Ellstrom Award for Literature - 2010: The Field

Dear Readers of All Stripes,

Last weekend was the event called, The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports. It's the Run for the Roses. It's the Kentucky Derby.

Well, perhaps, the announcement of the Ellstrom Award for Literature, 2010, is not the most exciting two minutes in literature, but it is one that I prepare for during the course of a full year. The Derby and the Ellstrom award have two things in common. They both have a great field! By that I don't mean the track, for the Derby track was pretty soggy this year. I mean the "horses" in the running.


I studied the horses that ran in the Derby this year. And then I placed a bet ($6.00) on Paddy O'Prado to win, place, or show. At the end of two minutes, I was $3.40 richer. (Paddy showed.)

During the course of the 2009 year I studied a different, but equally pedegreed, field. And I was far richer for the activity. This field of authors includes some of the very best. (See full list.) The contenders for the award are:

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky on The Brothers Karamazov
• Diane Setterfield on The Thirteenth Tale
• W.E.B. DuBois on The Quest of the Silver Fleece
• Sylvia Plath on The Bell Jar
• Bertoldt Brecht on Mother Courage
• Leo Tolstoy on The Death of Ivan Ilych
• Antoine de Saint-Exupery on The Little Prince
• Kurt Vonnegut on Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Duty Dance with Death
• John Steinbeck on Grapes of Wrath
• Thomas Hardy on Jude the Obscure
• Victor Pelevin on Oman Ra
• Zora Neale Hurston on Seraph on the Suwanee

The also-rans were notable with William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and Joseph Conrad being eliminated at the gate.

So now is the time to place your bets. Which of these stellar authors, new and old, will take the prize, will win the roses?

BRD

P.S. To sweeten the pot--for anyone betting on this race who also comes to visit me at my house before I announce the winner of the 2010 Ellstrom Award, I will give you a book from the DeGeorge family library. And, yes, I will inscribe it appropriately!

The Muse of Zora

Dear Zora Neale Hurston,

I'm trying to understand your writing. I want to hear the echos of the muse that you heard and analyze the colloquial phrasing of his voice.

I think that Richard Wright and Langston Hughes heard a different muse and gave voice to a disparate philosophic song. Richard and Langston took on themselves a responsibility that related to the future places that the Afrian American people as a group would have to go. But you, I think, couldn't let go of the grasp you had of where the people had been, not let go without writing it down, just once, writing it down. That, you said in your way, in your tongue, was worth writing.

That, you wanted people to understand, was worth saying in unvarnished speech . . . saying it like it had been said, over and over again by the pepole in the fields, by the people back to the cabin from the big house, by the people no longer owned but forced to sell themselves one day at a time, by those people who could still laugh and talk about the new shoes they got from the devil, who had the ugliest, who had the biggest, who had the richest soil, mule, hat, cat, master. Those words, those stories, those thinkings had to be preserved. That is what your muse said one day isn't it? Your muse said:

There once was a slave named Jack, and oh he could play tricks on his master. But that slave was going to die, so he set up a contest with the devil. The devil said he would give Jack a pair of brand new shoes and a mule to carry him to heaven if he would sprinkle a potion in the spring where all the former slave folk drank. That potion wouldn't make them forget, but it would make them hate to write that story down. Jack got a gourd and filled it with clear spring water. Then he fouled the spring with the devil's potion.

"Good job Jack," said the devil, and gave him his new shoes and the ugliest mule you ever saw. The last the devil saw of Jack he was astride that mule legs outstretched so not to drag his new shoes in the mud. Jack was headed for heaven, but what the devil didn't know was that he stopped by your house, Zora, and gave you the gourd and whispered in your ear, "Now write it down."

Thanks for your work, making sure the last legacy of the era that a part of us wants so desperately to forget, will be passed on.

BRD

PS Did I tell you I named a racoon after you? Her husband was named Zorro so it seemed right.

Whose Eyes Were Watching God?

Dear Zora Neale Hurston,

I have discovered your work (imagine) after all these years. "Why," I thought, "had I never heard of you?" Then, I realized, that it was a matter of timing.

Alice Walker rediscovered you in 1975, the very year I left educational institutions behind and cloistered myself in a world of non-fiction and children's books, laundry and camping trips, churches and crock pots, Chinese culture (a blog topic for another day) and an occasional opera.

So Zora Hurston, author of Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God and, Seraph of the Suwanee was for me unknown until the renowned scholar Brannon Costello, author of Plantation Airs, pointed you out to me. At first, your work seemed a curiosity, for I started with Mules and Men. Almost quaint. I think I was surprised. As I read about your research I was reminded of some work I had done once in a small library operated in the basement of the Smoky Mountains tourist center. There, I sat sifting through old documents looking for curiosities of the region to supplement a project I was doing for a technology company.

I found stories written by "oldtimers," as they were called; I met people who had lived in the park area before they were forced to move out by FDR; I joined in some shaped note sings and generally fell in love with a very distinct cultural experience.

Your work carries that same beautiful colloquial feel, but it is different too. It liberally brandishes dialects and expressions, stories and myths, but I say the work is almost quaint because of my own quaint ignorance. It is not quaint, I think. It is instead, not written for me, not contingent upon me as a reader at all. It is not trying to charm me with its vernacular approach, but is simply exposing me to it. Me, an outsider, me, the stranger, me, odd man out.

Is that the power of your books resurrected in 1975 to a new life beyond the grave of the 50's and 60's? Is the immensity of your influence as a writer to been seen not in the remarkable anthropological assiduity of your work, but in the acceptance of the full human dialogue represented in the architecture of this language form. And you, Zora, refused to allow that dialogue to go unrecorded.

You said in your autobiography, "Research is formalized curiousity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein."

Need I say that I'm impressed.

Betsy