To Blur a Line
Dear Eugene, They are set to announce tomorrow this year's winner of Nobel prize in literature. What is your guess? Your wish? I know you have one. A few? Nobel Lit is notoriously hard to predict, all book lovers know. I did pretty well, picking Alice Munro and Bob Dylan in the previous years and got lucky. My wife can attest I am not making this up. This year? My prediction is: either Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or someone one has never heard of from a country one will likely never visit. My reason? The former is a perennial favorite, the latter to compensate for last year's populist choice. Enough dumb fun. Art is not a race--what is the finishing line to cross? The Nobel committee has an agenda; as long as we know that, the dumb fun will remain clean. If the purpose of giving out the prize is nothing more than for the world to hear a prophetic voice, then I am all for it. With that purpose in mind, I...