Harold Pinter wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Now, I actually haven't seen or read as much Pinter as I should, so this post is not about the rights or wrongs of the award. I'll merely note the fact that, as the BBC News said,

His spare style, full of threatening silences, has given rise to the adjective "Pinteresque".

I'd say when your style gives rise to an adjective, named after you no less, that people recognize the meaning of even if they don't know your work...it can fairly be said you've had an profound effect on your field.

But again, this post is not about that. No, this is another in my series on the fascinating (to me) way the rightward blogs of the world view the arts.

Let's start with The Right Coast, where one Tom Smith manages to out-Kerry Kerry when it comes to long-winded, redundant rambling. Quoted in toto:

Pinter wins Nobel Prize in Literature
By Tom Smith

Do you care? I don't care. All that existential yak yak bores me to tears. It's so boring, I'd rather watch a NASCAR race, and that's saying something. British lefty moral superiority also bores me senseless. I'm glad I don't live in the UK anymore, except I do miss the ale at lunch time and the sausage and eggs, even if it is a good way to get Mad Cow. I think we should just deal with the fact that sometimes life sucks, and spare ourselves the agony of sitting through a Pinter play. Sometimes life sucks. Now you know. That wasn't so bad, was it? And it didn't take the whole evening. Now there's time to go to the pub and have 2 or 4 pints of real ale. Then it turns out, life doesn't suck so much! And we should also just deal with the fact that the British left will never like us, and the left in general will never like us, because hating America is all that is left of the left. If the enemies of America advocated enslaving women and everybody else except a few pampered scholars under a wacko medieval theocracy, the left would suddenly see their point and support them. Oh, that's right, they do. They must really miss Uncle Joe. Poor things. Nothing to do but sit around giving awards to each other.

Ahem. Moving on, we find the always-delightful Michelle Malkin. To her as well, Pinter's politics and specifically his opposition to the war are more important than any so-called "literary achivement" or "contribution" he might have made.

Funny, somehow I don't see "Malkinesque" entering any Literary Encyclopedias any time soon. She goes on to sarcastically "praise" a poem of Pinter's, "American Football." Here's the poem as it appears on Pinter's own website, with commentary by his biographer and Pinter himself and here's Malkin's hysterical, tired attempt at lit-crit.

You be the judge. Personally, I find it impressive. I find it even more impressive that, because it contains language that some would find obscene or offensive, Malkin implies that the poem is no better than those one finds in the average restroom.

She must go to a better class of restroom than I do. The graffiti I've seen scrawled in such premises rarely rises above the level of "Here I sit, broken-hearted..."

Finally, going "Outside The Beltway," we find Steve Verdon, who manages to combine the vocabulary of a stoner with the originality of a clone. Most of his post is devoted to "me-tooing" Ms. Malkin, with the exception of the following piece of brilliance:

Harold Pinter British playwright and poet has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation reads as,

"who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms"

Uhhh....what?

Go back to the bong, Steve. It's okay.

My point is this: To people like this, Pinter's work doesn't matter. I doubt they've seen or read enough of it to be entitled to an opinion. He criticized their politics and their war (the one they support without actually fighting).

Therefore, he must be crushed. Have I mentioned lately how much dealing with Joss Whedon fans prepared me for reading the blogs of right-wingnuts?