The Daily Babble

For the Next Nobel, I Nominate...

I caught some of Margaret Atwood's interview with Bill Moyers on PBS (it's available online.) I generally enjoy interviews with writers, and interviews that Moyers does with the people he finds interesting. I still look at his World of Ideas interviews occasionally, and read the printed versions. But Margaret Atwood is a special case among special cases.

I don't know if I can explain it. There's her clarity of diction and expression. Her responsiveness to questions and dialogue. I also heard part of a radio interview with her once in which the interviewer wasn't that good, and she did not suffer foolish questions. Yet she's game to make something out of a question or topic or event, on the spot. So she isn't severe, but it's best not to waste her time. She can be playfully incisive, or just incisive. I imagine that if she's talking and looking directly at you, it is impossible to shift your gaze away. She knows a lot, she clarifies, she's insightful, she gets me thinking and going off in my own directions. Anyway, I find her mesmerizing in interviews.

But that's the occasion, not the reason for writing about her here. The reason is that I am hereby nominating Margaret Atwood for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

She deserves it. Her 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is a modern classic. Her book of written talks on literature, Negotiating With the Dead, is a thoughtful and original work. She has written other distinguished novels, poetry, scripts, scholarship and I especially like her short stories. She writes of ideals and realities for all humanity, which fits the Nobel's charge. She has written a definitive work on Canadian literature, which brings me to my second point.

She is internationally known and read, but she is a Canadian writer, and Canadian literature deserves a great deal more recognition than it gets, which is little. Atwood, Robertson Davies, Northrup Frye, Tomson Highway, Alice Munro, Yann Martel, Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields--an amazing variety of forms and styles, in a relatively small population with historical diversity and even more diversity today, spread over a vast country. Not to mention Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. And SCTV. Canadian literature deserves to be honored.

It's a unique literature befitting a unique country that has never been a world power, and never needed to be. International literature has benefitted from Canadian writers, and American literature in particular has benefitted from Canadian literary culture, very different from the combination of commerce, chaos and cliques that passes for ours.

Canada has never had a Nobel lit laureate. It's about time, and Margaret Atwood is the one. So let's start the buzz. Atwood in '06. Or '07 at the latest.


Site news: My Soul of Star Trek blog was sagging for awhile. Why, there were days when Dreaming Up Daily got more hits, a hitherto unprecedented development. Then a few weeks ago I posted a piece on "The Inner Light," a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I'd been thinking about in connection with the gloomier prospects of the Climate Crisis. Then this past week, completely out of the blue, the author of that episode posted a long comment about how the story developed, and his proposed sequel. With news of my most recent post, I mentioned this comment, and sent the links to the two big Star Trek fan sites, Trek Today and TrekWeb. They often link to my posts, but this time they both did simultaneously, and for the past four days Soul of Star Trek has gotten thousands of hits.

It's also gotten comments from Climate Crisis deniers, and I wasn't sure I was going to engage them in a discussion. If they were purely ideologically or politically motivated, or perhaps even paid deniers like Walmart sends out to comment on blogs, I would be wasting a lot of time. But I went ahead, out of respect for Star Trek fans. Here's a direct link to the Inner Light essay.