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The Nobel Prize for Literature ... is dead.
October 13, 2016 - 8:38pm
OK, the Nobels are very much discredited these days. A US President gets one "for not being George Bush". And so on.
Now Bob Dylan gets the Nobel for literature?
Sorry. I love Bob's old songs as much as anyone. But the Nobel?
Garbage. The Prize is now garbage.
If you want to give the Nobel Prize for Literature to a musician, then let it be Leonard Cohen, ffs.
Assholes.
Globe and Mail: Dave Bidini - Dylan is great – but he’s no literary Nobel winner
... which is arguing for neither Bob Dylan nor Leonard Cohen. In conclusion, then...
'Dylan towers over everyone' – Salman Rushdie, Kate Tempest and more pay tribute to Bob Dylan
Salman Rushdie, Cerys Matthew, Jarvis Cocker, Andrew Motion, Billy Bragg and other artists and writers pick their favourite moments from Dylan’s body of work
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/13/dylan-towers-over-everyone...
Dylan's lyrics do not stand up without the music. He would get pounded at any decent poetry slam.
This is boomer nostalgia.
I don't really have an opinion; there are other writers I'd have preferred, but I think his lyrics are noteworthy. How can one award one might disagree with turn an award into "garbage"? As for Cohen, he was a poet and novelist for years before he became a songwriter.
Dylan wasn't a boomer, he was born in 1941, when even the US had become involved in the Second World War. And he's been writing for long since the 1960s-70s. I'm personally offended by the "boomer nostalgia" stereotype. Ageist piffle.
Yeah... how can Dylan's forgotten lyrics possibly stand up to the immortal work of the 2015 laureate (she's a journalist) or the 2014 winner Patrick Modiano, whose novels I'm sure all of us have read and worshipped, right?
Dylan's win is a victory for mass appeal. I would take Cohen over Dylan but that could be my nationalism speaking.
I agree on all three counts. On second thought, a joint prize might have been appropriate.
Yes, we remember that Anna Marly wrote that, but Cohen's translation and performances are lovely. I love that compilation that shows the Eastern front as well (both Northeastern - especiallly Soviet, and Southeastern with the Yugo partisans). But I also love his later performance in Finland, with some other old guys who performed as if they had been there as younger men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vsw6w1hVGE
The later versions become a dirge for the comrades I knew who WERE resistants. Almost all have died for "biological reasons". I can think of one old partisan (from France) who is still alive, and I also think of a slightly younger elderly friend who was a little Italian-Jewish girl in France who had to wear the yellow star and whose parents spent a considerable sum out of their shrinking budget to buy her roller skates so her friends would go play with her in the streets and sidewalks, as she no longer had the right to play in parks and squares. I must have mentioned her before and how her family were saved by an officially fascist functionary, but it bears repeating.
But I'm very sad that Juan Gelman, one of my favourite 20th-century poets, never got the Nobel: he died a couple of years ago. He did earn the Cervantes and some other prestigious literary prizes.
I'm still waiting for Roger Waters Nobel Peace Prize. He's one of the loudest voices for the anti-war,anti-fascist movement.
I also think he's by far a better lyricist than Dylan.
This reminds me of Grade 8, when my teacher elected to deconstruct the lyrics from "Richard Cory". No, not the original poem that was turned into a song, but the song. Because he was "hip" and "he got it" or whatever.
"See, kids... popular music is literature too!"
Phil Ochs should have won the Peace Prize in the late Sixties or early Seventies for all of his powerful indictments of the Vietnam War and Anglo-American-European imperilsm.
Such as this song(for which I will give a trigger alert, since the metaphors used in many parts of the song could be traumatic for victims of sexual assault):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLkEdWFG4so
(self-delete. dupe post.)
They sure got it right in 2005...
Nobel Lecture by Harold Pinter
https://youtu.be/PH96tuRA3L0
The Bob Dylan announcement made me smile. I think his lyrics stand up for themselves without the music. I totally agree that Leonard Cohen should have a shot at this honour as well. Roger Waters may be a great guy and top political activist but I can't think of any lyrics he wrote that could have impact on the page without music.
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq1q9k_bob-dylan-a-hard-rain-s-a-gonna-...
Nice to see he can do a repeat of Newport all over again. All we are missing is Pete Seeger with his axe.
well , it's about time. a discussion about SOMETHING.
Here is a contrary view...
Harvard U freshman course on Bob Dylan
It's not dead...it's only bleeding.
No Surprise Bob Dylan is Visiting 'the Neighborhood Bully'
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/no-surprise-dylan-is-visiting-the-neighbor...
"Yes, you read that right. Bob Dylan said Meir Kahane who favored the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homland and whose racist Kach party, has since been banned from Israeli politics, is 'a really sincere guy who's really put it all together."
Yeah. And Bob's your uncle.
Leonard Cohen about Dylan's Nobel Prize: "It's like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain"
He could be saying that it's redundant. Bob Dylan already has a rack of awards and doesn't need to appropriate a literary award as well. Or maybe that it's just unnecessary, because everyone knows that Dylan deserves such an award. Or that it's just silly. eta: Or, as you're summarized [quite well, I might add!] , that being the tallest anything means, well, nothing much at all. An accident of birth, for example.
Or all of the above. I mean, Leonard Cohen is actually a writer and might intend multiple meanings.
Dylan's Nobel was richly deserved, IMO. http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/j-baglow/2016/10/bob-dylans-well-deserve...
Keef is a constant reminder that I will probably live a long life. Makes me very depressed.
ffs, when you're dead, you're going to be dead for a long time. Forever, in fact. Why not put that day off as long as possible?
Because death (that is, no longer living, and in certain cases, living in unbearable suffering) is not always the worst alternative.
I don't think anyone is advocating a Keith Richards régime. Just that the fact that he is still alive is most exceptional.
Yeah, ok, that's a useful reminder.