Apparently, it's time for the U.S. of A. to dismantle the printing presses, close the bookstores and just give everybody a banjo. For according to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prizes, Americans just can't compete anymore for literature's top prize, the Nobel.

Sniffs this fellow, Horace Engdahl is the name, "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

The best comeback to his statements may be that of David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine. It's worth repeating. "You would think," Remnick said, "that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures." That's telling him, baby!

And it's not like the U.S. has been shut out. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. So did John Steinbeck. And William Faulkner. And Saul Bellow. And Toni Morrison.

Oh, and one other thing. We didn't mean to insult banjo players earlier. In fact, a great work of American literature is "Earl Scruggs and the Five String Banjo." An absolute masterpiece.

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