Nobel
 

Look who has won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/ar...iterature.html

I'm genuinely shocked. I like Dylan as much as anyone else (well, I guess not actually since I wouldn't give him this award)...but come on...

This is a strange choice by the Academy. Given their penchant for politics, they might have gone with Adonis, who would have been an apt (and worthwhile) choice. And there are so many writers I think are more deserving of this award.

But so be it. I do like his music.

Andrew--I'm curious to know whether your "come on" stems from either of these two objections, which seem to me the obvious ones to have regarding Dylan's prize:

Popular song isn't "Literature."

or

Dylan's work isn't "great" enough.

As a great Dylan fan with more lines of his in my head than of any other poet, I don't share either, but I think they're interesting points to discuss. I'm actually thrilled for the guy. And relieved: seeing his picture and the words "breaking news" at the top of the cnn website this morning, I supposed something else might have occurred and was overwhelmingly sad for a second or so.

He's playing Vegas tonight, so he's probably there or at home in Malibu. Do you think he knows yet?

He probably knows, but I wonder how much he cares. He's probably bemused.

Well, when he won his Oscar he brought it on stage with him for every show on the subsequent tour and played the set with it on the piano. That and the photos of him looking chuffed as he got his Kennedy Center Honors make me think he eats this shit up.

I think I'd be on dangerous ground in suggesting "popular song isn't 'Literature.'" It's an uncomfortably elitist position to take, and some of the great ballads (some of which I teach) are songs. So were Sappho and classical "poets." So this really isn't why...though I'm not entirely sure it is literature, exactly. Certainly art. But I have to say I haven't thought much about this aspect until you asked.

I guess I'd argue that, given other available options, I don't think his work is "great" enough. But even that isn't probably isn't enough by itself. I mean, this is in some way a matter of opinion.

Typically, I think the award has does well in highlighting and elevating less well-known (to American, but in many cases elsewhere) authors who deserve more recognition. Recently, those who have won are typically not international best-sellers. Perhaps it's time to go in the other direction. But this leaves me cold. I'll play some favorites, though, and get over it. :)

Yet when he played the White House, this is what Obama reported:

Andrew, Dylan isn't exactly "popular song" if that phrase is meant to conjure up the likes of Beyonce or even Cole Porter. There's a distinctly literary sensibility that comes through his lyrics that distinguishes so much of his work from that of other songwriters. While I truly love the way he sings, I think that many people are put off his songs by the vocals. Here is a song done by someone else with a more conventional (though lovely) voice. It's not his greatest song, but it would be the greatest song of just about any other songwriter, and tell me if you don't agree that it is as "literary" and serious as most poems you know: Ring Them Bells

For whatever it's worth, here's a comment I made during a poetry and song panel that I chaired at the WCU poetry conference a few years ago: if Dylan hadn't set his words to music, I doubt many of us ever would have heard of him.

Of course. But the same can be said about any songwriter.

Claudia: As Andrew says, we're arguing taste here, which ultimately goes nowhere. But I disagree with your remark in two ways: 1) I just disagree. Many of his songs are among my favorite poems. 2) But he did set them to music. Your remark is something like saying Mr. Steinbeck would never have won this prize if he'd written Physics textbooks and Christmas cards instead of novels. Yeah, but he did write novels. Dylan did write songs. So are songs "literature?" (I say yes, but it's an interesting question...) And, if so, are Dylan's "great?" (For me they are the very greatest. I often have the experience of hearing one for the first time in ages and thinking that nobody--not even my very favorites, like Richard Thompson or Polly Harvey or whoever you would name--has ever written a song as good...and then hearing one BETTER later on the album. But, again, this is to argue taste...)

There is another point to discuss. The Nobel Lit Prize, although widely perceived as such, is not actually the top honor for being the very best at, like, writing. It also has a specifically political dimension--something about writing in an ideal or idealistic direction. This may have excluded some literary greats in the past, likely influenced the 2015 choice of a Belarusian journalist, and may be in play with Dylan.

Roger--"Popular song" was me putting words in Andrew's mouth, but it's close enough to stuff Dylan says about how he sees his calling.

Yeah. Hmmm. I'm not so opposed to including song writers/musicians, but opening up the category does make me wonder who may be worthier. Popular or not. You don't think Bob Dylan was popular music, Roger? "Literary sensibilities" is just taste, I think. (And perhaps generation.) I think Bob Dylan was great, with the music. Which is ok. (But there were better lyricists.)

From Wikipedia (I remember my whoop of joy upon hearing the Norton Anthology editors had selected this Dylan song):

"Boots of Spanish Leather" is a ballad written and performed by Bob Dylan, and released in 1964 on his album The Times They Are a-Changin'.[1]

Dylan's recording features him solo on the acoustic guitar, playing the song using fingerpicking.

Lyrically, "Boots of Spanish Leather" is a "restless, forlorn ballad for the ages and sages—a classic Dylan tale of two lovers, a crossroads, and the open sea."[2] The song is written as a dialogue, with the first six verses alternating between the two lovers; however, the last three verses are all given by the lover who has been left behind. Within these nine verses, one of the lovers - a woman - goes across the sea. She writes, asking whether her lover would like any gift, and her lover refuses, saying they only want her back. Towards the end it becomes clear that she is not returning, and she finally writes saying she may never come back. Her lover comes to realize what has happened and finally gives her a material request: "Spanish boots of Spanish leather." Michael Gray says there is a strong parallel between this line and the traditional folk song "Blackjack Davey," which Dylan arranged and recorded for his 1992 album Good as I Been to You, and in which footwear of Spanish leather also plays a significant role.[3]

The song is included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, in the section titled "Popular Ballads of the 20th Century."

Stephen Metcalf's take, at Slate:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/...iterature.html

Nobel
 

I am not a Dylan fan. I find his voice irritating and his music sounds best to me when performed by other artists. But I have his lyrics 1962 to 2001 sitting on my poetry bookshelves between Stephen Dunn and Richard Eberhart. I take Dylan's lyrics out every once in a while and read a few pages. The man writes poetry. No one wants to give popular culture it's due. Dylan and the Nobel committee forces us to. I am not on the Dylan bandwagon. I just sit on the sidelines as it passes with my hands in my pockets but applauding nevertheless.

Bill

Thanks for the link, Max. I'm still reading. But I stopped at the Lennon/Dylan. Lennon was, of course, very influenced by Dylan, for a time (You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, etc), but it doesn't, imo, account for where he, and the Beatles, ultimately arrived. In other words, that's overstated. Maybe grossly overstated.

Hi, James,

In my very quick read of the beginning of the article, it seemed to me that Metcalf was crediting Dylan's influence with getting Lennon started putting more into his songs, not with his whole subsequent development.

I'm looking forward to peaking in on this discussion tomorrow. It raises interesting topics.

Max

Sure, Max. And I'm coming off as overly critical I think. Given John's upbringing, disposition, and a fairly creative environment with the Beatles (Paul McCartney's Eleanor Rigby has at least some literary merit), I'm just fairly certain he would have arrived there on his own. But who cares. Back to Bob and the Nobel.

It's surprising, but only because I thought the Nobel committee was much stuffier than this. Perhaps they're simply making an uncomprehending gesture toward broadmindedness. I don't know.

I've often compared Hafez to Bob Dylan — and I'm not the only one. For example the poet and Persianist Dick Davis writes:

"If we jump forward in time to a poet of a very different kind, Hafez’s poems can remind us of the songs of Bob Dylan, particularly his more meditative ones. Again, there is the music, and also the way a Dylan song often hovers at the edge of the paraphrasable, which might be because we don’t have enough background information to attempt the paraphrase, or because there isn’t a paraphrase, a back-story, to be found at all, simply a series of images that create a pervasive mood and suggest a thematic coherence. There is too the loathing of hypocrisy that comes through in some of Dylan’s songs, the earnest sense, casually conveyed, that life is too serious for posturing and lies. “So let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late” could easily be a line from Hafez."

I've also heard Sinologists, in private conversation, remark upon how similar Li Bai's poetry was to Bob Dylan's, and for similar reasons.

Russians often enjoy him a great deal in translation. And a look around the Russophone internet will turn up a staggering amount of literary translations of Dylan's lyrics.

There have been many recipients of the Nobel who deserved it far less than Dylan. I'm glad to see some prize-awarding entity that people take seriously acknowledging that artists like Dylan aren't "mere entertainers," and exposing the incoherent parochialisms which delimit the category "literature" as modern Western Europeans and more especially North Americans understand it (or more accurately, as understood by the Anglophone world and its closest European epigones, commonly conflated with the world as a whole.)

That understanding of literature is in some ways different from, say, how Eastern Europeans understand it. Note Russians' admiration for Vladimir Vysotsky, the great singerpoet (his occupation is listed as "Bard" on English Wikipedia — seriously, go check.) Figures like Vysotsky are numerous in the region. If Dylan were singing his lyrics in Russian or Lithuanian or Baltic Romani, his audience wouldn't have nearly as much difficulty processing his work as literature — and in the latter case likely wouldn't see the point in asking whether it is or isn't. It strikes me as sad, but also hilarious, that a translation of one of Vysotsky's lyrics could make it into, say, Poetry Magazine, but an opposite number of his like Bob Dylan never, ever could be. The very fact of this hypocrisy suggests not only the inability of Americans to apprehend Vysotsky's dimensionality as an oral artist, but that Americans themselves are the ones who have become deaf — in an almost literal sense — to some of what has made literature so meaningful to its audiences.

The narrow, and almost self-eviscerating, conception of literature is not unique to the Anglophone world. Versions or analogues of it have been pervasive in one form or another among many elites, and, even more than the elites, among those who aspired to be part of the elite and so made a cargo cult of exaggerating all the snobberies they though were necessary to attain higher stations — who took it for granted that what commoners responded to, or what was important to them, was inferior. This is also by no means always the case (medieval societies where courtly song was much prized are a bit of a different animal.) Regardless, it is, as I've said, especially virulent in the Anglophone world and its epigones. Most of all in the US. One of the most nauseating things about Americans, to put it bluntly, is that we are incredibly, embarrassingly uncultured in this way — such that we are all too ready to simply take the definitions or dimensions of literature (particularly non-prose) as handed down from on high at face value, whether by defenders of the traditional canon, or by the multiculturalists who think their elitism is somehow a virtue just for coming in all colors of the rainbow. It is philistinism turned inside out and upside down, a bit like a eunuch at an orgy who thinks that if he just imitates everybody else's amorous gyrations he'll be engaging in intercourse.

The result is injurious to language-art of all sorts, as it encourages those who partake of sung lyric not to ask too much of the stuff they listen to, because — they are made to believe — it's not where real greatness is found anyway (leading to a philistinization of song itself and to spoken word poetry that winds up seldom rising above an exercise in whiny affirmation and self-indulgence.) On the other hand it encourages written or self-consciously "literary" verse to look down upon anything that seems too much like you could set it to music.

(Note the borderline superstitious disdain, among Anglophone literary arbiters throughout a goodly portion of the late 20th century, for any and all rhymed verse unless it was written before WWII. This has slowly begun to change since the late 90s, though. Ironically those championing form in verse are also the ones most averse too much "deviant" English in it. The narrowness always just gets moved elsewhere. Like body fat being shunted from your viscera to your extremities as winter approaches.)

Not only does such an autoerotic hallucination generally refuse to admit sung or otherwise orally appreciated works unless and until they ditch the music, ditch the oral medium, and consign themselves to the undead lethe of philology and/or print, but preference is generally given to things in a language that has ceased to be fully intelligible to any but the cognoscenti. That way we can think "oh songsters and popular entertainers were great in the days of yore, like in Elizabethan England or 13th century Occitania, but now they're so vulgar." (Lost golden age much? Yeah, I've heard that one before. Sell it to Tolkien. I ain't buyin'.) Thank god Sappho managed to achieve a sufficiently de-musicked afterlife that people started thinking of her as a "writer."

I'll take Dylan over the preposterous Toni Morrison any day.

Though if I were to pick a living lyric singer to give the Nobel to, Dylan wouldn't have been my first choice. If pressed, I'd probably have picked Claudi Martí both because he's a stronger artist, and because Nobel-level recognition of his accomplishment would do a good deal to bolster attention for and interest in the fairly endangered language that he composes in.

This doesn't mean diddley. It means, in fact, fractionally less than diddley. If Jaufré Rudel and Bernart de Ventadorn hadn't set their words to music, history would've forgotten their existence (instead of transforming them into objects of romantic fantasy, as it has done.) And I suspect you will cast about in vain seeking a soul with a single hoot to give that this is the case.

If All Along The Watchtower had never been set to music, it would still be a brilliant poem. Though the music adds to it considerably. The fact that it wouldn't be as famous as it is doesn't really make this less the case.

That's a great post, AZ--alternately persuasive (on the value of oral literature), informative (Vysotsky), inscrutable (the orgy eunuch), and inflammatory (I'll bite: why is Toni Morrison preposterous?).

I thought I'd said my bit here, but I think it worth pointing out what is implicit in your post: this is a Literature prize, not a poetry one. In this sense, the Slate article that Max linked us to was enjoyable but unpersuasive. Maybe the Wilbur looks better on the page than the Dylan, but so what? Beckett and Pinter got their prizes for plays, and they would fail this test, too--just as Wilbur would lose the comparison if it were held on a stage (plus his 80s albums had a shit drum sound). And the 2015 winner was a journalist/oral historian! Once you decide to give a best fruit of the year award, you're going to be comparing apples and oranges. To do so fairly, you can't punish the oranges for being neither red nor green.

So, again, I think the most relevant questions are whether song-poems are literature (and, like AZ, the Greeks, and others, I think they are) and whether Dylan's song-poems are worthy of such an honor (for me, yup).

There's also the prize's stated idealistic goal...

"Man of Constant Sorrow," Dylan's version, is absolutely out of this world. "All Along the Watch Tower," Dylan's song (is that right? Getting old), was, imo, best done by Jimi.

I can offer anecdotal evidence as to whether the lyrics 'work' on their own, without the music.
I was 15 when I got into Bob Dylan, from a cassette tape of the original 'Greatest Hits' (the one that only had about 12 songs on it). I can't remember how I acquired it, nobody else I knew was really a fan. I think it may have been my auntie's.
I played it to death, then started repeatedly borrowing the 'Collected Lyrics 1962-1985' from the local library. I couldn't afford to buy any more albums and this of course was long before YouTube/Spotify and its ilk (this would have been the late 80s). So I read and re-read lyrics like these long before I eventually heard them sung:

Well, John the Baptist, after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, "Tell me, great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly
Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry"
And, dropping a barbell, he points to the sky
Saying, "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken"

and

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

and

A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs and couldn't help but follow
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil
I stumbled to my feet
I rode past destruction in the ditches
With the stitches still mending 'neath a heart-shaped tattoo
Renegade priests and treacherous young witches
Were handing out the flowers that I'd given to you

and

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet ?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the D-train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise she's all right she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.



Now, yes I was 15. But I was utterly spellbound. And from that I read some stuff (again, pre-Internet of course) and discovered the Beats, then Rimbaud, then to Blake, Whitman, to Eliot, to the 17th century metaphysical poets, to the Romantics, to Yeats, to Auden and Plath and Larkin. To finally realising that I was into this thing. Called poetry.

So yeah. Utterly subjective, but I say well done Bob. And thanks.

What point are you making by posting that link James? That Dylan was just a Woody Guthrie imitator? Maybe for a couple of years when he was barely out of his teens, but I think he soon morphed into something pretty unique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCipKmyngLY

No

I was born in Hibbing and Mom once told me "A nice little boy named Bobby Zimmerman sang to you when he pushed your stroller." She didn't know. Mom! I don't regard Dylan as a mere poet but as the greatest artist of our times. I am thrilled!

James. Ok. Haha. And that's a beautiful song. I love the detail of 'partly raised' (though I don't think he wrote that one)

Tim. What a story! Beats my anecdote about going to the library..

No Direction Home is a pretty good documentary, Mark. I like Bob Dylan quite a bit. I like Guthrie a little more. There were I think 3 different versions of This Land Is Your Land. The original works best.

It was mass produced for school children to sing. As a patriotic anthem. But it was written when land was being taken during the depression.

Anyone who assumes I intended to criticize or belittle Dylan's lyrics/poems should reread the above. I said nothing positive or negative about his words (although I like a good number of his songs). My comment was about the power of song.

Tim, is that for real? Amazing story!

Yes, Mark, Tim's story beats yours--but I love yours, too. Thanks for posting it.

Claudia--I see what you mean. In context, it read to me that you were criticizing Dylan's selection here (and fair enough...), but I get the other side of it now.

James, and others talking about Guthrie/Dylan and Dylan/Lennon: Dylan has often spoken of how Guthrie (another of my heroes) was a crucial influence on him and how he had to move through emulation of Woody to find his way. Perhaps it was similar between Dylan and Lennon--if perhaps less so and for a shorter time (hard for me to opine here; I'm not much of a Beatles fan...). I would post here if I could find online a wonderful painting I saw once in Rolling Stone. It was titled "Mr. Guthrie's Homeroom" (or similar) and showed Dylan acing a test in Woody's class while Springsteen and a cross-sampling of every other rootsy white American male singer of the later twentieth century try to cheat off his paper...

Yeah, I think that's true, Simon. And I'd like to see that painting. (Do you think anyone successfully cheated?)

I think more than anything else, Mark, as I mentioned in my first response, opening this up to song writers made me think of others who could/should be considered. As far as lyrics, I'm kind of partial to Paul Simon (on his own, probably more). But Bob Dylan is understandable. I'm not really complaining. Just thinking...

Hmm...posthumous award for Jacques Brel!

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...ylan-nobel-win

Very high spirited piece by Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, that ends with lots of links.

My parents were very junior English professors at the Hibbing Community College. They rented an apartment above the Zimmerman Store, and they paid the boy ten cents an hour to push my stroller. No wonder I turned to poetry! He became famous when I was twelve, and I loved and memorized his songs. This prize delights me even more than VS Naipaul, who was honored right after 9/11 in a rare nod to a conservative.

Claudia, an awful lot of Burns' appeal depends on the ancient airs he set his lyrics to. I teach Burns in high school every January 25, and I am more influenced by him than any other poet.

The prize spurred me to upload a recording to YouTube of Dylan's performance of Mr Tamourine Man at Wolftrap in 1997. The audio quality isn't very good (and there's 3 seconds of pure static in the opening 15 seconds or so) but it's a truly great performance. He changes up the melody and the tone is very different from his studio recording. It ends with a long guitar solo. Anyway, I love it so I figured I'd share it now. HERE

Now, if next year Richard Wilbur is honored, a lot of people are going to feel Springsteen was robbed.

Here's an opinion from Alicia Stallings.

Right on, Alicia! Thanks for the link, Roger.