Posts tagged as Howard Jacobson
Let's Name Our Hanukkah Candles!
Howard Jacobson, this year's Man Booker Prize winner, has an op-ed in today's Times complaining about the lameness of Hanukkah. He's right. Hanukkah is so the Mets. That's what you get, I suppose, when you elevate a minor holiday to major-league status. Sure, it's nice to try make Jewish children feel less bad about living in a world that hates them, but how are you going to compete with Christmas? It's like scheduling Chuck against Dancing With the Stars. "So what’s to be done?" Jacobson writes. "Either Hanukkah should merge with Christmas—a suggestion against which the arguments are more legion even than the Syrian-Greek army—or it should be spiced up with the sort of bitter irony at which the Jewish people excel. Instead of the dreidel, give the kids their own cars for Hanukkah, in memory of the oil that should have run out but didn’t. Maybe we should also dedicate each candle to one of the more recent narrow escapes of Jewish history. The Spanish Inquisition candle. The Russian Pogroms candle." READ MORE
Writers Like Prizes
"In a perfect world, where the words you write are immediately found and lauded by those you write them for – the whole of humanity, no less – a prize would not be necessary. But since humanity is deaf, or just too busy to give a damn, and since there seems to be a disconnect between those who want to read a good novel and those who write them – as though the world of reading is one big lonely hearts club waiting for a matchmaker – there must be prizes to bring us together. In which case, yes, thank you, I would like to win one." READ MORE
Jew I Like Wins Award
Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question has won the 2010 Booker Prize.
Booker Prize Shortlist
Howard Jacobson (a personal favorite) is among the six writers to make the shortlist for this year's Man Booker prize. The others are Emma Donoghue, Damon Galgut, Andrea Levy, Peter Carey and Tom McCarthy.
Howard Jacobson For Beginners
"That's the great test, if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing? There's nothing more wonderful than when the comedy's got horror in it, got blood in it. And the seriousness is at all times aware of its own preposterousness. What's it for, this seriousness? Everything is loss, is nothing, in the end." READ MORE
Underpants Bomber Explained
Oh, right, the underpants bomber. Here's a theory: "Those who hate religion will see this as another instance of God's murderousness. But religion is only the smokescreen. The great atheist tyrannies of the last century recruited their foot soldiers in an identical manner-targeting partially educated, preferably pampered, but certainly crestfallen young men for whom the usual safety valves of dissoluteness have for some reason failed to open. We should remember this when we rail against the morals of the young. Next time we are honked at by a stretch-limoload of vomiting adolescents we should give a little prayer of thanks. As long as they're out on the town pissed they're not in their rooms drawing up plans to blow up aeroplanes. Ditto sex."
My Ricky Gervais Problem
Although his personal prejudices and cultural bugaboos are occasionally too much to take-and, well, whose aren't? God knows I tire of my own frequently enough-I am on the whole a big fan of Independent columnist Howard Jacobson, who happened to write what may be my favorite novel from the previous decade. Anyway, his column this weekend did an excellent job of expressing a discomfort with a popular figure that I had been thus far unable to put into words. READ MORE
