Ever since the Salman Rushdie affair ive held to the principle i will not read anything i did not intend to read just because it gets publicity from manufactured contrived happenings.From what little ive heard from those who felt obliged to read the ersatz weak in fact , flimsy in circumstance drivel have certainly concurred with my judgement.
Howard Jacobson , journeyman author and mawkish , dressed up as funny , column writer was pretty scaving of "corporate" awards such as the Man-Booker as well , until he won it , now , hence the mawk in mawkish , he can see some tantalisingly , cant quite put your finger on it ,integral value in it.It is an authors equivalent of a committed socialist life long champion of trade unions accepting a peerage in the House of Lords.Jacobson likes to , glibly ( his defence shield and substance and artistic integrity), compare himself as the Jewish Jane Austin , though he would be more accurate in comparing himself as the literary John Prescott.
What what its worth below is a video of what the prize winning Book , The Finkler Question.
It does seem the dumbing down factor in attention spans is coming into play , less than four months from the awarding of the prize , and the obligatory free inches of column space only the spin-doctors of the publishing corporate powerhouses could generate , it seems the novelty is waring off.I purchased a ticket for myself a couple of days before the event , advertised by massive poster campaign in the shop which was hard to miss , and noticed a large thick as a fist batch of tickets unsold.My wife desired to go , so i went the next day thinking the tickets would be whittled down to at least a one finger thickness,but no , not one ticket had been sold from the last one a bought the day before , even though author events in the same week had SOLD OUT displays all around.
Alas the event itself had a pitiful turnout , having heard Howard Jacobson i was less desirous of reading the Book than i was before , as was my Wife.He did make a decent point about the drop in standards in teaching literature in the Universities , citing the lecturers themselves are incapable of reading challenging Books , yet alone encourage their pupils to do so.According to Jacobson the rot started when the concept of relevance was brought into the educational system , this meant Books in the curriculum had to be "easily" readable for the kids , which in turn meant any Book deemed as challenging was replaced by ones which had a likeability factor.And now we are reduced to lectures as well as pupils who determine from page one if they "like" a Book and if not leave it and go onto the next one , "like" in this instance being a euphemism for a Book challenging the reader to confront a Book which compels them to think for themselves how to counter the views in a Book with their own well argued concepts which can stand of the scrutiny of societies top down ideals.
As for Jacobsons political views , there is not much to add to the observations of Belinksy over a 150 years ago.They can be summed but as an ill-fitting pastiche of weak intellectual oxymoron's and philosophical non-sequitors masquerading as informed opinion.All in all a very juvenile effort from someone pitifully lightweight in matters of perspicacity if you are being kind or mendacious malfeasance if you want to attribute logic and a thought out motivation to his stance.I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt , though from the attendance and the piles and piles of his latest offering lying about as if waiting for a black bin bag to take them on their final journey i wonder if Glasgow has not sussed him out ahead of the pack.
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