J. M. Coetzee Wins Nobel Prize for Literature
It's not often that I've read the Nobel winner's work (it helps that this dude writes in English), but I was forced to do so in my Freshman English class (Lit-141, Vic Brombert). I'm very glad he made me read Coetzee for two reasons:
(1) I was still a Freshman which meant that I was still doing the required reading
(2) I can unequivocally say that the Nobel Comittee has bat-poo for brains.
I have often hated the great works of literature (just as I hate many of the "great" movies). Waiting for the Barbarians (the bat-poo in question) in no manner matched the earlier books in the class (on Modernist fiction), e.g. Primo Levi, Virginia Woolf and a whole mess o'Kafka. And all of them are superlative, none of them Laureates.
Considering that there are a bare few Nobel laureates worth reading (e.g. Winston Churchill) - I don't know why we even care.
But, for those who do, the timetable for the rest is as follows:
Medicine - Monday, Oct 6 (Yom Kippur)
Physics - Teusady, Oct 7 (Isru Chag)
Chemistry - Wednesday, Oct 8 (Nothing, really)
Economics - Wednesday, Oct 8
Peace - Friday, Oct 10 (Erev Sukkot)
In the running for the peace prize: Arafat (again, the Swedes love it when your body-count hits a new order of magnitude... it's like watching the odometer roll-over).
(And if you want to see grade-school art, check out the diplomas the laureates get)
It's not often that I've read the Nobel winner's work (it helps that this dude writes in English), but I was forced to do so in my Freshman English class (Lit-141, Vic Brombert). I'm very glad he made me read Coetzee for two reasons:
(1) I was still a Freshman which meant that I was still doing the required reading
(2) I can unequivocally say that the Nobel Comittee has bat-poo for brains.
I have often hated the great works of literature (just as I hate many of the "great" movies). Waiting for the Barbarians (the bat-poo in question) in no manner matched the earlier books in the class (on Modernist fiction), e.g. Primo Levi, Virginia Woolf and a whole mess o'Kafka. And all of them are superlative, none of them Laureates.
Considering that there are a bare few Nobel laureates worth reading (e.g. Winston Churchill) - I don't know why we even care.
But, for those who do, the timetable for the rest is as follows:
Medicine - Monday, Oct 6 (Yom Kippur)
Physics - Teusady, Oct 7 (Isru Chag)
Chemistry - Wednesday, Oct 8 (Nothing, really)
Economics - Wednesday, Oct 8
Peace - Friday, Oct 10 (Erev Sukkot)
In the running for the peace prize: Arafat (again, the Swedes love it when your body-count hits a new order of magnitude... it's like watching the odometer roll-over).
(And if you want to see grade-school art, check out the diplomas the laureates get)
This entry was posted
on Thursday, October 02, 2003 at 10/02/2003 11:22:00 PM.
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