This Week: Did Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature expand the category to songwriting?… Artists protest against gentrification… We’re deeply conflicted about the value of creativity… Is Google rewiring our brains so they don’t work so well?… Are we all living in a giant computer simulation? (don’t laugh)
- American Wins Nobel Literature Prize (Just Not The American Anyone Expected): After a decades-long drought, an American won the Nobel. There were plenty of candidates – and no shortage of speculation about whether it would be DeLilo, Roth, or someone else. Instead, Bob Dylan won. Dylan has often been “mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, his work does not fit into the traditional literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize has traditionally recognized.” So is this an expansion of the Nobel scope, broadening the category to include songwriters? Handwringing about “what is literature?” seems inevitable after the announcement that a rock star has taken the global writing community’s biggest award. But no great existential crisis is needed. The Nobel Committee could have decided that with this prize it wanted to expand the definition of “literature” to include recorded music, a hugely influential and relatively young art form that doesn’t have an award of Nobel-like prestige dedicated to it. But it seems to have declined to do so. Here’s a good selection of the literary world’s reaction to the news.
- Creativity Everywhere, Right? Well… Maybe Not: “There’s a critical misunderstanding of the over-used C word. The first thing most of us think of when we hear that someone is creative is: artist, poet, musician, or entrepreneur. That’s not to say that creative people don’t fall into those categories, but what I’m suggesting is that creativity is a state of mind rather than a set of skills in a particular area.” And while we all celebrate creativity as an idea, we’re also deeply suspicious of it. “The paradox of this bias against creativity lies in the fact that creativity — along with its close cousin innovation — is frequently celebrated in business as a most desired organizational trait. Reports of management excellence from McKinsey to KPMG state that creativity among the workforce is a basic requirement for long-term business success. Why then does the organizational immune system kick into high gear whenever exposed to the very thing it needs to survive?”
- Is Google Ruining Our Ability To Think? Sounds crazy, right? Google is just a tool, and it gives us unparalleled access to information. But “whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother. As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives.”
- Are We All Living In A Giant Simulation? Sounds crazy also, right? But as those computer scientists who work on machine learning and artificial intelligence are discovering, the mind-boggling complexity that machines can now handle leads many to project these capabilities forward and envision a blurring of the lines between what we think is real and biological and what might just be computer simulations. “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.”
Image: Pixabay
Why then does the organizational immune system kick into high gear whenever exposed to the very thing [creativity] it needs to survive?
I think it’s usually because organizations sort themselves into more-or-less neat organizational trees in order to function, and creative ideas, more often not, spread across branches of that tree.
So a creative idea often involves more work for staffers, along with confusion about who (i.e., which branch) is responsible for doing that extra work.
If a songwriter can legitimately win a Nobel Prize for literature, and a playwright can (as several have), then I nominate Stephen Sondheim.
The last American Nobel lit prize was 23 years ago. What happened to previous winners like Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison.
I wonder if American society and culture has been gradually sterilized.
Has the intellectual, political, and moral climate in the USA has become so narrow and one-dimensional that it makes it less likely that we can produce writers with the breadth and depth to be really great? From a political perspective, could a Harold Pinter, Dario Fo, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Günter Grass even exist in the USA? It’s quite possible that they would have been harassed out of existence.
I’ve live in Europe for the last 37 years. I feel the broader spectrum of acceptable political and social thought there allows them to have richer and more complex views of the world. Even Latin Americans seem to have a wider range. If an American strove for a humanism to match the breadth of Mario Vargas Llosa, Elias Canetti, Heinrich Böll, Pablo Neruda, or Samuel Beckett, I think he or she would be pilloried into silence and prevented from growing as an artist. Part of America’s notorious anti-intellectualism derives from the narrow ways we circumscribe acceptable thought.
Is it any mystery how this narrowing happened? Can at least part of the answer be found in the well documented histories of things like the Truman Loyalty Acts, HUAC, The Congress for Cultural Freedom, COINTELPRO, Operation Mocking Bird, and even today’s Operation Earnest Voice? How many sustained interventions can the thought world of a society take before it begins to shrink?
We were once a country that could produce Steinbecks and Faulkners, but is that now more difficult? Even Steinbeck faced sustained harassment from the FBI that very likely harmed him and his work. One could mention countless other artists like Dalton Trumbo, Arthur Miller, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, and even Aaron Copland. Cultural intimidation creates a uniform and obedient society that eventually becomes artless and stupid, but in our smug ignorance we think that only happens in places like Russia…
As a more recent example, I think of “Don” DeLillo who was accused of being a “bad citizen” by the conservative columnist George Will. DeLillo responded:
“…being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.”
Are we suffering a lack of Nobel Lit prizes because genuinely penetrating observation and thought defines us as “bad citizens” – and with all of the ostracism, character assassination, intimidation, and silencing that implies?