Creating chaos

• John Rockwell reviews John Brackett's John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression in Bookforum.

A mixed review, but any serious attempt to give Zorn's enormous body of work some context is always welcome.

With all these ingredients, Zorn whips up a frenetic froth of sound, although every once in a while he calms down into lyricism. The effect is sometimes ebullient and amusing, though Zorn’s all-purpose anger insists on priority. It all sounds anarchic on a first listen, for good or ill, and Brackett labors mightily to impose some sort of order on this chaos. Although his musical discussions are more descriptive than deeply analytic—the nonmusical ones are better—Brackett shows us how Zorn uses numerological symbolism, as did Bach, Mahler, and the twelve-tonalists. (Music and mathematics lie close, and lots of composers have embedded number secrets in their scores.) Compressed chunks of others’ scores often act as jumping-off places for Zorn’s own compositions, providing historical reference points and skeins of unity, at least on paper. The sonic equivalent of film montage is another favored device.

The trouble is that Zorn himself has said, “My concern is not so much how things sound, as with how things work.” In other words, he loves the process of creating intricate scores that sound like maniacs improvising on the fly. In that limited sense, he’s like an abstruse academic modernist composer, as in the old distinction between “ear music” you can listen to and “eye music” best appreciated through a close reading of the notes. But by any reasonable criterion—and despite Brackett’s deliberate obfuscation of the fact—Zorn is a postmodernist, even the king of the New York postmodernist hill. People like or dislike his music for its jumpy flow, its wild clashes of style, its passion and humor, its hair-trigger virtuosity in conception and performance.

Obligatory awards roundup

• This year's Nobel Prize winner for literature: Orhan Pamuk.

The selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for ''insulting Turkishness'' raised concerns about free speech in Turkey, continues a trend among Nobel judges of picking writers in conflict with their own governments. British playwright Harold Pinter, a strong opponent of his country's involvement in the Iraq war, won last year. Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of Austria's conservative politicians and social class, was the 2004 winner.

• The finalists for the National Book Awards include Mark Z. Danielewski, Richard Powers, Ken Kalfus and Lawrence Wright.

A notable lack of the heavy hitters with new books out (McCarthy, Pynchon, Roth, et al). Still, maybe this will turn more people onto Powers' stuff.

• This year's Man Booker Prize goes to Kiran Desai.

She becomes the youngest ever woman to win the prize, doing one better than her mother, Anita Desai, who was nominated for the award three times, most recently in 1999, but failed to win.

Kiran Desai's book [The Inheritance of Loss] was hailed by the judges as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness".

Accepting her award, she praised her mother, to whom she said she owes "a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine."

Apparently there's now something called the Quills, which sounds like a rather desperate attempt on the behalf of the publishing industry to sex up its image by tossing celebrities and an NBC television broadcast into the mix. The top book prize went to Tyler Perry. The defense rests.

And somehow I missed this when it was announced, but:

• George Saunders is one of the recent recipients of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant.

Other recipients include writers David Carroll, Atul Gawande, Adrian LeBlanc, David Macaulay and Sarah Ruhl, as well as musician John Zorn (a personal favorite, yay for that).