There aren’t many things I give a damn about, but I do give a damn about the hideous tragic farce that is the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’ll go to any extent to correct misconceptions of it. Even to the depths of hell itself: as proved when I ventured down into the Fifth Circle, which as Dante taught us is reserved for Harry Potter fans. I recently even corrected a fairly excited stub on the TV3 website (I know, I know) about the crew of the Spirit of New Zealand, who are being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. They might win! Like Gandhi did, wow! Yeah, how about this for a story:

“Young Man Buys Lottery Ticket

‘It’s possible I may win money from this!’ he claims”.

There’s a couple of things you need to know about the Nobel Prize. Pretty much any tenured University Professor can nominate a candidate in their respective field. Neat! But what this actually means is that every Professor of Fried Chicken & Genocide from the South Dakota University of Etiquette is going to nominate someone like William Luther Pierce for that colossus of eridition: The Turner Diaries. I’ll bet you two fiddy that Mugabe has been nominated for a Peace Prize. Someone out there is bound to have a sense of humor.

The Nobel nominee list is kept private for at least fifty years after the nomination. And even then: try googling for a Nobel nominee list. I haven’t found one. That’s because it’s full of embarrassments, like the time Hitler was nominated for Mein Kampf, or the time Licio Gelli was nominated, for God knows what.

This whole Nobel silliness reached it’s peak during the Stanley Tookie Williams trial. They actually used in his defence the fact that his childrens stories had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. What a fantastic defence: all I have to do is publish a book, bribe a professor, and murder as I please: if I’m nominated for a Nobel Prize, how could I possibly be anything but meek and bookish?

It is also important to not treat the laureates as belonging to some exalted canon, seconded only by the chorus of angels. There’s plenty of evidence that Mother Teresa was more shrewd and manipulative than we’d prefer to think. What was the hell with was giving a Peace Prize to… Kissinger? (the equivalent is giving one to Cheney for this years commitment toward peace). It’s a hit and miss affair. It’s crowning achievements, like the awards to Faulkner and Ossietsky, are shadowed by the lightweights (ie: Jelinek) and the undeserved. Winning the prize is just as likely to mean that you’ll be remembered as a bungled political decision as a great avatar of idealism.

My recommendation though is if you’re bored, online, and want to read something inspiring, check out some of the Nobel speeches online. I’ve only read some of the literature ones, I can recommend Pinter, Milosz, Kertesz, and of course Faulkner.

“In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than “the Gods forbid it” or “that is not our Way.” They will need the knowledge to say something like:

“Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which we now keep all for ourselves? Do you not know, clever stranger, that when any biomass is removed from the land, and not recycled back into it, the soil is weakened? And what could we do with our “saved” time, that would be more valuable and pleasurable than gathering the seed by hand, touching and knowing every stalk and every inch of the land that feeds us? Shall we become allies of cold metal that cuts without feeling, turning our hands and eyes to the study of machines and numbers until, severed from the Earth, we nearly destroy it as our ancestors did, making depleted uranium and polychlorinated biphenyls and cadmium batteries that even now make the old cities unfit for living? Go back to your people, and tell them, if they come to conquer us with their machines, we will fight them in ways the Arawaks and Seminoles and Lakota and Hopi and Nez Perce never imagined, because we understand your world better than you do yourself. Tell your people to come to learn.”

- Ran Prieur, “How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth”

Ran Prieur exists in a realm beyond awesome.  He exists in the future, and it is the kind of future that I would like to be a part of.