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Special Feature: In Pursuit of a New President
The College is on the hunt for its seventeenth president after James Wright announced his June 2009 resignation. A search committee has been formed; its antecedental task is the resolution of this question: is this a time for steady-as-she-goes, or is there a mandate for fresh leadership? Updates here.
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Le Clézio Wins Nobel in Literature
This column has already made note of Horace Engdahl’s announcement that America is D.Q.’d forevermore from the Nobel prizes in literature because “[t]he US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature …That ignorance is restraining.”
This is something approaching a compliment, because the Swedes who hold sway over the name of Nobel have an established preference for writing that is obvious, pompous, political, and ultimately unbeautiful. “It must give pleasure,” &c., are not the touchstones of the Nobel committee. In fact it may be accurate to say that a piece of literary art must cause extreme displeasure in order to be considered for the top prize. Others like Roger Kimball and James Panero have written more ably about this, but it seems rather an undoing of the critical faculty that the criterion of quality art is now, more than anything else, complexity, with the transcendent omega being incomprehensibility. But, no: incomprehensibility into which can be read a leftist politic is nothing less than genius. On this score it is worth noting that the only American author to win the prize in recent years was Toni Morrison.
Anyway the winner of the latest Nobel prize in literature has been named. He is Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. He is, we are told, concerned with ecology, the bygone European colonial period, and “melancholy.” And speak of the devil…
Featured posts
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November 17, 2008
Reconsidering Prop 8
Dartblog has been covering and opining on the gay marriage debate, particular in reference to “Prop 8” California’s recent constitutional amendment to ban the practice. Some past thoughts here. I have been mulling the issue… -
October 28, 2008
Debate: College Democrats v. College Republicans
Here I am in 3 Rockefeller Hall, liveblogging the fourth and most important presidential debate of this election season: the one held right here, in this room, between the Dartmouth College Democrats and the Dartmouth… -
October 13, 2008
Frontrunners
You know we’re both amiable in our own sense—in our own senses, and I think that, basically, you know, us together produces a force of, uh, amiab—amiability which is, ahh, a synergical force of amiability… -
October 6, 2008
Alumni, Students Fighting for the Vote at Colgate
The movement to get alumni involved and included in the governance of colleges and universities is alive at Colgate. A Better Colgate is campaigning “to elect a majority of the members of the Board of… -
October 4, 2008
Saturday at the Savoy
The cavernous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, which ran the length of a full city block and required three big bands to float the beat across the hall, was the inspiration for Edgar Sampson’s 1934 tune… -
October 3, 2008
Liveblogging the Presidential Search Committee Forum
About 50 people have turned up to the student Presidential Search Committee Forum today in Collis Common Ground. About 20 are students. Chairman of the search committee Al Mulley ‘70 opened with vagaries, a great…