Louise Gluck Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature (nytimes.com) 44
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Louise Gluck, one of America's most celebrated poets, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." The award was announced at a news conference in Stockholm. From a report: Gluck, who was born in New York in 1943, has written numerous poetry collections, many of which deal with the challenges of family life and growing older. They include "The Wild Iris," for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and "Faithful and Virtuous Night," about mortality and grief, from 2014. She was named the United States' poet laureate in 2003. At the Nobel announcement, Anders Olsson, the chair of the prize-giving committee, praised her minimalist voice and especially poems that get to the heart of family life. "Louise Gluck's voice is unmistakable," he said. "It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals this poet wants to be understood." But he also said her voice was also "full of humor and biting wit."
Once again, a massive snub to nerds & geeks (Score:5, Funny)
The Nobel Prize committee has failed to recognize the virtues of Vogon Poetry!
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The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me.
Louise Gluck
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The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me.
Burma Shave
Not the first time... (Score:2)
Surreal as fuck (for me, at least); still not news for nerds, though.
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Her son Noah was my roommate in school. His dad called one day, asked for Noah (who wasn't there) and then asked me to relay to him that his mom had just won the Pulitzer for poetry.
Surreal as fuck (for me, at least); still not news for nerds, though.
Let he who has never told a tangentially relevant anecdote from their youth cast the first stone.
WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
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There are many kinds of nerds, with a wide variety of interests. While you may prefer reading K&R, some of us also enjoy traditional literature, even if we couldn't write it ourselves.
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There are many kinds of nerds, with a wide variety of interests. While you may prefer reading K&R, some of us also enjoy traditional literature, even if we couldn't write it ourselves.
Just because you can be a nerd about anything does not mean anything is news for nerds. You are engaging in reductio ad nerdum.
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Should Slashdot start posting articles for all of the sports nerds then?
Have you seen the types of analytics used in sports now? Here's a list of roughly 50 different analytic metrics used in baseball alone:
http://m.mlb.com/glossary/adva... [mlb.com]
And that is on top of the other standard baseball stats(over 70):
http://m.mlb.com/glossary/stan... [mlb.com]
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There are so many different types of Nerds.
There are many different stories on how the Term Nerds came to be. My Favorite one is that it came from RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) Where it was originally spelt knurd or drunk backwards. To differentiate the people who were studying vs the ones going out to party.
So the knurd or now the Nerd, is someone who enjoys intellectual pursuits over more primal enjoyment.
So this could be applied to people who enjoy poetry and literature vs what it currently is
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So the knurd or now the Nerd, is someone who enjoys intellectual pursuits over more primal enjoyment.
So this could be applied to people who enjoy poetry and literature vs what it currently is applied to the people who enjoy Math and Science.
I would say it goes further than that, to someone who shows greater than normal interest, to an almost academic level, of any pursuit. You can have STEM nerds. You can have literary nerds, history nerds, etc. You can have sports nerds (people who know so much historical trivia, or statistics, or-especially these days- analytics). It's not limited to certain subjects.
The Hugo is better (Score:3, Interesting)
Nerds care about... (Score:1)
...Umlauts! Glück!
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Gluck gluck. I am chicken bort
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Naz1s gonna hate...
Poetry (Score:3)
Do people actually read poetry? Is there even money in it? Go to recitations? People buy books with poems in them and read it? Is poet a viable profession, like say songwriting.
I am asking these questions seriously.
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I don't know about poetry, but I know philosophy pays so little that a bunch of them had to form a guild [philosophersguild.com] just to survive.
Re:Poetry (rambling response) (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder the same thing. And I think it's become true of 'serious' literature in general. When I was younger I made an attempt at reading the serious contemporary writers, John Updike, Saul Bellow, William Styron, and, I didn't feel like I got much out of it. Norman Mailer I prefer when he wrote non-fiction; he's almost the original gonzo journalist. Even Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald seem overrated to me. Faulkner suits me a little better. On the other hand, I've enjoyed works by 19th writers li
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> Do people actually read poetry?
Yes. Some of us do read a little, and a few read a lot. That only seems bizarre because your school probably tried to make you *like* poetry, which C.S. Lewis pointed out is a sure way to make something impossible to like.
> Is there even money in it?
Not much. As with other literary writing jobs (e.g. novelist), the number of people who get paid for doing it is small, and very few make enough to live on. For example Gluck also has an adjunct professor gig.
It's not t
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Yes, people read poetry and buy poetry books.
I cannot tell whether one can have a sustainable life by focusing on poetry as their main activity. However, lots of people do this as a "side quest".
Writing poetry is a challenge - you have to think of what you want to say, then you have to encode it in a way that rhymes and sounds nice, takes word-play into account. As a bonus, you can bake in hidden references to certain events or things that only some readers will understand (which enables them to perceive th
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Many song writers are poets. Leonard Cohen for example.
Like any writing, most of them don't make much money, but a few can make a living at it.
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It just occurred to me that there's something else that should be said in this context - why is poetry not so popular?
My guess is that this is rooted in our educational system. At least in my area (Moldova, in Eastern Europe), we had to learn poems by heart and recite them in class. Though I understand that some people enjoy it, I didn't see the fun in it.
Some poets would write romantic verses about their feelings - to me, at that age, it meant nothing. I understood the words, but I could not relate to that
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I remember a Jay Leno joke, which went something like this:
"So-and-so has been named California's Official Poet. The position comes with a $50/month stipend. Thus making So-and-so the worlds highest-paid poet."
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I participate in a monthly writing workshop, and as a member, I write poetry. The answer to most of your questions is that poetry is rather a long-tail activity today, which is to say, there's a lot of it, in great variety, not a lot of people read it, and there isn't a lot of money in it. I and other members of my group occasionally place a piece of work in a journal or magazine. There's often a little honorarium for publishing, maybe $20 at the low end, maybe $200 at the high, and a free print copy of the
New for Nerds (Score:2)
Not "News for Nerds" Complainers:
Nobody forced you to click on the link.
Who is a good student? (Score:1)