Topic: The Culture
Invoking Roland Barthes can make you famous and respected and all that stuff...
I see today that the Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzer Prizes, the second most ever won by a newspaper in a single year, for coverage that included wildfires, wars and Wal-Mart. Note this - Dan Neil won the Pulitzer for criticism.
Andrew Bridges of the Associated Press adds detail:
Hey, a star is born.Auto critic Dan Neil won after joining the paper in September. He previously had been a freelancer and wrote promotional stories for the advertising department of a North Carolina paper.
Neil, 44, said the Times was required to submit 10 columns to qualify for Pulitzer consideration, but at the time he had published just 16.
"They didn't have a lot to choose from," said Neil, whose reviews were singled out as "one-of-a-kind" by the Pulitzer board.
My readers might remember his riff on semiotics and SUV ownership and much else from reading this from Wednesday, 18 February 2004 in these pages: What would Roland Barthes drive? - and the guy is a hoot! You might recall he progressed from a discussing the Kama Sutra to an HBO series to the Toyota Prius being a both the automotive equivalent of corrective shoes and a clear declaration of sexual security.
And this on pickup trucks vis a vis Roland Barthes:
"America's love of pickups: Like the soft-handed Parisians who bought up Millet's peasant paintings, pickup poseurs would find rural virtue a different thing entirely if they spent a day in the fields.
"Barthes loved to flog the petite bourgeoisie with their own illusions."
I'm glad he won.
Oh yes, in Volume 2, Number 8 (Monday, February 23, 2004) the same item on Neil's observations appeared in Just Above Sunset Magazine. And it had this photo of a car Barthes philosophized about, with the appropriate irony, courtesy of Ric Erickson over at MetropoleParis, as he had just visited the R?tromobile show over at ParisExpo, Porte de Versailles.
Posted by Alan at 17:22 PDT
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