The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes

Kendrick Lamar (pitchfork.com)

Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize Foundation announced its 2018 honorees, and this year list brought a particularly unexpected surprise: in the traditionally most aesthetically narrow arts category, Music, the prize committee threw prize watches for a complete loop and selected Kendrick Lamar, the platinum record-selling, Grammy-nominated hip hop artist, for his 2017 album DAMN. The Pulitzer jury noted that Lamar's work was a:

Recording released on April 14, 2017, a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.

With his win, Lamar became the first musician not working in a classical/Euro-American or jazz idiom to receive the award, and only the fifth African American since the Music prize was initially awarded in 1943. In fact, there was no Black winner at all until classical composer George Walker won in 1996 for Lilacs, for voice and orchestra. Since then, the other recipients have been Wynton Marsalis in 1997 for Blood on the Fields, the first strictly jazz composition to win; Ornette Coleman's jazz LP Sound Grammar, which won in 2007; and Henry Threadgill's In for a Penny, In for a Pound, in 2016.

Indeed, the Music category award roll was, until Walker's award, notorious for excluding not just Black musicians, but all music not falling under the general rubric of "classical music," and in particular, academic classical compositions. Some of the greatest American musicians, including Duke Ellington (posthumously, in 1999), George Gershwin (posthumously, in 1998), John Coltrane (posthumously, in 2007), Thelonious Monk (posthumously in 2006), and Scott Joplin (posthumously, in 1976!), received "Special Citations," but were otherwise ignored, as were all forms of popular music, however symphonic or orchestral, in the Music category.

Interestingly enough, musical theater, beginning with Of Thee I Sing, by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin, was honored in the Drama category as far back as 1932, and over the years, other musicals, like Richard Rodgers' and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific in 1950, were recognized, as "Drama," but not as "Music." This was about as close as the Pulitzer Music juries got to the popular music of the moment.




The honoring of hip hop marked an immense shift and might be a harbinger of things to come, as judges in this category, joining their peers in others, may now decide to take a broader view of the contemporary artistic landscape. Lamar is the real thing; about as far as you can get from hip hop-lite and user-friendly lyrics, he's insistently innovative and political, and very much grounded in the language and culture of his native South Central Los Angeles. (None of this year's music judges were hip hop musicians, but adding some now may also help to shake things up in the future.) But we will, I guess, see what happens going forward. The two finalists in the Music category fell into the more traditional classical/art music vein: Michael Gilbertson, for his string composition Quartet, and Ted Hearne, for his cantata for chamber orchestra, electric guitar, and percussion Sound from the Bench. In past years, either might have won.

I can imagine, however, that some classical musicians, who may already feel beleaguered by the shifts in the music industry as a whole and the reported declines in attendance at classical concerts, may now feel concern that what was their protected sphere, as far as widely known US national awards go, no longer exists. That may be true, but then perhaps the award should not have been called "Music," but more strictly named to reflect how much music and how many musicians had been excluded from consideration. Some prior classical music winners--Aaron Copland (1945), Charles Ives (1947), Virgil Thomson (1949), Gian-Carlo Menotti (1950), Samuel Barber (1958), Steve Reich (2009), and of course Marsalis and Coleman, have been in the ears of the wider public, or some of their music has (I recently heard one of Reich's most famous pieces, "Come Out," sampled in a hip hop song, and Barber's Adagio for Strings has been performed more than once on TV, etc.), but in general, far too many of the Music winners remained mostly unheard and unknown to a degree unlike anyother category, including Poetry or Drama.

Other winners in the "Letters, Drama & Music" section included poet Frank Bidart, for Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar Straus & Giroux), a nod towards his status as one of the senior, major figures in American poetry, and someone who had never received a Pulitzer before. I was very happy to see that the two finalists were two poets I know and admire, and collections I thought were stellar: Patricia Smith, for her collection Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press), and Evie Shockley, for her collection semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press). Given the threats university presses are facing these days, this was also a good vote of confidence in publishing in a genre that has remained the least commercial.

The poetry citation

The Fiction winner was novelist Andrew Sean Greer, for his comic novel Fiction Less (Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown and Company), and the finalists were In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press), and The Idiot, by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press).  In the Drama category, Maryna Majok's Cost of Living received the award; the two finalists were Everybody, by the very brilliant and talented young playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and The Minutes, by actor and playwright Tracy Letts. Bidart's and Greer's awards may have marked one of the rare times that the poetry and fiction winners were both out, gay male writers; had Jacobs-Jenkins also been honored, it would have marked a very rare trifecta.

In the History category, Jack E. Davis's The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis (Liveright/W.W. Norton), an exploration of the history of the Gulf of Mexico, received the committee's nod. The two finalists were Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, by Kim Phillips-Fein (Metropolitan Books), and Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by Steven J. Ross (Bloomsbury). The Biography recipient was Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books); the two finalists in that category were Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell (Doubleday), and Kay Redfield Jamison's Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (Alfred A. Knopf).

Lastly, under the arts and letters aegis, in the category of General Nonfiction, the winner was the highly praised study Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The two finalists were Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World, by Suzy Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, by Richard O. Prum (Doubleday)

I must admit that I have tended to pay less attention to the News winners, but some did catch my eye this year. First, art critic and provocateur--and former reality show judge!--Jerry Saltz received the Pulitzer in Criticism for his commentary in New York Magazine. I sometimes strongly disagree with Saltz's readings of exhibits and the general culture, but I do think he knows how to get readers to think about art and society.

In the Public Service category, the recipients were The New York Times, for coverage led by Jodi Kantor, and The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow, for their exploration of the sexual predation, harassment and abuse in Hollywood and other realms of US life, in response to the #MeToo moment and movement. The Washington Post won in the category of Investigative Reporting for its coverage of the Alabama Senate race, and its revelations of the Republican candidate Roy Moore's sexual abuse of an underage teenager; in part because of this necessary reporting, he may have been defeated by Democrat Doug Jones.

I must admit to some skepticism about the dual award in the National Reporting category, however; while the Washington Post rightly deserved a Pulitzer for its thoroughgoing attempts to enlighten the American public about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, the Pulitzer board moved the New York Times into contention for this award as well, and then jointly named that paper as a winner. Yet the Times has never explained its bizarre October 31, 2016 report that the FBI had determined there was no Russian interference in the election, which we now know was completely wrong based on multiple accounts, and not long after former public editor Liz Spayd attempted to answer the strange report--who gave the Times this information?--she was let go. Will we ever know what or who was behind that Times report, which provided official establishment and news ballast and support for the Trump campaign? Should the Times have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this work given this massive blunder?

Tyehimba Jess, Colson Whitehead Win Pulitzer Prizes

Tyehimba Jess

CONGRATULATIONS to poet and friend Tyehimba Jess, who was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his new collection Olio (Wave Press)! Winner of numerous awards, including a Whiting Foundation fellowship, Jess is a fellow NYU graduate and graduate fellow of Cave Canem. He is an associate professor at the CUNY College of Staten Island. His collection, for which he developed a new poetic form, the syncopated sonnet, explores the lives of a cavalcade of key 19th century African American artists and performers, many clustered around the minstrel tradition. The title, "Olio," is in fact a term for the variety acts in a minstrel show, a component of such performances that carried over into Vaudeville and burlesque. Jess's collection manages to be both formally and visually innovative, and historically and culturally humanizing, and underlines his standing as one of the major poets writing today.

Congratulations also to fiction writer Colson Whitehead, who received this year's Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel The Underground Railroad (Doubleday), which I am teaching this spring in my undergraduate literature class on history and myth in contemporary African Diasporic fiction. Whitehead's novel takes the concept of the Underground Railroad and transforms it, using the speculative mode, into a narrative that manages both to capture the essence of the fugitive system and  signify on a range of ideological nodes in US history, including state-sanctioned white supremacy, Progressive-era eugenicism, and precarious liberalism's inability to safeguard black life. Throughout Whitehead's skill, at every level of his prose, gleams, and his protagonist, Cora, as well as numerous minor figures, are not easily forgotten.

Colson Whitehead

Other winners this year in the arts and letters category include Lynn Nottage in the Drama category for her play Sweat; Heather Ann Thompson in the history category for her study Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon); Hisham Matar in the Biography category for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House); Matthew Desmond, in the General Nonfiction category, for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown); and composer Yu Dun, in the music category, for Angel's Bone, a multimedia opera. In the news category, Hilton Als received a Pulitzer in Criticism for his reviews in The New Yorker.

Lynn Nottage

I may be wrong, but I believe this is the most Black--4!--Pulitzer Prize winners ever, and the most ever received by authors and journalists of color. I guess we'll see if this is but a temporary shift or a harbinger of the future. (One of the oddest selections, though, was Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter and spinner of tissues of fantasy, in the Commentary selection. Perhaps this was supposed to reflect balance of some sort, but having read several of Noonan's columns this past year, I remain no less baffled than when I first heard the news.)

Noonan included, congratulations again to all this year's recipients, and please go out and buy of a copy of Olio, The Underground Railroad, and any of Als's books, and, before it closes and if you're in New York, catch Sweat! (I still have to myself.)

The Spring 2015 Awards & Prizes Season

Greg Pardlo reading at his
book party in November 2014

This afternoon I learned upon signing onto Facebook that the poet Greg Pardlo received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for his 2014 collection Digest, published by Four Way Books! This is a marvelous selection for an incredibly talented writer, and an excellent book of poems. CONGRATULATIONS TO GREG and to his publisher! I was fortunate to attend Greg's book launch last November at Dumbo Sky in Brooklyn, and after hearing him read and purchasing a copy I pored through the smart, inventive volume on the subway-and-PATH trip home. A graduate fellow of Cave Canem, Greg's first book of poetry, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, and published by Copper Canyon Press. That collection offered more than a few clear signals that he was on his distinctive, poetic way. In addition to writing poetry and criticism, Greg is a translator, and brought Pencil of Rays and Spike Mash by the Danish poet Niels Lyngsø into English. The other poetry finalists for this year's Pulitzer included the great poet Arthur Sze, for his collection Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press), and Alan Shapiro, for his collection Reel to Reel (University of Chicago Press).

Other Pulitzer Prize winners this year include fiction writer Anthony Doerr for his novel All the Light We Cannot See (published by Scribner); playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis for his play Between Riverside and Crazy (Suzan-Lori Parks was a finalist in this category for her play Father Comes Home from the War (Parts 1, 2, 3)); David I. Kertzer for his biography The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Random House); reporter Elizabeth Kolbert in the general nonfiction category for her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt); and composer Julia Wolfe in the music category for her oratorio for chorus and sextet Anthracite Fields (Red Poppy Music/G. Schirmer, Inc.). In the news category, no paper received an award for print coverage of the murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri or of Eric Garner in Staten Island, or any other similar state-sanctioned murders that occurred last year, nor for reportage or commentary on the subsequent protests, but the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, once part of the Pulitzer family of newspapers, did receive a Pulitzer in the Breaking News Photography category for its photojournalist coverage of the aftermath of Brown's death. Congratulations to all the finals and winners!

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I don't think I posted congratulations for Claudia Rankine, who was awarded both this year's National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and just the other day the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, for her timely invaluable book Citizen (Graywolf Press). This collection of innovative prose and verse texts had earned an unprecedented nomination in the criticism. Other recipients of the NBCC awards included Marilynne Robinson in fiction for Lila (FSG); David Brion Davis in history for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Knopf); Roz Chast in autobiography for her graphic novel Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury); John Lahr in biography for Tennessee Williams: Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W. W. Norton & Co.); and the late Ellen Willis in criticism for The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press). There were three other awards presented: Military veteran Phil Klay, who had won the National Book Award for fiction last fall, received the John Leonard Prize for his collection of short stories Redeployment (Penguin Press); Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; and Alexandra Schwartz received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

At the Los Angeles Festival of Books, which took place last week, other winners of book prizes included actor LeVar Burton, who was honored with the Innovator's Award for his successful, ongoing efforts to increase reading among children; Andrew Roberts in the biography for Napoleon: A Life (Viking); Jeff Hobbs in current interest for The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League (Scribner); Siri Hustvedt in fiction for The Blazing World (Simon & Schuster); Valeria Luiselli, with the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, for her book Faces in the Crowd (Coffee House Press); Jaime Hernandez in the Graphic Novel/Comics category for The Love Bunglers (Fantagraphics Books); Adam Tooze in history for The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Viking); Tom Bouman in the mystery/thriller category for Dry Bones in the Valley (W. W. Norton & Company); Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert in the science/technology category for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt & Co.); and Candace Fleming in the young adult category for The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (Schwartz & Wade/Random House Children’s). Congratulations to all the finalists and winners!

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This month also brought the announcement of the 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellows. The list is always a compendium of major and emerging figures in the broad areas the foundation supports, which include creative arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Among this year's cohort in creative arts and humanities are a number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, including Jeffrey Renard Allen, Brent Hayes Edwards, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Percival Everett, Cathy Park Hong, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Christina Pugh, Beryl Satter, and Akhil Sharma. Other literary figures receiving awards include Dan Beachy-Quick, Maud Casey, Vikram Chandra, Megan Daum, Matthew Dickman, Kristoffer Diaz, Rivka Galchen, Anthony Marra, Cate Marvin, Bernadette Mayer, Joshua Mehigan, Kevin Powers, Alex Ross, and Kenneth Warren. Also, visual artists such as Mel Chin, filmmakers like Akosua Adoma Owusu, philosophers like the aesthetician Dominic McIver Lopes, critics like G. Gabrielle Starr, composers like AACM member and chronicler George Lewis, and social scientists such as my former colleague the eminent psychologist Jennifer Richeson all received fellowships. Congrats to all the recipients!

Another Great Gatsby + Egan's Twitterature Experiment

Some people have too much money handy. What am I talking about? Baz Luhrman's initial trailer for his version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Watching this, I have one question, whose answers I already know (A: "Because he can; because the producers imagine dollars flowing in based on the name, stars, style; because Hollywood is intellectually bankrupt and seems to have forgotten that there are countless novels written since The Great Gatsby that might make interesting films; because etc."). Why?



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Jennifer Egan, who received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, has decided to share the beginning of her new novel, Black Box, via Twitter, as a series of Tweets via The New Yorker's feed @NYerFiction. She began doing so on Thursday night, and the first section is up on the magazine's site, as "Black Box." More than anything it reads to me less like Egan's other prose fiction that I've read--and she does write in a variety of voices, as A Visit from the Goon Squad exemplified--than a poetic experiment, the enforced concision of the 140 character pushing her towards a condensation whose result is aphorism, or something akin to it.  Think G. C. Lichtenberg, or E. M. Cioran. Were she wrapping these nuggets in ampler verbiage, I'd even cite the Walter Benjamin of One Way Street.

Take the opening lines:

People rarely look the way you expect them
to, even when you’ve seen pictures.

The first thirty seconds in a person’s
presence are the most important.

If you’re having trouble perceiving and
projecting, focus on projecting.

Unlike a prior experimenter in this microserialist format, Rick Moody, who in the late fall of 2009 tweeted a 153-tweet story, over 3 days, entitled "Some Contemporary Characters" for Electric Literature, she isn't allowing the sentences to run past the 140-character (Twitter's) limit, which is to say, to enjamb them. Or is the verb for sentences flowing past their technologically-enforced boundary "superlineate"? I asked on Twitter earlier whether "Twitterature" itself was a word (I imagine it is), and whether this text by Egan might not be a noteworthy contribution to it.

Japan has an entire fictional genre born of text messages; others, beyond Moody, like John Wray, have written stories and novels on Twitter; and our most recent inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander, like many predecessors, conceived of using the platform as a means for poetry.  Its asseverative quality seems especially apt for that oldest of literary forms. If Egan plans to proceed stylistically like this, I find it hard to believe she'll sustain this beyond a chapter or two. But she's as talented a writer as you'll find out there, so she probably has a larger design up her sleeve. I will certainly read the final version.

More Pulitzer Fallout + Eagleton Refinds Literature + MLB Baseball 2012

Ann Patchett (www.annpatchett.com)

The fallout from the Pulitzer Foundation's failure to award a fiction prize continues. The New York Times features three articles on it, the first a Media Decoder blog post (whose title is stronger than anything said in it--who's "fuming"?), Julie Bosman's straight news report, the third an Op-Ed by belauded author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, State of Wonder--which I suggested should have been a Pulitzer fiction consideree). The Daily Beast weighs in with more gossipy Sturm, if not Drang. Reggie H. directed me first to the Publishers Weekly Publishers' Launch site, and then to Laura Miller's Salon piece. Much speculation, none of the three judges are happy, nor are most publishers (or authors, it seems). It appears the board, which does include one truly amazing creative writer (and professor), Junot Díaz, couldn't agree on a choice. It got me thinking, on another note, that a sizable swath of the better-known and most original American fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, have not received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for their best works, or at all. This list would include William Faulkner, John dos Passos, Scott Fitzgerald, the major early novels of Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, all the Beats (Jack Kerouac in particular), Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., William Gaddis, James Baldwin, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Grace Paley, Samuel R. Delany, Donald Barthelme, Ursula LeGuin, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tim O'Brien, Sandra Cisneros, Bobbie Ann Mason,  Gayl Jones, John Edgar Wideman, Jayne Anne Phillips, Julia Álvarez, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Charles Baxter, T. C. Boyle, Mary Gaitskill, Sherman Alexie, David Foster Wallace, or George Saunders, just to name a few.  An august list, by any measure, though many of these folks are still with us and still writing, so....

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Today after the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium event featuring Russian prose writer Andrei Levkin (about which I'll blog tomorrow or so), I was chatting with a senior colleague and noting how humorous I found it that Terry Eagleton (1943-), the leading British Marxist literary and cultural critic who loomed over many discussions when I was an undergraduate in the late mid-1980s and who spent a great deal of his early career attempting, with some success (and help from others), to dispel the idea of literary value or literariness itself, has now decided that, in fact, there is such a thing as literary value and literariness and "literature," and that he, Terry Eagleton, is determined to describe and define it. This is not his first volta face; there was After Theory, almost a dozen years ago (2003).  Not that I'm mocking Eagleton, of course; his advocacy of theory, and many of his insights about the relationship between the literary and the aesthetic, interpretation and reading, and capitalist hegemony and empire, the primacy of social construction and the political, and so forth, are still quite valid. We forget them at our peril. Also: No text is completely transparent: this idea blazes as clear as a torch to this reader as day. But it has also always struck me that he and others might have gone too far, as he too has noted, and in The Event of Literature (Yale University Press, 2012), which sounds like he might be toking a good deal of Alain Badiou but isn't, he has taken up the idea, long ago cast away, that there is something called the "literary," or that there is something common to what we might call "literature," that he can subject to an Eagletonian taxonomy. I think many of us could have told him this. Baby, bathwater. According to this Stuart Kelly Guardian piece, Eagleton gets there via a more traditional (and to me reassuring, since I cite this person not infrequently, to bemusement, since I don't think he's considered so valid anymore) route: Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Wittgenstein of the later works, The Philosophical Investigations, Lectures on Aesthetics, Brown and Blue Books, that Wittgenstein, not the one who thought everything could be contained within a logical treatise.  According to Kelly, Eagleton essentially returns to a "common sense" (or pragmatic view) of what literature is, creating five categories--fictional, moral, linguistic, non-pragmatic, and normative--which those things we call "literary" possess at least some combination or all of. I haven't read the book, so I can't assess the argument, but it sounds very interesting, and I think Wittgenstein's concepts of familial resemblances and particular kinds of language games are a way back into a means of linking disparate texts. Kelly's critique is generous and fair. He finds Eagleton's argument "elegant" but "fuzzy," witty and sometimes felicitous in his aphoristic skill, but also thinks facts belie certain his assertions, particularly in the "moral" and "linguistic" categories. Kelly concludes with: "When, as a critic, I call something literature, I mean that it expands the field of what literature can be. David Foster Wallace is literature. Jonathan Franzen just tried to write a literary novel." I'm no great fan of Franzen, but The Corrections certain is literature, and I find a good deal of Wallace--I do like some of his work, let me be clear--trying too hard (and his fans, legion though they be, trying very hard to convince others). I guess this means I'll be reading this book at some point, once it's published (officially, May 12, 2012), as I have many of Eagleton's others, with a trained and skeptical eye...

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C. C. Sabathia (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

It's baseball season, and I admit to not following so closely, because I have too many other things to fixate on right now. But I am still saddened that Albert Pujols now wears the uniform of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (the most unfelicitous team name in history), and will not man first base for the World Series champion Saint Louis Cardinals. He went out in style, though, and now has a 10-year mega-contract to ensure that no matter what happens, his family will be set for life. The Cardinals are relying much more on pitching this year, a mix of veterans (Rafael Furcal, Javier Molina, Matt Holliday) and newbies (Matt Carpenter, free agent Carlos Beltrán), and the return of David Freese's bat. So far they've ascended to the top of the NL Central Division's heap, with an 8-3 record. Can they keep it up? I hope so.

The other currently top 2 NL beyond the Cardinals are the Washington Senators (I'm not joking), and the formerly financially shaky Los Angeles Dodgers. The Senators have some of the league's better young players and pitching sensation Stephen Strasburg, who is back from arm surgery and up through today has struck out 19 batters in 19 innings. He's only one of a very sharp pitching staff. The Dodgers have some of the league's best field players, including almost-MVP and Rihanna ex, coverboy Matt Kemp, as well as André Ethier, and Juan Rivera, and superb pitching, including 2011 Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw, who went 21-5 last year with a 2.28 ERA. Other teams that look good so far: the New York Mets and the Arizona Diamondbacks. The rest of the league, at least thus far? Meh.

This season's major distraction has been Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen's impromptu praise of Fidel Castro, which led to profuse apologies and a 5-game suspension. He probably could have gotten away with what he said anywhere else, including New York, but he'll be apologizing till the end of the season given the team he's managing, unless the Marlins manage to end up scaling their division. That team has pulled out miracles in the past, but this season, I'm not so sure.

In the AL, last year's World Series runners up, the Texas Rangers, are again setting the pace at 9-2. They have the cast and the tools to go all the way this year. Whether they can achieve their aims is another question. They definitely are playoff caliber. The Detroit Tigers lead the AL Central Division, and have been one of the better teams in this league for the last decade. They possess a reliable, solid fielding core, led by outfield Miguel Cabrera, as well as hefty slugger Prince Fielder, and they have the league's best pitcher in Justin Verlander, who won last year's Cy Young Award.

In the AL East, the New York Yankees are middling at 6-5; it is only April, and pitching star C. C. Sabathia just won his first game tonight. But the team in general looks long in the tooth; a number of its veteran players--Derek Jeter, Alex Rodríguez, Raul Ibanez, are approaching the end of their careers and only Jeter isn't playing as if this is the case--and the youngsters--Mark Teixeira, Robinson Cañó, Nick Swisher--haven't yet hit their stride this season. Senescent or not, they're never a team to count out.

The other AL East teams are keeping pace with the Yankees. The Baltimore Orioles, a team accustomed to bottom-dwelling these last few years, leads the division. Reviewing their stats leaders and lineup, I hardly recognize even a single name, save Wilson Betemit. Maybe they have the chops for a run. We'll see. What we can see now is that the Boston Red Sox are in last place, a bit of a surprise after their amazing run in the early 2000s. Stepping to the plate every day for them are David "Big Papi" Ortiz, Dustin Pedroia, and Adrian González, and their always strong corps of hurlers. The Yankees and everyone else are surely keeping an eye on them. Sleeping serpents. Let's hope they keep slumbering, as opposed to lumbering in the bat department, all the way through October.

In the AL West the Angels have posted more losses, 7, than wins, 4. It's only April, though. Albert Pujols is batting only .268, with no homers. I wish him the best, and hope he resumes his Hall of Famer pace. The Angels have good pitching (Jered Weaver, C. J. Wilson, Danny Haren) and a host of veterans alongside Pujols, so they should return to form soon enough. It's going to take everything to catch those Rangers. They really look great, again.  Rangers and Cardinals? I'm not betting on it, at least not yet, it the rematch would be sweet.

Pulitzers Say No Go In Fiction

In the wake of today's announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prizes, which in the Arts and Letters categories went to:

• Tracy K. Smith in poetry, for her collection Life on Mars;  
• Quiara Alegría Hudes in drama for her play Water by the Spoonful;
• John Lewis Gaddis in biography for his critical biography Geore F. Kennan: An American Life;
• Stephen Greenblatt in general nonfiction for his critical history and analysis Swerve: How the World Became Modern;
• Kevin Puts in music, for his opera Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts;
• and the late Manning Marable, in history, after it was moved from biography, for Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention;

across the nets people have been noting the decision by the fiction jury, comprising Chair Susan Larson, former book editor at The Times-Picayune and, host of the show The Reading Life on WWNO-FM; Maureen Corrigan, critic in residence at Georgetown University and book critic of NPR's Fresh Air, and novelist and 1999 Pulitzer fiction recipient Michael Cunningham, not to award any of the three finalists the award this year. Who were the three finalists? Dennis Johnson, for Train Dreams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Northwestern University alumna Karen Russell, for Swamplandia! (New York: Alfred A. Knopf); and the late David Foster Wallace, for The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown and Company).

People online have put forward various reasons why none of these novels met the grade. Johnson's supposedly was a republication of an earlier book; Wallace's was posthumously assembled and hardly his strongest work (he was ignored by the Pulitzer committee while he was alive, it should be noted); and Russell's novel, named to top 10 and 25 lists by Publisher's Weekly and NPR...I don't know what happened. The committee (or whoever puts forward the finalists) ignored all of the US finalists and the winner of this yearly cycle's National Book Critics Circle Award. Edith Pearlman (who won for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories), Dana Spiotta (Stone Arabia), Teju Cole (whose Open City I have read and thought one of the best of the year), and Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot), a prior Pulitzer winner in 2002 for his novel Middlesex, were passed over. So too did the Pulitzer committee ignore all of this yearly cycle's National Book Award winners and finalists, who included winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones), Pearlman, Andrew Krivak (The Sojourn), Téa Obreht (whose The Tiger's Wife has received rapturous praise) and Julie Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic), who did receive this year's PEN Faulkner Award for this book.

(I should note that women of color have received more awards this literary award cycle, among them last year's National Book Awards for Fiction and Poetry, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and this year's Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and Drama, perhaps than ever before, a very good sign, not that you'd know this from the lack of attention these authors still generally receive.)

And I could list a raft of works of fiction, novels, short stories, novellas, published since last year's Pulitzer, that should have been seriously considered. So what gives? I don't know, but I also don't know why such an eccentric list emerged in the first place. If anything, given the alleged knock against Johnson's text (and he has received many of the highest literary honors, including the National Book Award for his 2007 novel Tree of Smoke) and the desire, perhaps, not to throw Wallace a posthumous honor, why not just give the prize to Russell, if she made the final trio?  This is, as others who've perused the net are quite aware, not the first time the Pulitzer jury, or the board overseeing the awards, has decided not to name a winner. In 1977 the fiction jury recommended prize go to Norman MacLean for A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (which Robert Redford in 1992 transformed into a beautiful but glacially slow film), but the Pulitzer board, which has sole discretion for awarding the prize, supposedly did not give it. In1974, the fiction jury unanimously recommended the prize go to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but the Pulitzer board apparently said nyet. And in 1971, none of the three novels, The three novels the Pulitzer committee put forth for consideration to the Pulitzer board, Eudora Welty's Losing Battles; Saul Bellow's seethingly racist Mr. Sammler's Planet; and Joyce Carol Oates's The Wheel of Love, were all rejected, thus no award. Bellow received the award in 1976 for Humboldt's Gift, a lesser but less offensive novel, while Welty received it in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter, when any collection of her short stories more obviously merited the honor. Oates has never received the prize, nor has MacLean or Pynchon.

Usually, it seems, there are politics operating behind the scenes, so who knows. Had the Pulitzer Board--which includes many luminaries quite familiar with literature, including classicist, philosopher and political scientist Danielle Allen (of the Institute for Advanced Studies); Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz (also a professor at MIT); author and Columbia J school dean Nicolas Lemann; and University of Pennsylvania historian of the US South and African American history Paul Hahn--felt that none of the selections were adequate, I wish they'd just have picked a book themselves--by Justin Torres (We the Animals), say, or Tayari Jones (Silver Sparrow), or Amy Waldman (The Submission) or Kevin Brockmeier (The Illuminations), or Ann Patchett (State of Wonder), or P. Zamora Lindmark (Leche), or Donald Ray Pollack (The Devil All the Time), or any of the other writers listed above.

Of course some may say who cares? Yes, there have been criticisms that Pulitzer, particularly in the fiction category, usually honors a writer not for her or his best work but sometimes as a form of redress for having missed out on the best work (cf. Faulkner, Hemingway, Bellow, etc.). But recent Pulitzers in fiction have defied this. Is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao not Junot Díaz's masterpiece thus far? Was Middlesex not Jeffrey Eugenides's finest novel? Was The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, not perfectly realized? So that canard ought to be tossed out the window, at least as of recent winners (and nominees). But more importantly, the Pulitzer name, for the winners and finalists, does help draw recognition to literary fiction, and also helps sales, and there are few serious writers living in the US today--not a single person listed above, including the most successful ones--who could not benefit from a sales boost. Let's hope they find three finalists and a sure winner next year.

Congrats to Rae Armantrout + Poem: Rae Armantrout

A busy, busy week so far, and it's only Monday, so let me take time, even briefly, to congratulate poet Rae Armantrout, a longtime and important figure among several innovative writing communities in the US, for winning this year's Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for her newest book, Versed (Wesleyan University Press), which was also a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. (She was in Chicago a month ago, and I did get to meet her and secure her autographs; I hope she's back through town soon.)

In several of the Pulitzer categories, this was a banner year for small presses; the other poetry nominees were Tryst by Angie Estes, published by Oberlin College Press, and Inseminating the Elephant, by Lucia Perillo, published by Copper Canyon Press. The fiction category winner, Tinkers, by Paul Harding, was published by Bellevue Literary Press, another small press, and the other nominees included Lydia Millet's Love in Infant Monkeys, published by Soft Skull Press, and Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Voices, a highly touted debut published by the venerable mid-sized publisher and distributor W. W. Norton.

Other Arts & Letters winners included (Drama) the musical Next to Normal, music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey; (History) Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (The Penguin Press); (Biography) The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf); (General Nonfiction) The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday); and (Music) Violin Concerto by Jennifer Higdon (Lawdon Press).  Also, the late Hank Williams Sr. was honored for "his craftsmanship as a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life." ??? Uh, okay.

Trib Kaput + SCOTUS No to Crazy + Art Bubble? + AAWW Awards

So it's happened, the Tribune Company has filed for bankruptcy. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post has the goods on the CEO, Sam Zell, whose financial legerdemain has put the company's employees' stock option funds (ESOP) at severe risk--i.e., the shares are now worthless--while ensuring that his own stake ($315 million down out of the $8.2 billion private buyback, of which $225 million was a promissory note!) was relatively small, and his own empire remains untouched. Oh, and if you didn't get your severance in a lump sum, you probably aren't getting it at all. How did Hamlet put it in his famous prose passage about man(kind): "The paragon of animals" indeed, though don't think your beloved cat or dog or salamander would pull a number like this one! But you can't say the employees weren't warned; in fact, this is what Zell told two Tribune reporters when discussing the original deal to purchase the Tribune: "The deal...isn't going to change my lifestyle, no matter what happens....It's likely to change yours significantly." So at least you can't say he's a liar. It'll be interesting to see what happens now. I wonder if the papers will be spun off and operate as independent (broke) entities, while Zell holds onto the TV stations, which remain quite valuable. The Cubs franchise and the stadium weren't part of the bankruptcy filing because he's trying to sell both, but one of the likeliest buyers, Dallas Mavericks owner (and soon-to-be-neighbor to W) Mark Cuban is under investigation for insider trading. At a time when we need an active and engaged press, and in particular news organizations with the power and heft to conduct investigations and challenge the government and corporations, the Tribune Company's increasingly eviscerated newspapers, one of them, the LA Times once one of the top four in the country, list like scuttled but still seaworthy ships towards a bleak, unsettling future.

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I haven't commented on the auto industry bailout just yet, because I still haven't assimilated all the public details, but in general I do believe that if the government is going to bail out the banking and shadow banking system, which includes an entity like AIG, then the big three automakers, who sit at the center of a vast industrial web, ought to get help as well. It should be conditional, I think, based on a complete change of the top leadership of all three companies; a longterm plan for green technology, increasing fuel efficiency, and continuous modernization; a sustainable benefits package, negotiated with the autoworkers unions, for employees and retirees (which would include helping to push for universal, single-payer health care); and a restructuring, with the cooperation of states and the federal government, of the current regulation of brands, dealerships, and so on. Those would be starting points. Economists and people more familiar with the auto industry have deeper insights about all of this, but in general, I defer on the side of helping the companies, and the people they employ, than letting them crash. One thing I hadn't realized is that black workers would be disproportionately affected if the auto industry collapsed. Which is probably what has led to this phenomenon, though the article notes that the cardinal archbishop of Detroit is also soliticing prayers and organized an ecumenical outreach to Congress to press for support. Something about the current administration's response, however, strikes me as being not the right one....

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The Supreme Court said NO to the crazy today. Clarence Thomas unfortunately has a job (for life), so what is Alan Keyes going to do? Start preparing to run for the US Senate seat in Delaware?

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Is the contemporary art market like the tulip mania bubble of the 1630s? Is it on the verge of bursting? Will we soon be talking about some other values beyond "exchange value"? Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford think and say so in their Prospect article. (So whither the likes and fortunes of Elizabeth Peyton (at right,
"Live to ride," 2003) Takashi Murakami, Neo Rauch, and others?)

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Web writers are now eligible for Pulitzer Prizes! With conditions, of course, and not in the creative categories. But things are certainly changing.... Now, will all the people who continue to spout off about blogs being written by pajama'ed 20-somethings lounging around in their parents' basements, or a claque of liars who'll "say anything" at all, and so forth, please, please, please find a clue?

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Possible interesting fact I learned after my reading tonight: you can buy 7 guns per day in Virginia, but only two Louis Vuitton special edition purses per day there, or anywhere is. Is this really true? It seems not: certain brands limit purchases to 3 luxury handbags every 30 days. Or they did--before the downturn.

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Tonight the Asian American Writers Workshop held its annual awards ceremony in New York. I'm in Chicago so I wasn't able to attend, but this year's winners included a Lifetime Achievement Award to playwright David Henry Hwang, the fiction award to Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt), the nonfiction award to Vijay Prashad for The Darker Nations (New Press), and the poetry award to Sun Yung Shin for Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press). As part of the event, Hwang reunited with actor B.D. Wong for a reading and celebration the landmark play, M. Butterfly, which they also discussed with Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists!