{"id":2586,"date":"2008-10-01T05:00:40","date_gmt":"2008-10-01T09:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=2586"},"modified":"2008-09-30T21:35:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-01T01:35:00","slug":"dyn-o-mite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/dyn-o-mite","title":{"rendered":"Dyn-o-mite!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and the lead judge for the Nobel Prize for literature, believes American writers are small-minded boobs<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or waitasecond: he is<\/em> a small-minded boob. My bad.<\/p>\n

“You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.<\/p>\n

“And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not that I give much of a crap about contemporary literature, American or furrin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and the lead judge for the Nobel Prize for literature, believes American writers are small-minded boobs: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.” Or waitasecond: he is … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Dyn-o-mite!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[358,357],"class_list":["post-2586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-david-remnick","tag-horace-engdahl"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-FI","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2606,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/pale-fire","url_meta":{"origin":2586,"position":0},"title":"Pale Fire","author":"Gil","date":"October 4, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Adam Kirsch, my favorite book critic at the now-defunct New York Sun, has landed at Slate. It doesn't say if he's going to have a regular spot there, but I hope that's the case. I also hope he's given as much range in his assignments as he was at the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17558,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-641-peter-stothard","url_meta":{"origin":2586,"position":1},"title":"Episode 641 – Peter Stothard","author":"Gil","date":"June 3, 2025","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 641: Peter Stothard \"What's very important if you're writing a biography \u2014 a personal history \u2014 of a poet is to get as close as possible to the process of writing, how it sounded, how he made it sing, how he made the words fit together.\" Can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Architecture"","block_context":{"text":"Architecture","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/architecture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/stothard2025comp.jpg?fit=1056%2C800&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/stothard2025comp.jpg?fit=1056%2C800&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/stothard2025comp.jpg?fit=1056%2C800&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/stothard2025comp.jpg?fit=1056%2C800&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/stothard2025comp.jpg?fit=1056%2C800&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":17784,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-659-ron-rosenbaum","url_meta":{"origin":2586,"position":2},"title":"Episode 659 – Ron Rosenbaum","author":"Gil","date":"October 21, 2025","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 659: Ron Rosenbaum \"I'm always looking beyond the surface of the words to deeper meanings. Or sometimes shallower meanings.\" One of my fave writers, Ron Rosenbaum, returns to the show to celebrate his amazing new book, BOB DYLAN: Things Have Changed (A Kind Of Biography) (Melville House\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rosenbaum2025comp.jpg?fit=1101%2C800&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rosenbaum2025comp.jpg?fit=1101%2C800&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rosenbaum2025comp.jpg?fit=1101%2C800&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rosenbaum2025comp.jpg?fit=1101%2C800&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/rosenbaum2025comp.jpg?fit=1101%2C800&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":15292,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-489-ira-nadel","url_meta":{"origin":2586,"position":3},"title":"Episode 489 – Ira Nadel","author":"Gil","date":"June 7, 2022","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 489: Ira Nadel \"Roth left so many instructions and prescriptive statements about how things should happen after his death, that he was really trying to \u2014 to use a phrase uttered by the gravedigger in Everyman \u2014 square the hole.\" Professor & biographer Ira Nadel joins the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/nadelcomp.jpg?fit=1063%2C800&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/nadelcomp.jpg?fit=1063%2C800&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/nadelcomp.jpg?fit=1063%2C800&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/nadelcomp.jpg?fit=1063%2C800&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/nadelcomp.jpg?fit=1063%2C800&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10756,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-241-barry-blitt","url_meta":{"origin":2586,"position":4},"title":"Episode 241 – Barry Blitt","author":"Gil","date":"October 22, 2017","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show 241: Barry Blitt \"It was nice to have been offered this retrospective book, but I wish it had just stopped there.\" Why is award-winning illustrator Barry Blitt so uncomfortable with the flap copy praise of his new decades-spanning compendium, Blitt (just out from Riverhead Books)? We spend\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/no.jpg?fit=750%2C1026&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/no.jpg?fit=750%2C1026&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/no.jpg?fit=750%2C1026&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/no.jpg?fit=750%2C1026&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":948,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/25-years-huh","url_meta":{"origin":2586,"position":5},"title":"25 years, huh?","author":"Gil","date":"May 11, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"A few months ago, I wrote an insanely rambling piece about the crappy state of contemporary literature. In that post, I mentioned a conversation I had with an NYU prof (Elayne Tobin) and an author\/critic (David Gates) about what novels since 1980 will become \"canonical.\" We had slim pickings, supporting\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2587,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2586\/revisions\/2587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}