There were some surprises in this week’s Pulitzer Prize winners: a ProPublica reporter shared an award with the New York Times, and Next to Normal, with its bi-polar protagonist, has to be the best musical about mental illness since Gypsy (narcissistic personality disorder) or The Music Man (mass hysteria).

The other award no one saw coming went to a dead guy: the Pulitzer Prize Board gave a special citation to Hank Williams, who died in 1953 in the backseat of a car “in a Pure Filling Station on a New Year’s Day/In a car that needed gasoline/He found the only peace of mind he would ever enjoy/In a place he’d never ever seen.”

Those lines are from Steve Yerkey, who wrote one of a handful of great songs about the man who remains country’s greatest songwriter — “a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song,” as Leonard Cohen sang. Why the Pulitzer chose to honor him now is anybody’s guess, though he’s in interesting company: Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane and Bob Dylan are the only musicians who have been similarly honored. (Now that would make an interesting quartet.)

But you don’t hear a lot of Hank these days, not the real thing, anyway. His songs endure (Norah Jones did a sweet cover of “Cold Cold Heart” on her billions-sold debut album) but modern country stations don’t have much use for him, let alone his only talented offspring, Hank Williams III. Maybe the Pulitzer committee was hoping they could make people rediscover his poetry and pure-as-spring-water singing.

Not that Hank would care, but his alter ego, Luke the Drifter might. This was his handle for his good side, the guy who sang morality tales like “Ramblin’ Man” and “Be Careful of the Stones That You Throw” while bad Hank kept on drinkin’ and fightin’ and cheatin’ through life. That Hank would have missed the awards ceremony luncheon, where they never pour any sour mash anyway.

My neighbor Rob Buchanan forwarded the following to me, I guess in attempt to make me barf. It’s from a handout for DKLB BKLN, a new condo highrise in our neighborhood. Honestly, I’d try to parody the prose but I’m just not that good:

He likes waking up with the sun streaming through his window. He turns over–Sunny’s still asleep. God, she’s beautiful. He throws on a t-shirt, sweats, and steps out on DeKalb–he’s at the crossroads of Fort Greene’s multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, multistatus world and that’s what he thrives on, the life. He does a few stretches, then starts running. Give him something hard to listen to, something fresh. Runs to the park and does some laps. Finishes with a dash up the steps to the monument. Breathes. He loves this view. Loves where he lives.  Brooklyn’s a city in motion, pulsing, alive. He looks out over the park and thinks about what he has to do that day. He’s in control of his time, his space, his environment. And he likes it that way.

Back home, he rouses Sunny and they hit the Greenmarket. They pick up some vegetables and find fresh fish and flowers. They like getting there early when the local chefs are shopping too. There’s the chef from General Greene. Giles nods. The chef smiles back. They know each other. Back home, Sunny heads to the gym for a yoga class. Giles checks emails. He’s been waiting for a sound clip from a DJ in Durban. There’s this new South African group he’s hoping to book. Soweto kids. Cool, it’s there. He listens. Their sound is fresh, alive–they have something to say. He heads to Tillie’s. Coffee, black. A muffin. He talks to Mavis, the Pratt student with purple hair. They dish about the art on the wall. She’s smart, gorgeous, and knows what she’s talking about. Over his coffee, he jots down notes, things he’s gotta do. Book that band for one. Plus, he has something waiting for him at UrbanGlass. A vase he had blown for Sunny’s birthday. He finishes breakfast and heads back up DeKalb.

This threatens to be the first installment of the on-going adventures of Giles “Goat Boy,” Fort Greene arriviste and all-around monied hipster. His girlfriend is beautiful. His iPod is stocked with hard music, perfect for those runs around the park. He is friends with chefs and coffee shop waitresses alike. He listens to kids from Soweto.

But hear his song, and deconstruct for a minute the meaning of the word “multistatus,” one of the multi-adjectives he uses to describe our neighborhood. Does that mean Giles, who just overpaid for a condo on what is actually the Flatbush Avenue Extension (hard to romanticize that name), rubs shoulders with the dealers from the Walt Whitman projects? Would they take his iPhone from if he ran at night? And would he still like it that way?

Discuss among yourselves.

I had just finished watching Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero on Sunday (damn you, TCM, for keeping me from my appointed rounds with entrenched political blowhards on Sunday talk shows!) when I heard the first suggestion that the California man in the out-of-control Toyota Prius might have faked the whole incident.

The original story, which broke in the wake of all of Toyota’s other stuck-accelerator problems, was that James Sikes was behind the wheel on a freeway near San Diego when the Prius — a top-of-the-line Toyota model with no previous problems reported — took off at speeds exceeding 90 mph. Sounds like normal driving in CA but it took several frantic 911 calls and a savvy Highway Patrol driver to steer the untamed beast to safety.

Maybe.

Since then Toyota technicians have not been able to reproduce the malfunction and are openly questioning Sikes’s story. And reports have surfaced about the man’s sketchy business dealings (he’s $700K in debt!), followed by speculation that he was just hoping to sue the car company, or maybe just wanted publicity. Recordings of the 911 calls are riveting — perhaps more so if the whole thing was a hoax.

But why? In the Sturges film, Eddie Bracken pretends to be a war hero to get his fellow Marines a free meal or two, and things go wildly out of control (he ends up running for mayor). But people want to be war heroes, or certainly did after WWII. Who wants to be celebrated as a victim? Some people thought of the balloon boy hoax but that guy wanted a TV show. This reminds me more of the James Frey imbroglio; as one wag remarked, “Remember when people used to get in trouble for lying about having not gone to jail?”

Or maybe it was something other than a publicity stunt. In a fascinating OpEd in the NY Times a few weeks ago it was revealed that accelerator problems claimed by Audi drivers in the eighties arose from people stomping on the gas when they were convinced it was the brake. The mind is a dangerous thing, and stubborn as hell. Perhaps Sikes, who sounds like kind of a sap in his public pronouncements (“I’ve had things happen in my life, but I’m not making up this story!”), was just obeying his unconscious mind which said: hey, the rest of your life is out of control, pal! Enjoy the ride. What, I wonder, what Sturges have said?

Ken Kesey used to say that he did not want to see the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest any more than he wanted to pay to see his daughter raped in a parking lot. Whatever the merits of Milos Forman’s film and its relationship to Kesey’s book (I think the author mostly objected to the casting of Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, where he envisioned someone who looked more like Paul Newman, or himself), I kind of feel the same way about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Not that she’s my child, but I may be one of hers.

For Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, were the books that brought me to reading. So sick was my mother of reading them to me that she finally said, “If you want to hear these again, you’re going to have to learn to read yourself.” So I did. I’m sure I didn’t start with Alice — I had the usual Dr. Seuss stops along the way — but she was the goal, and to this day the John Tenniel illustrations are imprinted on my brain.

It’s obvious from the trailers, and the generally awful reviews, that Burton’s film has roughly the same relationship to the original books that Billy the Kid vs. Dracula had to its source material, which has not stopped it from having boffo box-office ($116 million its  opening weekend! Biggest 3-D movie ever!). As Anne Thompson put it in her Indiewire blog, the film’s success “proves yet again why studio marketers keep chasing the perfect match: branded family title + proven visual master + global movie star = blockbuster.”

What the mathematically inclined Charles Dodgson (aka Carroll) would have made of this equation is anybody’s guess. As Manohla Dargis pointed out in her generally despairing review in the Times, studios have tried to crack Alice’s code for years and have been mostly flummoxed. “Alice has no character,” said a writer who worked on the 1951 animated Disney version. “She merely plays straight man to a cast of screwball comics.”

“Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in Wonderland and in the sequel,” Dargis added,  “which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination.”

I may be in the minority in finding most of Tim Burtons films rather inert: visually arresting, dramatically arrested. And I’m not sure you could make a good movie of the Alice books: my daughter came home confused, which is sort of the point, even after Burton tried to add some return/revenge angle to the proceedings. The logical author, in a sort of valentine to the girl he was illogically obsessed with, wrote a paean to a world beyond logic.

Of course we didn’t have these great FX when I was my daughter’s age. We had to create our own. Which brings us back to Kesey…