Arts Advice for Young Artists/Writers/Performers
posted by May 20 at 12:59 PM
onLocal hotshot Craig Lucas (playwright, associate artistic director at Intiman) gave the commencement speech at Boston University College of Fine Arts this past weekend, and it wasn’t the standard commencement speech about, you know, how you’re walking across a bridge toward a path and that path has a fork in it, etc., etc. Lucas gave advice about how to handle success, criticism, and fame in a country whose current government is pretty hostile toward art.
One of his lessons of his speech: “Just remember: your success is only news once. After that, the only possible news flash is that you’re not what you’re cracked up to be or your new work isn’t as good as the old.” Another:
Clearly, many great and deserving writers have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Nonetheless, here are some who never won, all of whom died after the Prize was instituted:Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
Marcel Proust
Auden
Nabokov
Ibsen
Mark Twain
Wallace Stevens
Tolstoy!
Brecht
Chekhov!
Bulkagov
Genet
Strindberg!
Lorca
Kafka
Conrad
D.H. Lawrence
Orwell
Mishima
Rilke
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ralph Ellison
Who are some of the greats who took their place?
Jaroslav Seifert
Carl Spitteler
Ivo Andric
Selma Lagerlof
Paul Heyse
Pearl S. Buck.
The Moral: only time will decide. Since you may already be dead then, make the art you want to make.
The whole text (riddled with grammatical weirdness, but still) is here.
Comments
How could they miss Jorge Luis Borges?
I've been saying this for decades. The Nobels for Literature are mostly embarrassingly bad.
Heller, Salinger, Keroauc, Burroughs, and DeLillo also missed the list. But Falkner and Updike made it twice each.
I'll tell you what I'd give the Noble Prize to...an enormous whozeewhatsit!!!
it's 'bulgakov', not 'bulkagov'.
didn't tolstoy turn it down?
I’m surprised that Jimmie JJ DYNO-MITE! Walker never won the Nobel, considering what Alfred was famous for inventing.
@6, no Tolstoy was actually passed over for it.
Maybe so, Mr. Lucas, but I'd still like to have a Nobel Prize for Literature. Just 'cause.
Fortunately, Craig Lucas is not good enough nor quite bad enough to qualify for a Nobel.
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