Bob Dylan wins Nobel Literature Prize

[french frank]

Sometimes one philosophically watches the world go by . I would be interested - very interested - to read a rigorous critical analysis of Dylan's poetry which would explain the award in terms other than the obvious Zeitgeist/generational appeal.

[Richard Tarleton]

Sometimes one philosophically watches the world go by . I would be interested - very interested - to read a rigorous critical analysis of Dylan's poetry which would explain the award in terms other than the obvious Zeitgeist/generational appeal.

I'd suggest starting with Michael Gray (above) and Christopher Ricks (former Prof of English at Cambridge, now Prof of Humanities at Boston, and long-time Dylan scholar?) Dylan's Visions of Sin

I think it's a given that people will differ on this.

[Tevot]

I'd suggest starting with Michael Gray (above) and Christopher Ricks (former Prof of English at Cambridge, now Prof of Humanities at Boston, and long-time Dylan scholar?) Dylan's Visions of Sin

I think it's a given that people will differ on this.

Hello there Richard,

Thanks for the link. I shall read it with interest.

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[DracoM]

Rebs become the Elite. A known trajectory.

[french frank]

I'd suggest starting with Michael Gray (above) and Christopher Ricks (former Prof of English at Cambridge, now Prof of Humanities at Boston, and long-time Dylan scholar?) Dylan's Visions of Sin

I don't think Sean O'Hagan has sold me on the £25 Ricks book: "What is wrong with that opening paragraph is what is wrong with this big, misguided book: it is too knowing, too clever, too clumsily conversational. Its tone lies somewhere between academese and what I suspect the author thinks of as casually hip. It assumes too much - about the casual or curious reader's knowledge of Dylan's lyrics - and imparts too little. Not a great start for a book of scholarship."

The Gray might be a better bet, but I do remember a Night Waves programme in which Sarah Dunant was so embarrassingly teenaged in her incoherent droolings over Dylan that I instantly dismissed her as a reliable critic of anything. Having strummed and wailed Dylan's lyrics when younger, I suspect I will remain sceptical of his purely literary merits (what would he feel, as if that mattered?). Ricks seems (on the unexplored superfice) to be something of a male Dunant.

[Tevot]

Rebs become the Elite. A known trajectory.

The times they aren't a changin' ....

[doversoul1]

The decision elevates song lyrics to being on a critical par with literature, poetry and playwriting. It's a big step away from the self-perpetuating intellectualism and elitism for which the award had been criticised.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-37643621

...sounds familiar...

[Richard Tarleton]

Consider these footsteps... W B Yeats, G B Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney... Bob Dylan....

Spot the odd one out.

Best Wishes,

Tevot

Not sure that I can actually Tev - if forced to choose, I'd probably plump for GBS . Funnily enough I was getting to know Yeats and Dylan at around the same time, 1965-6, as I was "doing" Yeats for A level (inter alia). Listening to Yeats reading his own poetry, it doesn't seem that strange an association.

[Lat-Literal]

Literary links:

http://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1640-weird-and-wonderful-literary-world-bob-dylan

[cloughie]

Nothing wrong with Bob as a choice for Nobel Prize, particularly if you see the parallel of some of the nominations for some of the Art prizes in recent years. Maybe Leonard Cohen next time around.

[johncorrigan]

Great call by the Nobel Committee, if a bit overdue. So well deserved not just for Bob's wonderful body of work, but also for the ongoing influence he has had on so many.

[Lat-Literal]

Great call by the Nobel Committee, if a bit overdue. So well deserved not just for Bob's wonderful body of work, but also for the ongoing influence he has had on so many.

Andrew Motion considers this to be his best:

Visions of Johanna

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, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
Oh, how can I explain ?
It's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna they kept me up past the dawn.

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower frieze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees."
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Saying, "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him."
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can ya man."
As she, herself prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

[Richard Barrett]

W B Yeats, G B Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney... Bob Dylan....
Spot the odd one out.

All but one are Irish?

Lighten up people, it's only a prize, they're always pretty random. Dylan's words have certainly touched more people than that of many Nobel Prize-winning poets. Does that mean anything? Depends on your point of view. His work isn't really much to my taste (actually for reasons summed up in David Bowie's "Song for Bob Dylan" from 1971 ), certainly not to the extent of Beckett who for me is the most important writer in the English language since Shakespeare, and who of course is on record as being horrified at winning the prize and didn't go to the ceremony.

edit: although he didn't go to the lengths of Jean-Paul Sartre who refused to accept it altogether on principle, as he explained at the time thus: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964...e-nobel-prize/

[gurnemanz]

Re Christopher Ricks: I remember to this day his compelling exposition of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" on Radio 3 (1978 - I found it - a pity it's not available).

[Lat-Literal]

This middle ection from "Highlands" - a heartfelt and melancholy song in the main - is my favourite piece of Dylan humour in his later work:

Highlands (part)

My heart's in the highlands at the break of dawn
By the beautiful lake of the black swan
Big white clouds like chariots that swing down low
Well, my heart's in the highlands, only place left to go.

I'm in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Or maybe I do but I'm just really not sure
Waitress comes over, nobody in the place but me and her.

Well, it must be a holiday, there's nobody around
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face, with long white shiny legs
I said, "Tell me what I want," she says "You probably want hard boiled eggs."

I say, "That's right, bring me some."
She says, "We ain't got any, you picked the wrong time to come."
Then she says, "I know you're an artist, draw a picture of me."
I said, "I would if I could but I don't do sketches from memory."

Well, she then, she says, "I'm right here in front of you, or
haven't you looked?"
I say, "All right, I know but I don't have my drawing book."
She gives me a napkin, she say, "You can do it on that."
I say, "Yes I could but I don't know where my pencil is at."

She pulls one out from behind her ear
She says, "All right now go ahead, draw me, I'm stayin' right here."
I make a few lines and I show it for her to see
Well, she takes her napkin and throws it back and says, "That
don't look a thing like me."

I said, "Oh, kind Miss, it most certainly does."
She say, "You must be jokin'," I say, "I wish I was."
Then she says, "You don't read women authors do ya?" at least
that's what I think I hear her say
Well, I said, "How would you know and what would it matter anyway?"

Well she says, "You just don't seem like you do." I said,
"You're way wrong."
She says "Which ones have you read then?" I say, "I've read
Erica Jong."
She goes away for a minute and I slide out, out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street but nobody is goin' anywhere.

Well, my heart's in the highlands with the horses and hounds
Way up in the border country far from the towns
With the twang of the arrow and the snap of the bow
My heart's in the highlands, I can't see any other way to go.