The Alfred Stakes

It was the autumn of our ennui.

It was the word of times. It was the worst of times.

October '82, was the cruellest of months, breeding Empty Sundays out of the dead schedule, mixing Memory and desire.

THATS HOW I'll remember this fall--the year football died. No good reasons now to blow off Sundays no pretext for beers at dinner Monday night, drunk in anxious anticipation. No reason to read Sports Monday, unless you count the results from the Australian grass court tennis circuit. The recession has spread to organized crime and the bookies must be hurting. Yeah, there's still college football, but I'll shoot the cap off a bottle of beer with 22 to 50 yards blindfolded before I pick four college games correctly.

Now I read the first section of the newspaper and try to guess who'll win the elections. The Kennedy race doesn't merit an inch of newsprint; Dukakis over Sears by three percentage points; Weicker over Moflett: Moynihan by a landslide--it's pick 'em who'll do better. Kennedy of stormin' Pat--and my burn knee says Mario "the Mensch" Cuomo will down Law "my-suspenders-are-sewn-to-my-body' Lehman. In a week or two I'll put a out a line whether the Democrats can snag a Senate majority. The Greek is nodding.

But let's talk about a real race The race The Nobel.

Only someone who is certifiable would put his name on a prefix column for the Nobel Prize in Literature: but then a fail without football drives men to desperation Would you have picked Icelander Halldor Lawness in '55' Know any couplets by Giosue Carducci '06 Put 'em o n postcard and send 'em in Or how about recent history. Can you even name a bookstore, which carries two books by Vicent Aleixandre '77' In fact. If you knew anything at all about Elias Canetti '81 before last year and your name isn't Susan Sontag. I'll buy you a beer at Whitney. But what the hell, It's a gargeous day and a bunch of pitultury "All Star" strikers just played patty cake to the tune of 23-22. So here I go and send the flowers to the hospital at Mattapan, where I'll be recovering.

ATRANDOM

Gabrief Garcia Marquez: This man will cop the prize someday sure as my grandmother lives in Forest Hills, N.Y. For one thing, he is from Colombia, and Colombia has never had a winner. One of my many theories is that the Swedish academy picks the name of a country out of a ski hat and worries about finding a writer from there to shower with all those krona. One day Colombia will come up and Marquees will be it. Right now, though, he's just too young, Also, he spends too much of his time writing lefty journalism, In Stockholm, journalism in a dirty word, 14-1 on one of John "Here's some more Sophocles-at-Shea-Stadium" Leonard's faves.

Doris Lessing: There hasn't been a woman since Nelly Sachs shared the loot with Agnon in '66' There hasn't been a Brit since, catch this. Sir Winston Churchill of the "Narrzi Beast" fame won it is '53, A couple of things have Doris on the rocks, 1, The Times ran a story in its magazine on here during the summer. That's more a kiss of death than appearing on the cover of SI. 2, Leasing's latest books are sci-fi, and it the committee wants that, well they just ought to was till my man Isaac reaches Nobel age in 15 years. By that time he will have written more books than Erle Stanley Garner and Franklin W. Dison by a bushel 12-1 on the lady with the Golden Notebook.

Joyce Carol Outes: If the Princeton Creative Writing Department's own book-of-the-week-club wins, I'll be drowning my sorrow in methyl alcohol. James Wolcoff of Harper's (and The Village Voice and New York Magazine and Esquire and the New York Review of Books...) called her last book "oozesome." Give the medal to Wolcoff Still, her name always pops up this time of year 23-1 on logorrhea in the fifth.

V.S. Nalpaul: Put this gay In the Marquez category. He'll get it. He's from Trinldad, he's upholding the standard of Western Culture, and he has a pen like vipet's tongue. Trouble with Mr. Vidladhar Surajprasad Naipaul, as Bud Collins would cali him, is that he is way too young as well as way too popular. The average age of the last six winners when they got the TNT laurels is over 71, and Bellow '76 was the kid on the block at 61. A fot at 50, Vidiadhar will have to wait, 17-1.

Gunther Grass: Another squirt Grass turned 52 on Saturday Besides, he wrote a book called The Flounder 21-1.

Graham Greens: Pindly, one whose got the age qualification The 78-year-old Greene loss written more than 35 books. I've read one and I liked it. He calls some of his books novels and others "entertainments." If you have a clue on that one drop me a line 8-1.

Jorge Lulls Borges: No cute stuff here, the man is my candidate At 83, this writer has endured. Person made him Impactor of the Chickens or something like that to humiliate him. But check out Paul Theroux's account of his meetings with the Argentine master in The Old paragoning Express-it'll left you how well that worked. The old men in the Academy have been stringing Borges along for more than 25 years now and everyone knows it. If I were Mike Barnicle, I'd call that the mark of bunich of human dirt bags (I wish I had said that to start with it miglior fabbro to you, Mr. Barnicle). They let Auden slip by, they jet Joyce slip by, I hope they don't let Borges go the same route,7-1.

So much for this exercise is futility, We all know it's going to be the poet laureate of Lesotho or Burundi, so why I bothered, I don't know, I started doing this for my own records in 1968, when I picked the author Of Harold and the Purple Crayon. I've singled once--everyone knew Bellow would get it during the Bicentennial. My average? 077, but today is the first day of the rest of my life. Pass the chips.