Prizes

Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the title of course echoing Raymond Carver, is a companionable memoir, mainly about his marathon exploits. In an age when some take more of an interest in the writer than the writing, it is gentle, open and accessible compared to some of his more opaque and mystifying novels. But apart from his obsessional nature as writer, extreme athlete and record collector (all of which are laudible enterprises), he comes across as a very sensible bloke.
And sensible, too, in the view that he doesn't want a Nobel Prize although the link sent by my Japanese correspondent is in Japanese so I'm going to take her word for what it says. Neither would I, although I am a bit further down the list of likely recipients, although the cheque that comes with it is admittedly generous. But apparently, you can't turn it down, you can just not turn up.
Bob Dylan, at the time of writing, doesn't seem all that excited about it either. Why would you be. It's nice to be listed alongside James Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Heaney and suchlike but I'd prefer to have just written The Changing of the Guards, the Street Legal album, in among everything else, and enjoy having done so than get a prize for it. No amount of celebrity, gongs and acclamation can be as good as having such a thing. It's the words. There isn't anything else.
So I simply don't have a view on whether Dylan worked in a genre that qualified him for the Nobel Prize. It doesn't make his word sound any better. And questions such as 'what is literature?' can be left to the likes of Terry Eagleton to publish books on which will no doubt be diverting but risk leaving you none the wiser. Or, perhaps wiser but still not sure of the answer.
But perhaps this derision of prize-giving is a bit rich coming from me. Not because I've been happy enough to accept some very minor ones but because this week I did look at the shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize to widen the coverage of my own Best Collection and Best Poem of the Year meditations.
It's getting late and my list of poems only has three on it and while Judy Brown and Ian Duhig's collections are admirable, it is not the most competitive shortlist I've ever had.
I haven't read much new poetry this year. I've read a few reviews but not been tempted by many of them and perhaps, as one gets older, the activities of those a few decades younger don't seem quite so relevant. Some of the elderly are either fearful or uncomprehending of their successors.
And so I've ordered Bernard O'Donoghue's new book, picked from the Eliot Prize list, and hope for great things. I met him in the street in Oxford once. I was with an-ex student of his and he was on his bike, and I'd say you'd hardly wish to meet a more congenial man.
But if prizes just provide reading lists, we could just call them reading lists.