Everything I know about Mo Yan I learned today, but that does not prevent me from knowing that this article on the Nobel is pernicious nonsense. Not on the facts, necessarily, but in the way it frames the facts. Others can comment on the perhaps imperial/racial bias of the piece, but I feel a duty, as the internet’s only compiler of Maxims for Apolitical Artists, to note the absurd aesthetic standard being imposed on Mo Yan here, which the New Yorker and its ilk applies to no American or Western European writers (and rightly enough, in my opinion). In fact, as if to underline this point, the very next post on the New Yorker blog is an old essay on the new laureate by John Updike. Where was the liberal literati’s anguished concern that Updike had not spoken up for America’s many, many prisoners? Did I miss it when the New Yorker purged Updike for his pro-government stance during the Vietnam war? The anguish was never there, the purge never came. The hand-wringing liberals only want writers from enemy regimes to denounce their oppressive governments. They want their home-grown writers to get in line behind the President of drone war. They would be over the moon if Philip Roth won the Nobel, and Roth, for all his glorious rebelliousness, is nothing if not a patriot to a state whose hands are in no way clean. I say fuck it. If Shakespeare wrote great plays under a system of censorship, then surely Mo Yan can write great novels under similar conditions. To say this is not to defend censorship (which I would never do), but to defend writers from the counter-censoriousness of self-styled subversives, which is all the worse for being unfailingly hypocritical. All governments oppress; such is the bad news. The good news is that all governments fade, and great art remains. At least that’s what a traveller from an antique land told me…