Harass with class
The Swedish Academy announced that it will not award The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, postponing announcement of the 2018 award winner until next year, 2019.
Ironically, it's the first time in 69 years the Academy has postponed the award.
At the heart of the Swedish Academy's postponement decision is a scandal concerning sex and money--what else could it concern, other than murder--involving a husband and wife. The husband, a French photographer, and his wife, a Swedish poetess who is a member of the Academy, stand accused: he of sexually assaulting 18 women, including Crown Princess Victoria, heir to Sweden's throne, and she of corruption, inappropriately distributing funds to his cultural center.
Jeez, what a mess! And twice, involving husband and wife! This two-pronged scandal deserves a two-pronged response:
1. Can't these guys keep themselves to themselves or, if they feel so deeply about the need to service their predatory sexual urges, can't they find a way to do it with style and wit in a manner commensurate with the institution they represent? Can't they learn to harass with class? What's so difficult about that? Men have been doing it for centuries; history is filled with examples of successful harassing with class.
2. And poets are supposed to be poor, aren't they? What's a poet doing doling out money, and to her husband the Frenchman, of all people, who's groping young girls in backrooms at the Academy no less, at bookfairs in Gothenberg etcetc, as she's doling out money to fund his cultural center, while also presumably writing her poems.
I looked for the French photographer's 'work', i.e his portfolio, as a photographer and could find none on the internet. His name is Jean-Claude Arnault. If he's really a photographer, as he says he is, one would think there'd be some of his work on the internet. If you look up William Eggelston or Stephen Shore on the internet for instance, you'll find dozens of examples of their photographic work. (Perhaps Jean-Claude's predatory sexual nature has caused Mark Zuckerberg to exercise his editorial prerogative, by takingJean-Claude's Facebook page down and encouraging other internet titans to do likewise, in effect banning his work? At least I'd like to think so).
I did find a poem on the internet by the accused Swedish poetess, wife of the accused photographer. Her name is Katarina Frostenson. I'm pretty sure Frostenson in Swedish means 'son of Frost', which is interesting from an American perspective, given that the American poet Robert Frost was once rumored to be on the Nobel Prize for Literature short list when he was alive. Katarina's poem was titled "Myself in a Yellow Dress" and could only have been written by a woman about a man and a woman, in the kind of gloomy atmospheric style poets like the late Ingeborg Bachmann used to write years ago. In her poem there's something happening between a woman in a yellow dress "dark in a tree" and a man looking at her in the "green of July, under a tree."
I'm not sure I understand Frostenson's poem, but at least she's transparent; whereas her husband the photographer would seem to have something to hide.
And so, there will be no Nobel Prize for Literature announcement in 2018. I'm not sure how this will work? Will there be two winners announced in 2019? The 2018 winner and the 2019 winner?
Of course Bob Dylan, singer/songwriter, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, one of the "most debated arts awards in recent memory," acc. The New York Times, from which at least some of this report is extracted.