American literature bragging about never having read Don Quizote or Moby
Dick, let’s take them out of the writing workshop and have them spend a few
years reading the classics! O, yankee doodler dandy, let us be worthy of the
great tradition of Poe and Melville, Dickinson and Twain, Whitman and
Hughes, Hemingway and Faulkner, O’Connor and Wright, Miller and Wilson
(R.I.P.), to just name a few, again!
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See if this young whippersnapper, Wred Fright, can put his money where his
mouth is by reading his first novel, The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus,
forthcoming from ULA Press in 2006.
Visit Wred's website, www.wredfright.com
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