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The only good thing about The National Book Award is that it isn’t the Nobel Prize, which seems to be reserved for politically correct terminuses of one of the major bodily tracts that pertains to items like foie gras and morels.Some of the NBA winners are actually readable.

He’s a Buddhist Priest ya know.

This sounds like a book I want to read. Gonna get it from the library

Where is all the publishing world factoids we depend on? Economics first, heck with the Hamptons.

Clancy

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing (TM): Clancy (born 1926) is an American novelist and screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for the 2002 Salma Hayek film Frida.

Cheers, Clancy. Frida would have been a great movie, even without La Salma.

Ah, yes, the Hamptons, where the elite meet. But let’s cut the WW a little slack — you write about what you know.

I say huzzah for Matthiessen’s rewrite. Here’s a writer who lived long enough to get a do-over. We should all be so lucky. In spite of the pre-award strafing this potential winner got from the tight-collars. But now I’ve gotta decide whether to buy three books or one. (Maybe PM was just prescient — going Back2Press with a Depression-proof trilogy.)

In these days when reviewers seem much hipper than the actual writers they review, there was a case below where the reviewer was not quite so, even if he himself was a premier novelist. Here is a gem from John Updike’s speech when Mr. Updike received his second National Book award in 1998:

When I was told of this handsome honor, my mind flicked back to the two other times when I have been so fortunate as to be summoned by the National Book Awards. The first occasion, on March 10, 1964, was immortalized by a young reporter for the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune who signed himself Tom — as distinguished from Thomas — Wolfe. His coverage began with these two paragraphs:

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“No sensitive artist in America will ever have to duck the spotlight again. John Updike, the Ipswich, Mass., novelist, did it for them all last night, for all time. Up on the stage in the Grand Ballroom of the New York Hilton Hotel, to receive the most glamorous of the five National Book Awards, the one for fiction, came John Updike, author of The Centaur, in a pair of 19-month-old loafers.

“Halfway to the podium, the spotlight from the balcony hit him, and he could not have ducked better if there had been a man behind it with a rubber truncheon. First he squinted at the light through his owl-eyed eyeglasses. Then he ducked his head and his great thatchy medieval haircut toward his right shoulder. Then he threw up his left shoulder and his left elbow. Then he bent forward at the waist. And then, before the shirred draperies of the Grand Ballroom and an audience of 1,000 culturati, he went into his Sherwin-Williams blush.”

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Well, On Canadian television, John Irving was reported to snort when the name. Tom Wolfe came up.
“He can’t write. He can’t **ing write.!

I rest my case.

I was with you during that breathless encounter at the Elaine Benson Gallery and yes, your eyes did light up!
You’ve written a fine tribute to PM.