Pulitzer board to fiction jury: why did you give us this crap to read?

NMC notes that the Pulitzer Prizes are out, and for the first time since 1977, the board has refused to make an award.

The way it works is, a jury picks three finalists and then the board votes. This year's finalists were Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and The Pale King by DFW. (I can't imagine that last was a good book, and know nothing of the other two.) No word whether the board had a hung vote, hated all three, or just what.

... Hung vote, it's said:

"The main reason (for the fiction decision) is that no one of the three entries received a majority, and thus after lengthy consideration, no prize was awarded," said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. "There were multiple factors involved in these decisions, and we don't discuss in detail why a prize is given or not given." * * *

Susan Larson, chairwoman of the Pulitzer fiction jury, stressed that it wasn't up to the jury to select the winner. Rather, she said, its job was to submit three finalists to the board. "The decision not to award the prize this year rests solely with the Pulitzer board," she wrote in an email to the AP.

The board has 20 members, including such luminaries as Thomas Friedman (himself heavily favored to win Wanker of the Decade) and a co-founder of Politico - heavy with newspaper editors, which perhaps suggests part of the problem: a single board that evaluates journalism, fiction, poetry ....

UPDATE: Aaaaand it's Friedman.

Character is fate

He was always writing, and even then he wrote long. His sixth-grade essays dwarfed everyone else’s. His senior thesis at Princeton — on existentialism in Hemingway — was so long, he was told, that the college’s English department subsequently instituted a rule limiting the number of pages a senior could turn in.

The New York Times has a long profile on Robert A. Caro, who " is now spending more time writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than Johnson spent living them, and he isn’t close to being done yet." Long, but not as long as Caro would've written it.

Mark Twain and the hard-boiled style

Stumbled upon a lecture of Twain's on the prose style of James Fenimore Cooper. Summary would be invidious:

Here is a passage from Chapter xi of The Last of the Mohicans, one of the most famous and most admired of Cooper’s books:

Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place. Without any aid from the science of cookery, he was immediately employed, in common with his fellows, in gorging himself with this digestible sustenance. Magua alone sat apart, without participating in the revolting meal, and apparently buried in the deepest thought.

This little paragraph is full of matter for reflection and inquiry.

And he goes on to pick it apart, sentence by sentence, needless word by needless word, until he arrives at what he thinks Cooper should have written:

During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp. He and the others ate the meat raw. Magua sat apart, without participating in the revolting meal.

Though Twain has some qualms about "revolting," since it's vague who is revolted - presumably not Magua.

And that seems nicely to illustrate how we get to Hemingway and Hammett.

The PDF is excellent for distribution to a composition class, as Twain illustrates the editor's mind in action.

Hillary turns out to be kinda cool actually

Hillary Clinton is apparently a big fan of “Texts From Hillary,” the viral site imagining the Secretary of State messaging various celebrities and politicians on her Blackberry. So much so that she invited the creators, Stacy Lambe and Adam Smith, who TPM interviewed this week, to join her at the State Department for an in-person meeting. She even came up with her own“Text With Hillary” and signed it

- TPM. 2016! 2016! 2012!

When I was in fourth grade, no less.

Kingfish reports that Gov. Phil Bryant has evidently decided that stronger beer is not a victory for Satan.

In honor of this event, here's an old drinking song that I can't find on the internet with the lyrics exactly as my mother (yep) taught them to me, so I will present that version here:

Drunk last night, drunk the night before,
Gonna get drunk tonight like I've never been drunk before;
For when I'm drunk I'm as happy as can be;
For I am a member of the Soused family.

Now the Soused family is the best family
That ever came over from Old Germany.
There's the Amsterdam Dutch, and the Rotterdam Dutch,
But the best Damn Dutch are the God-Damn Dutch!

Glorrr-i-ous!
Glorrr-i-ous!
One keg of beer for the four of us!
Glory be to Heaven that we're not ten or eleven,
For one of us can drink it all alone - all alone! HIC!

... A friend advises me of what beers we've been missing. I'm pretty sure I can do without the Russian Imperial Stouts, but the Scottish ales sound inviting. And a whole lotta Belgian brews that aren't Stella Artois. (Which, amusingly, is sold as ultra-classy over here and regarded like Budweiser in Belgium.)

Decline & Fall, chapter 41

According to the testament of the founder, the African kingdom had lineally descended to Hilderic, the eldest of the Vandal princes. A mild disposition inclined the son of a tyrant, the grandson of a conqueror, to prefer the counsels of clemency and peace; and his accession was marked by the salutary edict, which restored two hundred bishops to their churches, and allowed the free profession of the Athanasian creed. But the Catholics accepted, with cold and transient gratitude, a favour so inadequate to their pretensions, and the virtues of Hilderic offended the prejudices of his countrymen. The Arian clergy presumed to insinuate that he had renounced the faith, and the soldiers more loudly complained that he had degenerated from the courage, of his ancestors. His ambassadors were suspected of a secret and disgraceful negotiation in the Byzantine court; and his general, the Achilles, as he was named, of the Vandals, lost a battle against the naked and disorderly Moors. The public discontent was exasperated by Gelimer, whose age, descent, and military fame, gave him an apparent title to the succession: he assumed, with the consent of the nation, the reins of government; and his unfortunate sovereign sunk without a struggle from the throne to a dungeon, where he was strictly guarded with a faithful counsellor, and his unpopular nephew the Achilles of the Vandals. But the indulgence which Hilderic had shown to his Catholic subjects had powerfully recommended him to the favour of Justinian, who, for the benefit of his own sect, could acknowledge the use and justice of religious toleration; their alliance, while the nephew of Justin remained in a private station, was cemented by the mutual exchange of gifts and letters; and the emperor Justinian asserted the cause of royalty and friendship. In two successive embassies, he admonished the usurper to repent of his treason, or to abstain, at least, from any further violence which might provoke the displeasure of God and of the Romans; to reverence the laws of kindred and succession, and to suffer an infirm old man peaceably to end his days, either on the throne of Carthage or in the palace of Constantinople. The passions, or even the prudence, of Gelimer compelled him to reject these requests, which were urged in the haughty tone of menace and command; and he justified his ambition in a language rarely spoken in the Byzantine court, by alleging the right of a free people to remove or punish their chief magistrate, who had failed in the execution of the kingly office. After this fruitless expostulation, the captive monarch was more rigorously treated, his nephew was deprived of his eyes, and the cruel Vandal, confident in his strength and distance, derided the vain threats and slow preparations of the emperor of the East. Justinian resolved to deliver or revenge his friend, Gelimer to maintain his usurpation; and the war was preceded, according to the practice of civilized nations, by the most solemn protestations, that each party was sincerely desirous of peace.

--Gibbon

... Regardless of his historical accuracy, Gibbon must be read for his rhetoric.

Stories of the absence of love

Eudora Welty -- a ___________ fan, friend, and influential booster -- described his novels as stories of "the absence of love." His signal, said Welty, is "simple and undisguised: find the connections; recognize what they mean; thereby, in all charity, understand."

Fill in the blank; the answer's at the link to this article (which liberally splashes spoilers, dammit).