Nobel Prize fight

I hate Horace Engdahl. The nobel judge of literature from Sweden announced a week before the award was to be given that American writers are too ignorant to compete for writing's top prize, effectively dashing in advance any hopes U.S. authors had of winning this year's award. And after the top U.S. literary authorities were predictably insulted and fired back, Engdahl did the most loathsome - and typically European - thing possible - he said he was surprised by the "violent" reaction from America and he didn't see what the big deal was about.

They ended up giving it to French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who no doubt writes in a rigid, romantic style that suits Engdahl's narrow-minded definition of literature.

So our best move as Americans right now? Perhaps it's to point out that the U.S. has won more Nobel prizes in literature than Engdahl's native Sweden (8-6.5)? Or mention, as The New Yorker editor David Remnick did, the historic overlooking of Proust, Joyce and Nabokov for the prize, three huge gaffes in hindsight? Or maybe bring up the fact that by his own admission, one of the top Nobel judges is a bigot and allows his personal beliefs to affect his opinion of the literature he judges, severely damaging the credibility of the Nobel Prize for Literature?

What a butthole.