[lit-ideas] Re: puh-lit-zer puh-riz-es
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:48:47 -0400
>>nope, not even the judges, that's why it won.
Notes from Underboard
by Tristram Shade
filed 4/18/06
[NYC-American Literary Watchdog] Ever wonder about
the process through which Geraldine Brooks' novel
_March_ was shortlisted* as a Best Unread Novel?
Ever wonder about the actual "shortlisting" itself?
In a surprise Senior Séance at the Pulitzer World
Room of the Columbia School of Journalism Building
at 2950 Broadway, here in New York City, Board
members disclosed previously secret Pulitzer Prize
deliberation techniques. Dead poet WH Auden was
also on hand, and gave a brief talk about being
Best Unread and about how much Best Unreads leave
to the unreading of others.
At the Pulitzer Prize Board Séance, Auden's ghost
was awkwardly summoned and eventually emerged,
fifteen minutes late, flickering, defensive,
gray-toned, dog-tired, and stung. Asked about the
short list*, the poet's ghost gossiped and
wheedled, reluctantly positing a larger community
of the Best Unread Novels. He admitted to
discarding many of the poetry and fiction
collections sent to him without having completely
read them.
"No poet or novelist," Auden finally admitted,
"wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but
most of them wish they were the only one alive,
and quite a number fondly believe their wish has
been granted."
Everyone at the Pulitzer Prize Board Séance fell
fast asleep. They slept because they were all
thoroughly exhausted by their long sessions of
behaviorally conditioned structured learning
programs reinforced by high-intensity lights,
drugs, and shock treatments. In their dreams, each
Board member knew that literary texts reflected
intuitive psychological apprehensions of human
nature. Each also knew that they, the Pulitzer
Prize Board, could anticipate that an analysis of
literary representations would reveal not only the
way people perceive individual differences, but
also how people integrate their new perceptions
into elemental motives such as mate-selection,
candy ploys, juggling, E-mail, and grooming. All
this in a dream that lasted less than ten seconds.
After all, that's how a Pulitzer Prize is awarded.
Biometrics, textual analysis, grooming behavior,
sleep deprivation: the four pillars of every
Pulitzer Prize. Happens regular as rain.
_____
* Nothing was intended by the word "short list" or
by the adjectival "shortlisted." Don't interpret
this. Freudian renditions of texts (literary or
practical) will almost inevitably insert gaggles
of distorting ideas about, for example, mass
copulation, incest, and castration anxiety into an
otherwise fit literary personality. The cure?
Encounters with Equus asinus, taming nanny-goats,
back slapping bad weather paladins, shuffling
trente-et-quarantes, laughing hyenas, flapping
Jolly Rogers, howler monkeys, sick cougars,
sleep-learning Swedes, American elk-style step
yoga, mobile homes cannonballing south, spotlights
on plastic crosses, chocolate cottontail rabbits,
… enough already! Forget about it. Time to change
beliefs. Back to the self as a human universal.
Let us examine and acknowledge that the self is
often itself a very short list.
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