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Once again, the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to an idiot.
How many years in a row now is it that the Swedish Academy has lauded idiots with this ultimate honor.
Here's some idiot in the NYTimes:
"Should Ms. Oates and Mr. Roth, Mr. Pynchon and Mr. DeLillo never win a Nobel, however, they will be in exalted company. Among those who never won the Nobel Prize: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust."
The Times idiot doesn't mention a single poet: natch.
Pound, Frost, Stevens, WC Williams, Auden, Bishop, Larkin: just to list past poets writing in English who should have won Nobels and didn't.
What a disgrace that the prize has not gone to living poets like Ashbery, Bonnefoy, Tanikawa et al (make your own list) . . .
The latest idiot:—Helga Muller: well, if they wanted to give it to a woman writer in her middle years of age, it should have been the great Carol Ann Duffy—
but Duffy is a poet, and poets only get the Nobel on those odd-once-every-decade-or-two occasions
when the idiots at the SwedAcad can't agree on which idiot to choose,
so it seems . . .
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I'm using the word "idiot" in its original meaning, from ancient Greece.
To quote a sentence in the Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (p. 561)—from its definition of "idiot":
'The Greeks have the expressions,
"a priest or an idiot" (layman),
"a poet or an idiot" (prose-writer).'
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