(no subject)

This Post about the current Hugo controversy is pretty much why I don't tend to place much stock in awards for artistic endeavors.

Just finished watching the film Rush which is an interesting biopic about the rivalry between race car drivers James Hunt and Nikki Lauder during the 1970s. Now that like most sporting events is a competition that can be scored, graded, with a clear winner based on "objective" criteria. It's not purely a popularity contest or political. Oh sure, there are political factors and it helps if people like you -- it helped Hunt, but Lauder, considered an asshole by most, and uncharismatic, did become champion on skill alone. This is not true in regards to the Hugos, National Book Award, Pulitizer, Nobel Prize, Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, etc. That's subjective. And it is based purely on how much your peers like you, how well you are regarded by the judges, and if your work personally resonated with them.

In short? Artistic Awards are meaningless, unless of course you agree with those who judge them or consider those judging them like minded souls. It's sort of like reading reviews of television, movies, books, etc - if you tend to agree with the reviewer - then yes, it works, if you don't that too works - you know if you'll like or hate the work, more or less. But in most cases, you don't really know, sometimes you agree, sometimes you don't, or are just ambivalent. So as a marker or test as to whether you should buy a particular book or if it is worthy of your notice? Awards are sort of meaningless. Particularly if you do any background research on them. A few years back it was revealed that judges of the Booker Prize were, ahem, awarding it to the writer who literally kissed their collective asses.

Awards, notoriously, mean almost nothing — particularly in literature, where the architecture of competitive sports is just flat-out silly. Literary prize-choosing is always a fickle, unsatisfying process: It’s often just a way to settle scores, or send political messages, or strategically boost careers. As Nathan Ihara put it yesterday on the lit blog MobyLives, every book prize is “the imperfect result of literary bickering, in-fighting, and vote wrangling by semi-arbitrary judges with highly subjective concepts of literary worth.” He links to a fascinating Guardian piece that compiles insider gossip from 40 years' worth of Booker Prize judges — and their stories of politics, nepotism, ignorance, and bullying will make you want to disregard pretty much every fancy medallion you ever see on a book cover again. You could, infamously, build a first-rate library out of authors who’ve been denied the Nobel over the last 100 years: Chekhov, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges, Roth (so far), et al.

- http://www.vulture.com/2010/10/jonathan_franzen_national_book.html

And here's the UK Guardian article about the Booker Prize, which was linked to in the article mentioned above.

Before the longlist was made public, if you wanted to know which books were in contention you would usually be able to find out by having a discreet lunch with Martyn Goff, the charming and mischievous prize administrator who used to operate his own idiosyncratic system of leaks, withholding and revealing in equal measure. I remember turning up to the meeting at which our shortlist would be decided to be received with suspicion by our chairman, Gillian Beer. She wanted to know how our longlist was being discussed in the papers, and I was pretty sure by the way she looked at me that she thought I was responsible. Certainly I'd been having fun writing polemical pieces about the state of the British novel.

I believed then as I do now that the Booker is essentially a jamboree, little more than a kind of sport, with its own roster of winners and losers. It shouldn't be dignified or taken too seriously. But I wasn't the leaker. As we sat down for the lunch that preceded our discussions, and with Gillian Beer still grumbling about the longlist leaking out, I heard Goff say: "It's quite extraordinary. I don't know how it happened." He then, winningly, glanced at me and winked.

So, I don't tend to choose books based on awards. I choose them based on quotes, blurbs, teasers, summaries in reviews, and oddly, cover art.

I won two literary awards in college. One for a short story I wrote - with a cash prize. It came in handy, since I'd overdrawn on my bank account, and that made up the difference. Plus, I finally got published in the Literary Journal. (It was hilarious, I'd submitted numerous stories, including the one that won more than once. But the Journal was run by people who only published their friends works and ignored everyone else.) The short story was about a man in his mid-40s struggling with putting his aging mother in a nursing home. He ruminates over it on a plane, while sitting next to an obnoxious and ill elderly passenger, who reminds him uncomfortably of his mother. The man is a road warrior - who spends a great deal of time traveling, so he reflects on his own life as well. It won because the judges were 40 year old English professors who identified with the lead character. It didn't get published in the Literary Journal until then, because the editors of the journal were 18-20 year olds who were more interested in stories about tattoo artists amongst other things. They published a lot of sci-fi stories.

The second was a literary grant to go to Wales and collect what amounted to ghost stories. (I wrote up a budget, a proposal, presented it to the judges, and persuaded them to give me $2000 to go to Wales and research these stories. I've been told when I put my mind to it - I am quite persuasive.) I wanted to collect Welsh myths and compare to the Mabinogi, but ran into a brick wall and had improvise. Ended up collecting over 100 ghost stories and tales of witches, superstitions, and jokes regarding the same - in every province of Wales in the 1980s. Wrote this lengthy paper, about 50 pages, comparing the stories to the Mabinogi. I researched Welsh mythology and the Mabinogi at three libraries in Wales, the National Library of Wales in Aberwysthe (sp?), The Welsh Folklore Museum in Cardiff (can't remember the exact title - it was in the 1980s), and University of Cardiff Library. Also interviewed various experts in the field. The paper used Jungian psychology, Erich Neumann, and Robert Fraiser to analyze the myths. (No, Joseph Campbell wasn't referenced - this was the 1980s, Campbell didn't come about until the 1990s. I had never heard of him until I left the field and graduated from law school.
He's okay, but I liked Neuman and Jung better.)

Anyhow...experience more than anything else has made me skeptical of awards, and of reviewers and well the publishing industry in general (Working for 6-7 years in it, interacting with various folks in it, and having interviewed every NYC publisher and literary agent - will make you cynical.) I learned that people don't publish what is good or interesting or different, they publish what they like. They don't award or praise something because it is good, but because they love it, it turned them on. It's more than possible that the person who despises it is equally right. Art can be interpreted more than one way. Or rather, good art can be interpreted more than one way.

I guess that's the objective test I'd use - can it be interpreted more than one way?
Does it inspire strong emotions or apathy? Or is there even a test? Can we apply one outside of the obvious - technically it follows the rules laid out. But what about those works of art that deliberately break rules? Or play with narrative? Then the test would be is it deliberate? Is it intentional? And I guess you can sort of tell. Or not.

Like I said, when it comes to art...there's no definitive answer and mileage, it varies.
So awards at the end of the day feel a bit like a pointless exercise don't they?