Ignobel Poem by gershon hepner

Tolstoy, Nabokov and Joyce,
Borges and Orwell, Conrad, Twain
all failed to be the Nobel choice,
which causes me a lot of pain.
Like them ignobel, I won’t win
this most prestigious literary prize;
of all these losers I’m the twin,
and yet they should apologize
to Joyce and Nabokov as well
as Proust, whom I forgot, and Twain,
and let George Orwell gives them hell
because their verdicts are insane,
for they have foolishly forgotten
another author whom I like
a lot, which proves they’re really rotten:
the recently deceased Updike.

Of course there truly is still time
to remedy their grave mistakes,
selecting me, although my rhyme
will never sweep the Stockholm stakes,
because for them it’s too eccentric,
and not politically correct,
and since it is not Eurocentric,
how can it gain their deep respect?
My writings never will go global,
or be what few men would desire,
and yet I hope that, though ignobel,
I may still light some women’s fire.

I completed thus poem, begun in 2000, on October 9,2009, the day after the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded not to the Israeli author Amos Oz but Herta Müller, a relatively unknown Romanian-born German novelist, and a year after a relatively unknown French writer, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was the winner. Dwight Garner discusses why the prize “shies from predictability, ” noting how many great writers have not won it.
Burton Feldman, a specialist in the history of ideas and science, in 'The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige' (Arcade,362 pages, $29.95) plumbs the reasons for the Nobel's enduring glory. He points to the prize's monetary value, which has risen (though at a sadly lesser rate than the stock market) to $1 million from $40,000; the seeming universality of an award that honors good books as well as good physics; and the mystique of a prize controlled by little-known (in the U.S., anyway) academies in countries where it is dark in winter. Prizes are sometimes awarded in error, but they are never rescinded, nor are the names of the all-important nominators - experts in each of the various fields - revealed. This has resulted in some unhappy choices - one child molester, later convicted; the wrong co-discoverer of insulin; the father of what was not a cure for cancer - but once the ballots are dropped in a silver pitcher next to a bust of Gustav III, the decision is final. (Floridians, take note.) Mr. Feldman observes, 'The effect is of magisterial authority and finality.'
The author has nothing to say about the frequency of Jewish laureates, more than a sixth of 700 winners thus far, though he lists them separately in an appendix. This will not do. They either merit discussion or not; the appendix hangs like a pregnant chad. My other complaint is with Mr. Feldman's prose, which is only workaday and tends to crack in the higher octaves, as when he asserts: 'Those honored are forever of the Elect.' But for a well-researched guide to the merriment in Stockholm, his will do fine. Freud was hardly the only notable omission. Gandhi didn't win the prize for peace; Tolstoy, Joyce, Conrad, Nabokov, Orwell and Twain were passed over for literature. The Nobel's errors of commission were just as bad. Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist, watched lobotomies being performed on chimps and adapted it to humans in 1936. Of 20 luckless subjects, Moniz declared that seven had been 'cured' (of anxiety and, apparently, everything else) . Though the procedure was immediately denounced as a 'mutilation' and though Moniz was unable to state what, precisely, he was doing, thousands more 'operations' were performed and Moniz was Nobelized for medicine in 1949.


12/8/00,10/9/09