As a Swedish harmonica player, let me immediately deny any rumours to the contrary: There are no harmonica players in the Swedish Academy (there is one accordeon player, but that´s as close as it gets) and I think we must assume that Mr Dylan is awarded the prize on other merits. All in all, an interesting choice, albeit controversial.
There was an article on Slate complaining about it; I'm composing a rebuttal. I like me a good 'fancy book learnin' poem' from time to time, but the author seems to fetishize big words over saying something. (I hate listening to Bob Dylan sing Bob Dylan, but some of my favorite songs of all time are other people covering Bob Dylan).
One of my biggest pet peeves is people who insist that poetry has to sound all old timey. I've written some old timey poetry. It's fun to write, but give me something that actually reaches people any day, and Dylan reaches people.
I bet there are plenty of Nobel winners who are closet harmonica players. Congrat's to Bob. Controversial? Nah, more like "you can please some of the people, all of the time".
I love it. Bob whips out the harp and blows on some of his music and the harp nuts disparage him. Wrote a song for a movie called Wonder Boys decades ago, won an Oscar. The song by the way, Things Have Changed is awesome. Got it on my ipod and listen to it all the time.
He wins a Nobel prize for literature and the literature loons go nuts ( is there a name for these people like the word foodie, for ya know, those who want to put arugala on pizza). Remember...... it's the Nobel people...the same people who decided Obama deserved one merely for getting elected. So "no reason to get excited" one way or the other.
And Bob? He just keeps on rollin. Made my day when I heard the news. I saw something about no response from Dylan, so far. I hope he just says nothing, and takes the Woody Allen approach when Allen won that Oscar but preferred to be playing clarinet in some NYC Jazz club rather than go to the Hollywood ceremony. Outstanding.
Don't need a weatherman, to know which way the wind blows (with apologies to Brick below who was first-in with the parking meter line from Subterranean Homesick Blues. You inspired me Brick.)
Last Edited by Honkin On Bobo on Oct 14, 2016 11:49 AM
they say i shot a man named grey, and took his wife to italy, she inherited a million bucks, and when she died it came to me, i can't help it if i'm lucky.
It's well known that "The Beats" (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs et al.) revolutionized writing and literature. The "mantle" was handed off to Bob Dylan, in a sense, who became the wordsmith of the 60's and beyond.
Like Leonard Cohen, I believe Bob was a poet who put his words to music and believe the literature prize was well deserved. ---------- The Iceman
" ------Why Bob Dylan shouldn’t have gotten the Nobel prize for literature.:
The good news is that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The bad news is that the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Bob Dylan. Good because it gives an American the prize after a long wait for one of our own writers to be acknowledged. Bad because I have a difficult time thinking of Dylan as a writer as we normally think of them--poet, novelist, essayist, playwright.
Stephen Metcalf, writing in Slate, argues that Dylan, despite the conspicuous profundity of his innovations and the global, generation spanning reach of his influence, did not deserve the Prize because Dylan is not a man of literature, but a rather a songwriter, a lyricist, not a poet. I wrote long and agitated on topic in 2007, which you can read at length here .To summarize ,Dylan is a not a poet, but a songwriter who writes lyrics, an art now distinct from poetry which he has taken apart and reconfigured and put back together as no one else has done. Yes, I realize many will make the argument are historically connected in past ages, but that there has been a split between what's done in song and what is done on the page quite a while ago and Dylan , for all his revolutionizing, did not bring poets back from under the shadow of Whitman. What Dylan lacks a proper category and here, I think, the Nobel folks shoe horn him into a classification that is and will remain an awkward fit.
This is like a sports statistic with an asterisk after the name. It could be , as well, a slap to our face, considering a Nobel Judge Horace Engdahl, famously remarked in 2008 that American writers are second rate compared with their European counterparts" The US 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." So rather than deal with our rich selection of poets, novelists, playwrights who are deserving , the award goes to Dylan. What this means is that given the amount of time its taken the Nobel Committee to come around and present one of our own as worthy of being a Nobel Laureate, we are pretty much assured that Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth are forever out of the running.---- Ted Burke tburke4@san.rr.com
"It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe" Probably what Bob was thinking when he was awarded the prize But nice to see him honored in this way
He even made one of the early music videos with Allen Ginsberg
Ted, I hated that Slate piece. I've been trying to come up with a response to it since yesterday. The Wilbur example was terrible. I mean, it's not bad poetry, but it's not great poetry, and the Dylan snippet they compared it to tops it easily.
The takeaway Slate may have been shooting for was the continued marginalization of American poets, but it came off as typical 'classy' poems are better than common poems. Old timey poets wrote old timey because that's how people spoke then. A large swath of modern literature would do better academically if we moved it to the history department.
That's not to say that simple words shouldn't be chosen well. I mean, look at what Robert Frost could say and make sound like he was the guy next door. The literati use obscure sounding poetry not so much as a source of pleasure to hear as as a source of pleasure in the marking of their social standing. I love Shelley's Ozymandias, and I've even played at writing in that style, but it stands as a good poem because of its timelessness, not it's old-timey-ness.
And of course, Europe can try to use it as an old money status symbol all they want, but give me bended birches, and liberty or death. :)
Nate, I didn't care for the Wilbur poem either. I had to read more of him than humanly tolerable in high school and always found to be wooden and nearly a caricature of what a poet ought to me. Strictly middle brown, and dull and too passive for my tastes. But I take Metcalf's point, which is as art, as writing, Dylan's lyrics have no heft, no punch , nothing in the way of power and ideas that result from an inspired scribe's talent to create sensation, empathy, make ideas tangible, to exhibit rhythm and music drawing from the sounds and ambiguities language , in itself, contains. I own a lot of Dylan records and at least two copies of his collected lyrics, and its been my experience that the words he writes are inert, without emotion ,without the music. The language, of course, does not have to be grand--Hemingway, Frost, Sanburg, Hughes could make you laugh,shiver and contemplate the larger unknowns of experience with artfully terse language. Dylan's rhymes, though, do not resound by their own properties. Ironic, I suppose, to say that they sound "sing-songy". Even much of his lauded surrealism comes off as a little silly when read aloud, sans music. I know, there are good lines , brilliant lines through out his body of work,but these are single lines, not whole lyrics. ---------- Ted Burke tburke4@san.rr.com
I see critics to anything which honors someone else. How does that saying go? "Empty barrel make the most noise." For my dime, Mr. Dylan is not "only" THE master songwriter of our time, he has always played exactly what he intended on harmonica. At Ground Zero last week a guy leading the jam band called off "All Along the Watchtower". Could you find a part for harp there? It's not so difficult and I had a real blast when I was cued.
My biggest and first thought was, "It's about time." ---------- Reverbnation
Two song writers from my era (the 60's) that deserve such recognition are Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot. ---------- Wisdom does not always come with old age. Sometimes old age arrives alone.
Harp or no he has garnered quite a following and is certainly deserving of some recognition. Sharing rank with Gore and Obama is fitting.
My personal view is that the prestige of the Nobel Prize, in some categories, began its decline a long time ago. But where's the harm? They could have named Jim Morrison and I'd still be sleeping well. I find the upset much more entertaining than the award recipient.
There is just a tad bit of a "What can we do to make the Nobel Prize relevant to Today's Young People" about this. (And as usual when ultra-Establishment types try to do that they miss & hit yesterday's young people.)
Dont you know obscure foreigners who need to be translated are always more important than American artists. ( then they will harp about the " bad " translation)
Usually that hipster crap ends when you graduate university -
Actually there is some potential harm, as described in that article you posted, JustFuya.
I don't feel very strongly about it, although it seems a bit odd. Song lyrics sound daft when read outside of the song. They could have just made another category: Nobel prize for song writing.
If it's chiming with modern concerns they want I'd sooner it went to Chris Difford out of Squeeze for Up the Junction and his other songs. More meaningful than all that stuff about the joker and the thief. What even is a Buick Six? Ford Cortina, that's what you want. I'm not on the committee.
I think Bob Dylan is great though. Positively 4th Street is the song to play when you're a bit miffed with someone.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Oct 15, 2016 10:33 AM
Thanks. I know in the UK that car makes and models have very specific meanings, with loads of cultural baggage. Reliant Robin, Triumph TR7, Ford Mondeo! Must the be the same in the US but we don't have the same info to work with.
There was a thing with the Black Keys album 'El Camino' where they put a 'Plymouth Grand Voyager' on the cover. I read what it means, but can't feel it the same way you will.
I'd always imagined a Buick Six as one of those hot rod cars like in the film Two Lane Blacktop. And so, very cool.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Oct 15, 2016 11:09 AM
I don't think that he deserved to get it. I didn't like his music 40-50 years ago when I first heard it and I still don't. Besides, a prize for literature should be for the written word , not music.
I know of at least one other harmonica player who won a nobel prize - but not for harmonica playing. He was on some of the harp forums for awhile, but people starting making a big deal of his Nobel and he became scarce. =========== Winslow
