Oct 13, 2024
Did anyone read this article from the times the other day? https://archive.ph/SKI2G. What do you think?
hieratichead1 year ago
"Furthermore, the notion that a conclave of learned Scandinavians would presume to decide, every fall, which writer matters most seems quaint, if not absurd. Usually, such decisions are left to the marketplace, or to helpful market-adjacent mechanisms that aggregate, sort and rank. Critics make lists; newspapers conduct polls; algorithms and social platforms serve up carefully curated consumer advice. Nobody invests any of these with too much authority. If you don’t like what’s on my list, you can make your own. How we evaluate the things we enjoy thus feels data-driven, democratic and subjective in the ways that institutions like the Nobel don’t. Which is to say that the Nobel’s specialness comes from its aloofness, its unworldliness. The anachronism — the tuxedos and medals, the pomp and majesty — is part of the brand." My favorite excerpt from the article. This man has drawn the bars of his own cage!
I don't understand why everyone has such a hatred and mistrust of "great works". It's not like the greats had anything more than any other writer who's seriously into literature does. They just had more drive and were eventually able to let their ego go when they write. What's funny is this guy references Emerson in the article who once said that if the press was with him he was doing something wrong and that he felt much more secure when the press was against him(butchered quote). I think maybe people don't realize that all these greats embellish their level of reading and seem far more distant from the common man than they really are. At least in certain respects. One of the funny things I picked up about Joyce from the Ellman bio is that he would purposely pick the more obscure works of his favorite old masters to laud. It's a neat trick, but just a trick. I forget who said it but someone said about Joyce that he did a lot of his reading from anthologies. This isn't meant to be an attack on Joyce at all I just realized one day that there can't be that much of a gulf between me and any of these guys as far as reading goes. Half my opinions are cribbed from these guys who likely did the same with their favorites. I always come back to a quote from Einstein that I think maybe says all that needs to be said on the subject of greatness and is far more democratic and affirming of the common man's innate abilities than any of these guys taking potshots at greatness from their cushy desks at prestigious institutions: "The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the state but the creative, sentient individual, the personality: it alone creates the noble and sublime while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling." It's important to remember that we're all the individual as well as the herd.
Also, all these loser snickering at Coppola for Megalopolis should be shot. Yes the movie is bad but it still has flickers of Coppola's greatness. He has made some of the greatest films we'll ever have, let him go out with some dignity jesus christ.
Regardless of the content, I am grateful for the author making me aware that the Nobel Prize for Economics wasn't introduced until 1968. And upon further research, that the prize is not actually a Nobel Prize but a "Prize in Memory of Nobel" created by the Central Bank of Sweden. Not that this necessarily discounts it from being meaningful.