Nobel

This is from New York Times blog called "Paper Cuts":

The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature will be named in the next few weeks - although, according to the Nobel Foundation Web site, there’s no firm date set for the announcement.

The speculation has begun, however. Writing in The Local, an English-language site for Swedish news, Jeanne Rudbeck sniffs around but is unable to come up with any fresh intelligence. “The secrecy this year is absolute,” she writes.

She does ask around in the publishing world, though, and comes up with the unconvincing and mildy wacky list printed below (Vargas Llosa and Fuentes to share it?). It’s a list that ignores a lot of the names that are often thrown around this time of year - Margaret Atwood, Nuruddin Farah, the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, and remember all that talk about Bob Dylan? Here’s Rudbeck:

Hot tips from Deep Throats:

Ko Un, Korean poet
Adonis, Syrian poet

Lukewarm tips:

Amos Oz, Israeli novelist
Don DeLillo, American novelist
Cormac McCarthy, American novelist
Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, Latin American novelists, to share it

Not a snowball’s chance in hell:

Jackie Collins
Also, Arnel Salgado, Baguio bet to a literary contest called the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
George Bush

Here's Bushism for the week from Harpers: A February 2003 transcript of a meeting between Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar surfaced showing that Bush had knowledge that Saddam Hussein was prepared to go into exile. In the transcript, Bush complained about former French President Jacques Chirac, who "thinks he's Mr. Arab," and the European attitude toward Hussein. "Maybe it's because he's dark-skinned, far away, and Muslim," said the President, "lots of Europeans think everything's okay with him." The annotated text of Bush's address to the U.N. General Assembly appeared briefly on the U.N. website. The speech included phonetic spellings for the name of French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania(moor-EH-tain-ee-a), and the Zimbabwe capital Harare(hah-RAR-ray). A White House transcript of Bush's Wednesday speech on education was amended from "children do learn" to "childrens (sic) do learn."