National Book Awards: Expected Nonsense, Resulting Rant

The Washington Post has a rundown on this year's National Book Awards. Like the annual MLA convention, which has become a once-yearly subject of mirth for its idiotic seminar topics, these awards don't really matter much anymore, as they invariably dispense kudos and a brief moment of fame to left-liberal authors who generally pen books that nobody except the so-called intelligentsia ever reads. As we can see in today's Post, the reportage on the National Book Awards is often as fatuous as the awards are themselves, though probably unintentionally so.

Let's take a look.

First of all, something called The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (a professor, of course) copped this year's award for fiction. A sampling of reviews tells us it's sort of a tortured exploration of psychological phenomena that may or may not be real, involving a cast of characters that would, no doubt, ever get together in real life. No beach book here. But hey, this is academic fiction, right?

Powers, impressed by his receipt of the award, commented astutely,

"I've got to say, that does a number on your brain chemistry..."

Yep, things have happened to my brain chemistry, too, particularly after I've been unwise enough to consume mass quantities of adult beverages.

But Powers' comment seems positively astute when compared to the observations of Timothy Egan, who

...won the nonfiction award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Egan, a reporter for the New York Times, mentioned Abraham Lincoln's dictum that we cannot escape history, then pointed out that "this history of the Dust Bowl almost escaped us," because its last survivors are now in their 80s or 90s.

Gosh, Timmy, you may have something there. And you oughta know, since you write for the greatest and most objective newspaper of all times (which I'm sure didn't influence the judges' choice.) After all, we never had a writer like John Steinbeck, a Nobel Prize Winner, (when the literary prize actually meant someting, before Rigoberta Menchu), who told us all we wanted to know about the Dust Bowl and the Depression (Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men). Of course, no one reads an old Socialist like Steinbeck anymore since he was dumb enough to support Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War, thus throwing away his lefty credentials and losing his place in the academic canon. In point of fact, Egan's story was "untold" because that's good marketing, not because the observation is correct. The bloody story has been told many many times, and retold on stage and screen. "Almost escaped us." How funny is that?

Ah, but wait, there's more, this time for poetry lovers (all three of them).

Nathaniel Mackey [another professor!] won the poetry award for Splay Anthem. Mackey said he was particularly gratified to receive an honor first awarded to William Carlos Williams, an early influence.

(Comment aobve is Wonker's)

Ah, yes, that Little Red Wheelbarrow, upon which "so much depends," a pitiful excuse for a poem that is still probably boring undergraduates to tears as they swear to God (if there is a God) that they'll never, ever read another poem if they can escape the course with a "C."

Publisher New Directions provides an appropriately breathless online introduction to Splay Anthem:

Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. The three sections of the book—"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent for Nub, as Mackey notes in his enlightening Preface: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become")—form a discrete whole. They also form the next installment of two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years: Song of the Andoumboulou and "Mu" (though "mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").

Looks like a winner, particularly the "flailing republic of Nub the United States has become" part, which is probably attributable to Chimpy BushMcHitler. If you don't understand what this "discrete whole" is, neither do I. Poetry used to speak to people. Now it's just an academic stunt engraved on a page. No wonder no one reads this stuff anymore, except the university rank and tenure committees for whose edification it's written.

Anyhow.

Let's take a look at a poem from this collection, self-referentially entitled "On Antiphon Island":

On Antiphon Island they lowered
the bar and we bent back. It
wasn't limbo we were in albeit
we limbo'd. Everywhere we
went we
limbo'd, legs bent, shoulder
blades grazing the dirt,
donned
andoumboulouous birth-shirts,
sweat salting the silence
we broke...

Okay. I guess this is a poem about a poem. Hence "Antiphon Island." It uses clever, edgy, revolutionary typography (which we can't seem to reproduce here for you) to symbolize the limbo, just like e. e. cummings used the same sort of thing some 75 years ago. Which is, no doubt, some kind of deep symbolism representing the decadence of the United States. And, of course, no traditional meter and rhyme, which have been out of style for 3 generations due to the dour but celebrated postmodernists, the dullest party-poopers of all time. There might be just a touch of jazz rhythm here, but it's lost in the language stunting and obvious alliteration. Neither this snippet, nor the poem itself tell us much except that nobody will want to read the collection, so it won't make any money. Unless it's an assigned text, along with the "Red Wheelbarrow."

But don't take our word for this. If you can't bear the suspense, the rest of the poem appears here. We decide. You report.

Meanwhile, back to the Award party. The Post name-drops a few of the finalists (i.e., the Losers), including the pyramid-climbing faux poet H. L. Hix (professor-turned-administrator). Hix infiltrated and helped to diminish the effectiveness of the long running West Chester Poetry Conference years ago by pretending to write in form. But this excerpt from his losing collection Chromatic shows that his head is closer to the dreadful John Ashberry, holder of the Wonker Award for the Most Overrated Poet in the Universe:

My cold dark salty desire: schools of krill spilled
silver from light to light: whales jailing krill in
bubbles before bursting on them from below:
invisible algae and plankton suffusing the whole:
seaweed waving goodbye goodbye: jellyfish these
floating moons morsing your name here where it
cannot be spoken: sperm whale fighting squid to
the death far below any light: penguins sliding off
ice into might as well be: elephant seals swimming
deeper than radio signals can sink goodbye goodbye:
orcas close to ice cruising for antarctic cod: cephalopods signalling
complex codes of color and gesture: crinoids fanning for algae in eerie light beneath
the ice: swollen tubeworms swaying over volcanic vents: luminous fish as far below
day as stars stay above it: orcas bobbing up to peer across the ice then sending
signals with their intricate exhalations.

As Mel Brooks once stated in voiceover in the hilarious, Oscar-winning cartoon short, "The Critic": "What the hell is this?"

Well, it's the usual academic trick of looking a lot of words up in a dictionary in a field that has nothing to do with your own, thus demonstrating astounding erudition; the promiscuous portmanteauing of imagery to the point where it no longer means anything (thus providing discussion fodder for an entire afternoon seminar); overly intellectualized observations ("sending signals with their intricate exhalations"); cute, and highly foreshadowing repetitions ("goodbye goodbye"); random endstops; and so forth.

The result? You won't want to read another verse unless it's been assigned. Poetry in the 20th century was gradually killed by countless cuts like this. Poems used to mean something and people used to derive comfort, satisfaction, and entertainment from that. But with meaningless, show-off litanies like this, the inclination is to go watch the whales on the Discovery Channel or camp out at the mall to buy a new Playstation 3. The single most obvious characteristic about academic writing these days is its sheer joylessness. (And the overuse, in the last two poems, of the "salty" meme.)

Oh, yeah, we were talking about the party:

Before the ceremony, which was held at Manhattan's Marriott Marquis Hotel, writers and publishing folk drank and mingled.

Profundities were pronounced, including writer Gene Yang, who solemnly observed

...he thinks we're "in the middle of a renaissance for the graphic novel" -- finally seeing "an entire body of work" in the form that aspires to be literature.

Hey, there's a cute twist of condescension. Perhaps like Yang aspires to write literature. Earth to Yang: those of us on the bleeding edge considered Frank Miller's futurist Batman epic, The Dark Knight Returns, literature over 20 years ago. Where were you?

Oh, well, anyway, you were probably waiting to get to the anti-Bush stuff, you know, the smart remarks that show you're part of the club and really deserve to be there. The Post quotes Fran Lebowitz, who hasn't written anything worth reading since her splash-in-the-pan 15 minutes of fame in the 1970s (upon which she's coasted ever since), cracking wise on, who else, Chimpy himself:

Fran Lebowitz eschewed Simpson jokes, though she got one off at the expense of the Bush administration's Iraq Study Group that drew a roar of approval. If you were in the third grade and had a math test coming up, she asked, when do you think the best time would be to study -- "before the test? Or three years after the test?"

No, Fran, after you'd penned your academic essay on the collected works of Karl Marx. A roar of approval indeed. Who do these idiots think bin Laden's planes were aimed at? This is another characteristic of today's socalled writers: fundamentally unserious. Which is why everyone but the Post, the NYTimes, and maybe what's left of the LA Times ignores them.

Ah, but what's a literary love-fest without a few comments from the insufferable leftist Adrienne Rich, "this year's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters..." who "drew a standing ovation as she wheeled her walker toward the lectern." (Authentically differently abled, let's give her an ovation!) Parenthetical comments below courtesy of Wonker, who wasn't invited:

Poetry, she said, has sometimes been accused of aestheticizing human suffering. [Sometimes???] And yet "if poetry had gone mute after every genocide in history," there wouldn't be much poetry in the world. [How many genocides were there? Only Abu Ghraib, no doubt. Kill Bush!!]

It is the poet's job, she added, to give the lie to "that brute dictum: 'There is no alternative.'"[Yes there is!! Don't read this stuff!!]

Once upon a time, literary awards meant something. Now they mean nothing. For literature has ceased to exist, replaced by tiresome tomes trolling for tenure by intellectual misfits who couldn't survive in the real world but nonetheless consider themselves better than anyone in flyover country, particuarly if they were stupid enough to vote for Bush and support America.

What calls itself literature today is really the academic inscape talking to itself. Where great writers in our recent past, from Fitzgerald to Hemingway to Thomas Wolfe to William Faulkner to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and yes, even John Steinbeck, used to be read, followed, and honored by a considerable number of Americans, today's literary stars are stars in name only. They have no constituency, save in the halls of academe. And they essentially have no audience aside from jaded New Yorkers and college students who are forced to read their drivel in order to graduate.
It's astounding to me that a profession once so honored has now sunk so low in public estimation over the short course of about 50 years. But this is what happens when people trade their intellects and creativity for the dubious honor of serving as apologists and chief propagandists for a failed Marxist utopian philosophy that continues to deaden intellectual life in the West.

Far from being our prophets, guides, and seers as Shelley imagined they were, today's writers and poets are like the useless drones in a honeybee hive. When winter comes, as it inevitably will, they'll all be thrown out to freeze and starve in the frozen wastes. And none will be mourned because they contributed precisely nothing at all.