Dylan: "The News About The Nobel Prize Left Me Speechless. I Appreciate The Honor So Much."

Hey, look at this, on the website of the Nobel organization:

Bob Dylan: “If I accept the prize? Of course.”

On 13 October, 2016, the Swedish Academy announced that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

This week Bob Dylan called the Swedish Academy. “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless”, he told Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy. “I appreciate the honor so much.”

So, are all of those people who've been trashing Dylan for being too arrogant to accept a Nobel Prize rushing to apologize? No! That's very strange: everyone can see now that they were wrong.

No, instead, they're now trashing Dylan because he's said that he will come to Stockholm to accept the prize "if at all possible," instead of definitely.

I think they're bearing out my theory that they -- "they" being millions of idiots all over the world -- were going to trash him, and will continue to trash him, no matter what he said or says or did or does or didn't or doesn't say or didn't or doesn't do.

That leaves the question of whether Dylan knew that if he was quiet for a while, these great herds of idiots would trash him,, making themselves look idiotic in retrospect, and whether he intentionally was silent for so long in order to give them plenty of rope in which they could entertainingly entangle themselves. If so, I must say: Mr Dylan, well-played! If millions of idiots are going to behave so idiotically whenever your name is mentioned, you might as well have some fun with them, if you can. They've been doing it to you for over half a century now. I don't blame you a bit.

If I'm reading you completely wrong, then of course I'm just one more idiot, and I apologize.

Wadenbeisser

The last 12 twelve days of tempest in the teapot of culture have given me an idea for what might be a fascinating documentary film. It could be entitled Wadenbeisser, and examine people who have complained about other people receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Wow -- it has really only been 12 days since Dylan's Nobel Prize was announced. It feels like much longer than 12 days. There has been so much criticism of the award in those 12 days, which I have been able only to partly ignore. It seems incredible that such an immense volume of hostile nonsense and ignoble resentment could have been produced in just 12 days.

"Wadenbeisser," always with a capital W, is a German noun, one of those German nouns which is spelled the same in the singular and the plural, which literally translates to a "calf-biter" or "calf-biters," and figuratively refers to someone whose behavior is reminiscent of that of a small dog which charges a person, barking furiously, and bites the person in the calf. A Wadenbeisser is someone who is figuratively small, in the sense of shallow or petty, attacking someone of greater (figurative) stature.

Wadenbeisser might be a good name for this documentary, because, of all the impassioned denunciations of various Nobel Prizes in Literature which I have read, none has been a tiny fraction as interesting as the written work of the denounced Laureates.

Bob Dylan's award may have kicked off the greatest of these storms of boring and petty discontent, because he is so famous. But I'm also thinking of the outrage expressed when William Golding, VS Naipaul and Mario Vargas Llosa won The Big One. I'm sure there have been many earlier cases in which the Wadenbeisser have been deservedly forgotten. I would dig such cases up primarily to mock them, of course, and to underscore the greater stature of the winners.

In the case of William Golding, at least one Wadenbeisser usually wrote much better stuff than his complaints about the prize: Gore Vidal, who usually was not a Wadenbeisser at all. Indeed, typically he was arrayed against the petty-minded and the resentful. He will deservedly be long-remembered. Just hopefully not for bitching because Golding got the prize in 1983, and not his pals Burgess and Calvino.

(In case the name Golding rings a bell but you can't quite place him: he wrote novels, drama, verse and non-fiction. He wrote Lord of the Flies and published at least 12 other much less famous volumes before his prize in 1983, and 4 volumes afterward, not counting a posthumously-published novel.)

There would have to be a special place in the film for those criticizing awards going to writers not one line of whose work they had read, and of course, I am among that special class of Bozos: I've complained about the number of Literature Nobels going to Scandinavian writers, but I shouldn't have, because I haven't read them. And I'm always bitching about other people talking about texts they haven't written, which makes me a double Bozo for bitching about these Nordic bards unknown to me, and I'll take my licks for it. I'm not one of those people, like Donald Trump, who think that no one can see fault to which the faulty party does not admit.

Dylan's Nobel: None Of Your Business. His Response? See Previous Answer

A thought experiment: imagine that you -- yes, YOU -- were in your home, and someone you weren't expecting suddenly broke down your front door, barged into your home followed by a crowd of journalists with cameras and microphones, tossed $1000 in cash into your lap and demanded that you stand up and dance, and you didn't stand up. Who would be the impolite and arrogant party in such a case?

Bob Dylan's failure to acknowledge his Nobel Prize in literature is "impolite and arrogant", according to a member of the body that awards it.

Well, I'm sorry Per Wastberg feels that way.

The way I feel about all of this is: the people who are expressing outrage at Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize are, at the very best, worse than impolite and arrogant. It's none of your business whom they give their prizes to. They're not your prizes to give.

And I think that Per Wastberg is being worse than impolite and arrogant in expecting a certain response from Dylan.

I'm not upset with Dylan at all about the prize or about his lack of response to it. Because I think that it's none of my business, and also none of Per Wastberg's business, what Dylan does or says about the prize. I wonder why he hasn't responded. But I don't think he owes me or anyone else an explanation of his silence.

Here is exactly what I think Dylan owes me, and you, and Wastberg: absolutely nothing. And that's exactly what, in my opinion, celebrities in general owe their fans: absolutely nothing. And it's also what Wastberg and the other Nobel people owe to the public, or to the people you think they snubbed, and it's also what any of the Nobel laureates owe any of the people at the Nobel organization: absolutely nothing. None of the above ever pledged that they owed anything to anyone, with the possible exception of the people who award the Nobel Prizes, and if they ever made any such solemn pledge, to the public or to the prize winners or to whomever, well, they shouldn't have.

When I'm (FINALLY!) awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, if and when I publicly react to the news of the award, and how I react, will be none of your business. Whether or not I take the money will be none of your business, and if I take it, what I do with it will be strictly between me and the Internal Revenue Service, and whether or not I show up at the award ceremony will be none of your business, and whether or not I give a Nobel Lecture will be none of your business, and if I give a lecture, what I say in that lecture will be none of your business. If the lecture consists of the 5 words "thnk yu verr mutch pleez" and you are outraged that that was my Nobel Lecture, you have my hearty permission to blow that outrage out of your ass.

And here's why: that agreement we came to about all of these and all related matters? That never happened. You hallucinated that.

Those of you who are outraged at Dylan for not making a statement about the prize: has it occurred to you that he may have been silent so far because he honestly doesn't know how he should react, and he's taking his time and thinking it over very carefully before he says anything? (Maybe in part because he knows that whatever he says will be blown out of all proportion by millions of idiots, and that there will be no way of coming close to pleasing them all?)

I have no idea why he hasn't responded, I'm just speculating. I'm not too worried about it one way or the other. It's none of my business. I just feel for someone who has so many complete strangers expecting so many different things from him for absolutely no sane or otherwise justifiable reason. For his sake and for the sake of many other famous people, I wish all of you judgmental, moronic creeps would just get your own damn lives. But it doesn't seem that anything remotely resembling that will happen soon.

For A Change: Reacting To Positive Reactions To Bob Dylan's Nobel

Leonard Cohen on Dylan's Nobel:

“To me, it's like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”

It's been well over 24 hours since I first read that and I'm still trying to figure out just exactly what Leonard means. And I mean that as a compliment to Leonard.

Billy Bragg:

"'Yes to dance beneath a diamond sky with one hand waving free...' for this alone Bob Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize."

I've also always especially liked that line -- although to be perfectly honest, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it means. It's from "Mr Tambourine Man." Probably more people are familiar with the Byrds' cover version of that song than with the original recording by Dylan, on the album Bringing It All Back Home. The original has many verses which didn't make it into the Byrds' version, including the one with the line about dancing with one hand waving.

Joyce Carol Oates:

"Asked about Nobel for Dylan: inspired & original choice. his haunting music & lyrics have always seemed, in the deepest sense, 'literary.'"

Take that, "literatti"!

Salman Rushdie:

"From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice."

Take THAT, "literatti"! Oof! That's gotta hurt! I've never read anything Rushdie has written which wasn't brilliant, including this. I was about to add that everything I've heard him say was brilliant too, but actually, I've seen him on some talk shows where some of his utterances were banal. Still, if I had been able to pick the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, I would have picked myself, and my 2nd choice would have been Rushdie. And of course Rushdie is right. If we were to exclude singers from the category of poets, we could start with Homer -- you all up for that, "literatti"?

Both Rushdie and Oates are considered to be on the Nobel short list. And previous years' winners weigh in on each new prize, so it can to some extent be taken for granted that a fair portion of them approve. So take that even more!

Another short-lister, Philip Roth, has for some reason been mentioned quite often by people objecting to the prize going to Dylan. It would be quite ironic if Dylan and Roth happened to be friends and were at this moment on the phone laughing and joking about these objections. I don't know, though: utterances of Roth's such as this, from a 2005 interview with the Guardian, make me wonder how well he and Dylan would get along: "I'm exactly the opposite of religious, I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie." Dylan's religious. Which means either that he would find Dylan hideous, or that he meant to say that he found some religious people hideous, not all.

I know this post is supposed to be all positive reactions, but for some reason Reza Aslan's response made me laugh:

"I'm sorry but this is total bullshit."

Good for you, Reza! Don't hold back!

As you may know, there is one writer in particular whose reaction to the prize has been very eagerly awaited, but who has not said one word about it, despite appearing in public since the award was announced: Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan Ist Nicht Richard Wagner

(Ich kommentiere jetzt einen Aufsatz, der auf Englisch erschien, auf Deutsch. The End is Near.)

Alex Ross schreibt im New Yorker, Bob Dylan sei Richard Wagner.

Finde ich nicht. Ja, Wagner war einmal de riguer fuer gewisse Kreisen, die sich fuer die ganze Welt hielten, and dann spaeter passierte dem Dylan etwas aehnliches. Aber ein Kuenstler kann nichts fuer seine Anhaenger und was alles fuer Quatsch sie sagen ueber ihn und sich selbst. Wagner begruesste den Wagner-Kult und strengte sich an, ihn nach Moeglichkeiten auszunuetzen und aufzubauen, und machte sich zum nicht-ganz-heimlichen Koenig von Bayreuth, wo sein Geist immer noch regiert.

Dylan hat sich immer sehr skeptisch jeglichen Dylan-Kult gegenueber gehalten, und gegen Kulte um Kuenstler ueberhaupt.

Ross erwaehnt, dass Dylan einmal den Antisemit Wagner einen Erzkriminell genannt hat. Und nicht ohne Gruende, erwaehnt Ross leider nicht.

Ross schreibt:

"As the novelist Hari Kunzru has observed, a Nobel citation can exponentially increase a writer’s audience and help keep independent publishers afloat; in 2016, that opportunity was lost."

Der Literature-Nobel ist nie humanitaere Nothilfe gewesen. Dylan ist nicht der erste reiche Preistraeger. Wenn er denn reich ist. Ich weiss nicht, ob Dylan alles weggegeben hat fuer karitative Zwecke. Vielleicht kennt ihn Alex Ross persoenlich, und vielleicht ist Dylan tatsaechlich erstaeunlich steinreich. Aber wenn schon, er waere damit nicht der erste Steinreiche, der einen Nobel in Literatur bekam. Weder Mann noch Churchill war ein Obdachloser.

"What matters is the explosive fusion of words and music, and in both cases" [In dem Fall Wagner wie in dem Fall Dylan] "music is the igniting element."

So. Ross, wie viele Anderen, die behaupten, Dylan bekaeme den Preis zu Unrecht, hat verstanden, dass Dylan ein Musiker ist. Stimmt, ist er. Ross weiss auch, dass etwas Besonderes passiert in der Kombination von Dylans Wortern und Dylans Musik. Das stimmt auch, und ist auch der Fall immer wenn ein gutes Lied gut vorgetragen wird.

Aber wenn man von Dylans Musik wegsieht, und die Worte allein, an und fuer sich betrachtet, auch dann sind sie etwas preiswuerdiges. Noergler wie Ross -- es gibt deren sehr viele -- wollen Dylan dafuer bestrafen, dass er auch, darueber hinaus, ein Musiker ist, was seine Leistung nur noch imposanter macht, anstatt seine Talente als Dichter zu relativieren.

Am Ende dieses Stueck Noergelei schreibt Ross ueber Dylan:

"He deserves the Nobel Prize."

Gut, dass Ross nicht vergisst, das zu erwaehnen; naemlich, anderenfalls haette man nie wissen koennen, dass er so meint. Am Anfang seiner Essay behauptet Ross:

"My Dylan fandom is as immoderate as anyone’s."

Sehr viele Stuecke in den letzten paar Tagen fangen so an: "Es gibt gar keinen groesseren Dylan-Fan, als ich" -- Nur um fortzufahren: "Aber [...]"

"Jokerman" By Bob Dylan

I guess this is my favorite Bob Dylan recording. If I'm going to actually argue about it, and try to make the case that this year's Nobel Prize in Literature is no joke whatsoever, then this will be Exhibit A. (Don't worry, he's written lots of other great song lyrics too. I would have no problem getting to Exhibit Z before we even get to the album covers and oh yes the books too.) The video is pretty striking. If you don't like listening to Dylan -- some people don't -- you can turn the sound off, and you might still get a kick out of the video.

If the visuals don't do anything for you either, most of the song's lyrics appear on the screen in the video. All of those words were written by Bob Dylan, and Dylan's words seem to be what everybody's currently arguing about.

Honestly -- how is this anything but poetry of a very high order?

Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

So swiftly the sun sets in the sky
You rise up and say goodbye to no one
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
Both of their futures, so full of dread, you don’t show one
Shedding off one more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister
You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister
Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame
You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain
Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks
Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain
False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin
Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery grey
A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of a harlot
Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants
Oh, Jokerman, you don’t show any response

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

Well, if none of that does anything for you -- well. Sorry for wasting your time. To me, this is as good as it gets.

I've sort of surprised at how vehemently I've been defending the choice of Dylan for this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. Because I'd heard his name mentioned as a possible winner for years, and I thought -- meh. But yesterday, when he won, I started listening to things like this again, and -- yeah. Ai r uhgree. Dylan r grate pohett. Ai r uhgree with Noebell!

Reactions To The Award To His Bobness

I've calmed down a little bit since yesterday, when I was vowing to cut off contact with any of my friends who dared to mock Bob Dylan. I've calmed down, and realized that it's not as if I have too many friends. (After I win the Nobel and phony friends start coming out of the woodwork -- THEN I can start hastily cutting people off.)

The number and stature of people who have praised the awarding of the Nobel to Dylan has also calmed me down. It may be just a coincidence that I ran into a bunch of the h8ers first thing yesterday morning -- or maybe it was no coincidence. Maybe the h8ers were more in a hurry to express themselves than the Dylan fans.

The beginning of an article in the New York Times, the part showing on the Google News page was so cheesy -- "Now, Mr. Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era, has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that elevates him into the ..." -- that I had to click and see who had written it -- Nat Hentoff, maybe? No, it wasn't Hentoff, it was several people I'd never heard of. In the first paragraph I read:

Some prominent writers celebrated Mr. Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr. Dylan [...]

-- and I didn't want to read much more. This is a great example of why I hate the New York Times so much: mentioning a great writer like Salman Rushdie, who I hope wins the Nobel soon, in the same sentence with someone like Stephen King. That literally made me nauseous, Times. Thnx a lot!

But of course, the Times can do much worse still: check out Why Bob Dylan Shouldn't Have Gotten a Nobel by someone named Anna North if you want to read something so inept that it's hilarious:

Yes, Mr. Dylan is a brilliant lyricist. Yes, he has written a book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Yes, it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan’s writing is inseparable from his music. He is great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.

As reading declines around the world, literary prizes are more important than ever [...]

CBS News reports: Writers divided on Bob Dylan's Nobel honor. They cite a bunch of heavyweight writers expressing approval of the award, a few silly twits being silly ("A musician won the Nobel! Does this mean I have a chance at a Grammy?" Not if you can't write better than that.), the Vatican newspaper disapproving -- does this mean that Francis also disapproves, or that Francis needs to clean house at his newspaper as he's cleaned house elsewhere? -- and the truly amazing pile of bile over the award spewed by Irvine Welsh, the guy who wrote Trainspotting. (What, did Welsh think HE might've gotten it this year? Hahahahahaha...) No, seriously, what Welsh has said about the Nobel going to Dylan is profoundly disgusting. I don't want to quote it, you can find it easily if you want to with Google.

More unintentionally funny anger over the prize ("I get it: writing books is hard.") has been collected by the New York Post under the headline "Bitter critics slam Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize."

In my opinion, in all seriousness, if the giving of an award, any award, to someone -- anyone -- makes you bitter, you should go see a doctor right now, because that bug up your ass has grown dangerously large and your life is dangerously devoid of depth and joy. An award can be an occasion for joy. If it's an occasion for bitterness, yr doin it wrong. I looked at the Amazon sales ranks for Irvine Welsh and Anna North, and wow, I can understand them being bitter, but it's not Bob Dylan's fault that their stuff isn't selling. Bob Dylan's books are selling a little better than they did yesterday -- and significantly better than Welsh' and North's -- but also nothing spectacular. His records, though -- wow. Surely this must be a big boost from the news of the Nobel. If his records have been selling as well as this, day in and day out, year in and year out, then the $900,000 from the Nobel wouldn't amount to a week's pay for him, maybe not even a day's pay. But surely, the current situation represents a big bump from the Nobel. (Another illustration of the Tom Petty Its-Ab-So-Lute-Ly-Bass-Ack-Wards Law of Microeconomics.)

I Need A Better Class Of Friends!

If you're horrified that Bob Dylan won the Nobel, I'm horrified at you. Truly.

All these Bozos who have managed somehow to surround me, shocked and horrified over Bob's Nobel. In less than an hour on Facebook this morning I blocked at least half a dozen people for dissing Bob. I have nothing to say to them, no more than I have anything to say to people who support Trump or who maintain that we have "two terrible candidates." Then there are other cases, people with whom I've had good exchanges in the past, who seemed reasonable and intelligent, who are spewing all of this stupid anti-Dylan bile. I have nothing to say to them for the moment. At first I thought: I'll let this blow over, then I'll interact with them again like before... But do I really want to do that? This is the only life I have, do I want to spend it with people who can't appreciate Bob Freaking Dylan?

I don't know whether I want that. I'll have to think this over. Perhaps I've been much too lazy in seeking out my sort of people.

It's London in 1966 all over again: a buncha privileged twits who think they know a lot, and they don't know their asses from holes in the ground, and they're dissing Bob to a truly insane extent.

Okay, for one thing, if you're not only horrified, but also astounded that Bob won, well, that just goes to show that you don't know shit about the Nobel in Literature, because Bob has been a leading contender for a long time now. (The nominating process, the process of deciding who is in the running for the Nobel in Literature, is supposed to be a little bit more secretive than it actually is.)

I'm not going to try to make Bob's case here. I don't want to discuss it with the mental midgets who need convincing. And conversely, if you want to make the case why Bob doesn't deserve the Nobel, I don't want to hear it, and I'll cut off contact with you to keep from hearing it if I have to, and I'll curse myself for not having seen you for what you are days or months or years or decades ago.

I suppose it's good: certain great events occur, and they cause certain curtains to drop, and you see what sort of people you've been hanging with.

So. Perhaps you've noticed that I feel rather strongly about this. My annoyance this morning at once again not having won was very, very quickly outweighed by my horror at the reactions of people I had thought were my friends, people I had thought I was in tune with.

Not all of them, to be sure. Not each and every acquaintance of mine who's expressed an opinion on this award has expressed a negative one. Still, except for the satisfaction seeing the Nobel go to someone who so thoroughly deserves it, it's been a pretty shitty morning for me so far.

You got Me --

-- in a corner
You got me against the wall
I got nowhere to go
I got nowhere to fall

Take back your insurance
Baby nothin' is guaranteed
Take back your acid rain and
Let your TV bleed

[Chorus:]
You're jammin' me, you're jammin' me,
Quit jammin' me
Baby you can keep me painted in a corner
You can walk away, but it's not over

Take back your angry slander
Take back your pension plan
Take back your ups and downs of your life
In raisin-land

Take back Vanessa Redgrave
Take back Joe Piscopo
Take back Eddie Murphy
Give 'em all some place to go

[Chorus]

Take back your Iranian torture
And the apple in young Steve's eye
Yeah take back your losing streak
Check your front wheel drive

Take back Pasadena
Take back El Salvador
Take back that country club
They're tryin' to build outside my door