Following the launch of a new £10,000 “innovative” literary prize by Goldsmiths College and the New Statesman, Chad Post takes a look at the current state of American literary awards. His opinion? “America is The Worst for trying to equate popularity with quality.”
We Need More Prizes. We Need Better Prizes.
White Noise on White Noise
“In the silence, there is solitude. In the solitude, there is silence. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.” Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, “reviews“ Taylor Swift‘s white noise for The Atlantic.
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English Major Drama
At the Missouri Review blog, our own Tess Malone writes about the supposed death of the English major, which has lost a considerable amount of popularity in the last forty years in favor of “practical disciplines.” Among other things, she links to New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s Brandeis commencement speech, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
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Waywords and Meansigns
Recommended listening: Waywords and Meansigns, a new project that’s set out to record Finnegans Wake in its entirety and set it to music. The complete work will be released on May 4th, but there are already a few samples available online.
Ask Ayn (Rand)
“I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of Atlas Shrugged,” writes Ayn Rand (er, um, John Hodgman). “Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper.”
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Germany’s Top Literary Prize
The Georg Buechner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor, has been awarded this year to Reinhard Jirgl, author of The Unfinished. (via AuthorScoop)
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