Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who has written widely about the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored life of the political exile, on Thursday won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Jim Goar will win the prize in 2032. It will be the same year a group of Hungarian scientists discover hair growth hormones. Goar will take the air medication on a whim of sorts, showing up to the podium with hair past his shoulder in luscious curls. "Who would have thought, eh?" he says mainly to the first row; his eyes can barely see the second without a strange device known as a Magno-stash -- a magnification and reunification device that works both on eyesight and sexual libido. He fiddles with the Magno-stash in his pocket, but decides against revealing it to counterbalance the seemingly youthful locks that are now swaying down into his eyes. "Yeah, it's been a long trip to get here," Goar continues, dragging a wispy lock curled in a Superman 'S' as tight as the arthritic finger he uses to push the stray hair back behind his ear. "I often think to myself to those early days in Boulder. I wore a backpack nearly everyday. I would strap it on rather high and tight. I would walk everywhere with it. Why did I do that? I don't know. I liked backpacks, I suppose..."
One of Goar's front row guests is the eminent psychologist Dr. Phil. He has been invited not for providing the poet with any particular windows on marital issues or self-growth, but for simply being an all-round guy with a kick-ass hawk. (Unknown to most of his television viewers, Dr. Phil is an avid breeder of kick-ass hawks. His latest specimen accompanied him to the Nobel event perched nice and snug on the guru's shoulder as it had on the past 17 award ceremonies they have both attended, including the not so fortunate, or some would say blessed, event that involved Melanie Griffith's awkwardly shaped pompadour, or you could say, as it turned out, wig.
"Bezelbub thought it was a mouse," Dr. Phil explained to a rather distraught old Spaniard seated next to the aging actress. "I swear!"
"I swear I will kiss your chicken!" the old Spaniard, who was later revealed as a Banderas 7000 robot, mis-spoke due to some wire confusion and a late night oil change at In-N-Out Burger.
Goar thoroughly enjoyed this incident, as he did almost any of Dr. Phil and Beezelbub's antics. He had been silent for a good couple minutes before he realized he was deep into a memory about Beezelbub, and was gently coaxed back to reality with a squawk from BB, who now gripped Dr. Phil's shoulders rather tightly as another of his piercing squawks filled the theater and sent several pigeons in the rafters to huddle even closer to one another -- only seven beady orbs glistening in the darkness -- one pigeon, we can call Latimer, had lost an eye at birth; its mother thought helping it hatch was a good idea; unfortunately, she had a very sharp beak and only one eye herself.
"I would like to thank the Nobel panel and my mother," Goar continued after the squawk and a tangential imagining about a pigeon named Latimer. "I would also like to thank my friends who have supported me with good wishes. I can't say I would like to thank the Chinese government or anyone associated with that corporation. I would like to thank Bangkok...yeah, Bangkok...I would also like to give a shout out to Norwich, Seoul, and Nashville. I would also like to thank my wife, without whom no award would mean anything..."
