YARBROUGH: Bummer — no Nobel Prize for literature again

 I simply realized that I’ve been handed over for the Nobel Prize for Literature as soon as once more. Bummer. And that crowd over in Stockholm didn’t even have the courtesy to select up the cellphone and name me with the unhealthy information. I needed to examine it within the paper. An individual of my literary stature deserves higher.

It appears they’ve given the award to French author Annie Ernaux. Mats Malm, secretary of the Swedish Academy which decides the prize stated Ernaux received it for her “braveness and scientific acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of non-public reminiscence.” Say what?

Together with a statue or medallion or one thing, Ernaux additionally picks up a examine for 10 million Swedish krona, which equates to a bit of over $900,000. Frankly, I might have used the cash greater than the {hardware}. I’m not having a lot luck with Powerball.

Ernaux has characterised her writings as “brutally direct, working-class and typically obscene.” Oh, like you’re the solely one who can write like that, girl? Return and take a look at a few of my previous columns. Perhaps I do lack braveness and scientific acuity with which to uncover the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of non-public reminiscence. That’s solely as a result of I do not know what meaning. However I will be simply as brutally direct and obscene as your on a regular basis run-of-the-mill Nobel laureate . Or Marjorie Taylor Greene, for that matter.

As for working-class credentials, my daddy labored for the railroad and my momma was a phone operator and I don’t have 10 million Swedish krona in my checking account like Mme. Ernaux. I believe everyone knows who the working class stiff is right here.

“For me, writing was and stays a strategy to make clear issues that one feels however are unclear,” she stated on the information convention after being named winner. Once more, we’ve a distinction in strategy.  I really feel I’m by no means unclear about something upon which I shed mild. I clearly loved having liberals get their pantaloons in a wad over my current column about migrants being shipped to uppity Martha’s Winery as a lot as I clearly get pleasure from getting an increase out of the Trump Harrumphs who couldn’t spell patriot if you happen to noticed them the “p” and the “t.”

The place I’m at an obstacle is the kind of material that appears to activate the Nobel judges. In keeping with information reviews, they had been impressed that Ernaux wrote so much about her confusion and ambivalence over her first sexual expertise, her affair with a married overseas diplomat in addition to an undesirable being pregnant and abortion and her uncertainty about marriage and motherhood. My goodness. That’s like the person who confessed to kissing a goat on the lips. I don’t suppose I might have instructed that. Not even for a pocket filled with krona.

Within the first place, I don’t find out about a variety of that stuff Ernaux is speaking about. And second, even when I did I don’t consider that is the place to be discussing it. (I believe I can hear the editors vigorously nodding up and down in settlement.) 

I’m fairly positive you’d simply as quickly be spared the small print, anyway. With our financial system within the dumper and that nutcase in Russia threatening to make use of nuclear weapons at any second, telling you my ambivalence regarding any hanky-pank which will or could not have occurred in my previous life can’t be very excessive in your listing of considerations proper now. Mine, both.

So, the Nobel judges handed me over for a girl who appears as if she has by no means had a contented day in her life. As my candy momma would say, “Bless her coronary heart.”

If that sort of depressing existence is what it takes to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, no thanks. I might somewhat have a household I really like and that loves me and the laughs and hugs that go together with that. Treasured recollections of the beloved Girl Who Shared My Identify. Fantastic pals that care about me. A church household that sustains me. Watching a dawn on St. Simons Island. Listening to Ray Charles Robinson, of Albany, Georgia, singing “Georgia on my Thoughts.” Barbecue and candy tea.

And I’ve one thing else that Annie Ernaux doesn’t have and by no means will: The privilege of corresponding with you every week. For that, I’m richer than all of the krona in Sweden. Thanks.

You may attain Dick Yarbrough at dick@dickyarbrough.com; at P.O. Field 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139 or on Fb at www.fb.com/dickyarb.