Forum / Dylan wins Nobel Prize for Literature
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 14, 12:55am
Who's next? Kate Tempest?
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Chris OkumOct 14, 03:03pmA lot of people seem to be minimizing Dylan's importance and I don't understand why. Is this some form of garden-variety patricide? The man is a giant. I mean, yeah, I would have preferred someone like James Kelman, or Anne Carson, but acting as if Dylan is some minor talent / has been is bewildering to me. And this is not a personal attack on you, Sam. I just don't understand the vitriol. They always try and give it to iconoclasts. And Dylan is an iconoclast, and a particularly ornery one at that.
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David AckleyOct 14, 04:31pmAnyone with an ear, who's been alive for the last fifty years( or more in my case) would have to concede that the dominant literature of our time is song. You may or may not like it( and I don't so much)but there it is. In that event, Dylan is not only the best candidate to embody it, but probably long overdue. Anyway he's also a very fine poet, and a good writer of prose. Why carp?
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 14, 08:39pm
His lyrics don't work on the page, only when they are sung and sung by him do they take on meaning. Gershwyn was a great songwriter too but it doesn't mean he is deserving of a literary prize.
The moment they start giving grammys to poets and authors and inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame I will eat my own mouth and cut off my fingers.
This clouding of what constitutes literature is extremely dangerous and is part of a cultural marxist leftist agenda. Maybe it shouldn't really be too surprising when one must take into account the fact they gave Obama a Nobel Peace Prize.
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Chris OkumOct 14, 09:21pm
From the website run by Rhys Tranter: "There have been some who have responded to Dylan’s Nobel nomination with dismay, even anger. Some cite that his status as a songwriter might justify a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but is not a ticket into the literary canon. Such detractors often fail to acknowledge that in addition to his music, Bob Dylan has also published poetry, experimental prose, and even a memoir. That’s to say nothing of his influence on countless more traditional literary figures. But this kind of categorization seems to miss the point. Those who reject Dylan’s candidacy for the Nobel forget that literature, when traced back to its earliest forms, began as a poetic oral tradition frequently linked to rhythm, music, and song."
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 14, 10:11pm
I've heard that same bs argument countless times, usually from lefties. It's meaningless.
a song is not a piece of literature, a song is a song, they are two different art forms that happen to occasionally share similar characteristics but they are distint from each other.
This is what I mean about how they are trying to redefine what literature/poetry is, so they can justify the publication of white middle class marxists (the likes of K Tempest and a shitload of others) and their pathetic white middle class attempts at rap lyrics masquerading as poetry. You can't get printed unless you are one of them. The zionists and communists have taken over the artistic establishment while pretending to be against it, its an inversion.
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Chris OkumOct 14, 10:23pm
Samuel, who would you have preferred to win? Just curious.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 14, 10:57pm
My preference has no meaning.
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Chris OkumOct 15, 12:20am
Sure it does, Sam. It has meaning to me. I'd be interested to know. Your pick is as valid as anyone's.
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David AckleyOct 15, 05:09pm
Aside from all the bullshit white middle-class Marxist ranting, yours is a good argument, Sam.
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Mathew PaustOct 15, 07:33pmSam, how can you say "Those not busy being born are busy dying" does not work on the page? Far as I'm concerned that line alone deserved the Nobel. Christ never said it better.
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Chris OkumOct 15, 08:53pm
Oh, God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son." Abe said, "Man, you must be puttin' me on." God said, "No." Abe say, "What?" God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but the next time you see me comin', you better run." Well, Abe said, "Where d'you want this killin' done?" God said, "Out on Highway 61."
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 15, 09:50pm
All great song lyrics.
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Mathew PaustOct 16, 06:09pm
Wonder if the dynamite inventor had even an inkling of the "profundities" his bequeathment would provoke. Would he have been considered a master of war?
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Tim G. YoungOct 20, 06:45amBob Dylan:
Oh, what did you see, my blue eyed son?
And what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin'
I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'
I heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin'
I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. -
Mathew PaustOct 20, 06:10pm
Yeah but...yeah but...there's a tune goes with that, isn't there? It can't be lit'ry if there's a tune goes with it!! But, yeah, there's a hard rain a'fallin' alright. Damned hard rain.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:27am
True
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:32am
It is somewhat telling that the lefties that defend the ludicrous awarding of this prize to a songwriter all quote the same handful of lyrics, ie, It's Alright Ma, Hard Rain, Visions of Johanna.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:32am
I dare them to list more than five song lyrics.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:35am
twoplato • 3 days ago
'For the categorical separation of music and poetry is itself a mistake;... Apols for appearing to be a pedant (I probably am), but I think you mean 'categorial separation'. You introduced Aristotle's categories and Austin's categorial arguments, so it's categorial, I'm afraid.
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Box of Frogs • 3 days agoGramsci must be so pleased.....
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Jay Igaboo Box of Frogs • 3 days agoIndeed.
Awards are meaningless now, they reek of PC corruption.
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Box of Frogs Jay Igaboo • 3 days agoSadly they have hijacked so many charities and trusts... One needs to be very discerning
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Jay Igaboo Box of Frogs • 3 days agoVery true. When I campaigned very publicly against PC under my own name, I was often in conflict with so-called "charities" that had been, as Gramsci ordered, "captured" by Cultural Marxists.
Many are very harmful to society, rather than charitable.
Some, such as the NSPCC purportedly exist to help the needy and the vulnerable, but in reality exist to advance the PC deconstruction of society whilst providing fat salaries for the executive class-- fat salaries made possible from 1, the donations of well-meaning people, and two, a huge amount of work by unpaid volunteers. -
Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:40am
In other words, the advancement of evil, toxic, zionist driven cultural marxist destruction of human civilisation has been ignorantly aided by the ignorance of obnoxious, pretentious, "well-meaning Leftists who seem to think we are still in the 1960s. The Left are intent on destroying literature from the inside out (aided by the evils of modern feminism ) and it looks like they are succeeding. Hopefully they will all burn in hell, if hell exists.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:42am
AND I am glad I don't have any children.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:46am
AND I am sure the Leftists are too, sociopathic as they are.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:50am
I apologize for the vitriol but I have come up against these people in real time/real life and it left me exhaused and on the verge of wanting to self harm.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 02:54am
Hart Crane commited suicide too, who else?
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 21, 03:05am
Ignore my worthless and cringe inducing angst.
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Mathew PaustOct 21, 08:41pm
Conspiracy, Sam? I had not thought of it that way, that it's one big stinking leftist conspiracy. Good lord, if that's the case it's the first conspiracy I've ever consciously been a part of. Why don't I feel more...you know, triumphant? Do we get to execute rightists? (Wonder if we'll get a T-shirt or a pin or something? I could use a new T-shirt...)
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Chris OkumOct 21, 08:56pm
Don't worry, Mat. Being a Jew, I am apparently a small part of the longest running conspiracy to ever be inflicted on the human race, which is why periodically we - meaning Jews - need to be erased from the face of the planet. As Vonnegut would say: Ho-hum.
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Chris OkumOct 21, 08:59pm
BTW: if we Jews really did run shit there would have been more than 4 Jews named the Nobel Prize Winner in Literature that last 100 hundred years. And we certainly would not have given it to Knut Hamsun. I will admit this, though, pace Brando: We really do run Hollywood. That's no fucking joke. That shit is ours and anyone who wants it is going to have to pry it from our cold, lox-stained hands.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 22, 12:24pm
It isn't Jews, it's Zionists and Leftists and a lot of Leftists seem to be anti-semitic. You don't have to be Jewish in order to be a Zionist and I suspect a lot of Zionists are not in fact Jewish. I see it as a mish-mash.
I try to keep out of politics because I see art as being separate from it but unfortunately the poetry circles here in Glasgow are all overrun with Leftists. Anyway, my slew of recent comments were made when I was drunk and depressed (and reflecting on the way I was treated by the people I invited on the poetry night that I organized) and a classic example of why I should just continue writing and staying out of the whole political thing.
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Mathew PaustOct 22, 04:25pm
Two points, Sam: (1) Artists, if they want to make any money, should probably aim at markets slightly right of center--neoliberal these days would be perfect, I should think, unless we're talking criminal kingpins striving for a patina of respectability. (2) Most artists in their hearts, I tend to believe, are raging leftists--until they become commercially successful. But isn't this the way with offbeat vocations?
I provide no factual or historical basis for (1) or (2), as I consider myself purely a perceptionist. Sorry you got shat upon at your poetry night. The lesson there, perhaps, is the old No good deed goes unpunished trope. Better luck next time, bubba.
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Nonnie AugustineOct 23, 12:20pmDylan's lyrics have been with me, embedded in my consciousness, since I was 14 years old. That's a long time. And I'm not the only one, obviously. When I felt depressed I was the "sad-eyed lady of the lowlands," when I was angry with a lover, I sang (or said) "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." More recently, every song from the troubadour for our times (still on a never-ending tour at 75) from the album Time Out of Mind, but especially "Not Dark Yet," accompanies me in some way. Troubadours are poets who put verse to music. Then again, I've been a leftie since I was 14; fancied myself a rolling stone, still do, even though I'm getting ancient. I think the Swedish Academy made a fine choice.
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Gary HardawayOct 23, 04:14pmDylan didn't ask for it, angle for it, and so far, seems indifferent to the honor. I understand the choice. Not one I would have made but one that makes sense in the odd light of this still newish century.
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Charlotte HamrickOct 24, 05:22pm"Most people – the vast majority of humanity today – get their poetry from songs. That was certainly true in the ancient world when literacy was hardly widespread. The psalms, Homer, the Vedas – the greatest ancient poems – were heard and revered as song. It is narrow-minded and culturally limited to think of poetry purely as page oriented, book oriented."
I agree.
Essay by Roger Kamenetz here:
http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/fighting-in-the-captains-tower-in-defense-of-bob-dylans-nobel-prize
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 24, 05:30pm
That's another modern myth, back then they were poems that were set to music, they were not songs.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 24, 05:35pm
"Most people – the vast majority of humanity today – get their poetry from songs. That was certainly true in the ancient world when literacy was hardly widespread. The psalms, Homer, the Vedas – the greatest ancient poems – were heard and revered as song. It is narrow-minded and culturally limited to think of poetry purely as page oriented, book oriented."
That is a really limited and narrow-minded thing to say, it is also a lie.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 24, 05:56pm
Calling songs poems is like calling apples oranges just because they happen to both be fruits. A peanut is not a nut just because it has nut in its name, a peanut is actually a bean.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 24, 06:01pm
"Dylan's lyrics have been with me, embedded in my consciousness, since I was 14 years old. That's a long time. And I'm not the only one, obviously. When I felt depressed I was the "sad-eyed lady of the lowlands," when I was angry with a lover, I sang (or said) "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." More recently, every song from the troubadour for our times (still on a never-ending tour at 75) from the album Time Out of Mind, but especially "Not Dark Yet," accompanies me in some way. Troubadours are poets who put verse to music. Then again, I've been a leftie since I was 14; fancied myself a rolling stone, still do, even though I'm getting ancient. I think the Swedish Academy made a fine choice"
I can understand that but just because the lyric of a song embeds itself in your consciousness in some meaningful way doesn't mean that it is a poem. A film can do that too (through the delivery of the lines by the actors/actresses and the direction and the shaping of imagery, it doesn't mean a film is a poem.
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Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-IIIOct 24, 11:03pmFranzen sucks. Foster Wallace Sucks. Woolf, Wilde and Joyce all operated from a headspace that's not replicable if you live don't in a world where Dreiser, the World Wars, and the Dadaists didn't happen -- in other words, if you were in a loveless marriage and homosexual without having to brave being "out" in everyday society (like Quentin Crisp, who should get credit for it and truly be on the proverbial "Three-Dollar Bill" -- ha, ha!).
V. Woolf wasn't gonna write any essays about "Oscar Wilde's Wife" (as opposed to "Shakespeare's Sister," as though she had no idea how Mary Shelley and/or Louisa May Alcott were able to get by) any more than she was going to cop to the fact that the "Separate Rooms" essay needed the subtitle "or, Kick the Servants, Would You Kindly, Leonard"? I say this having stuck my head in the "Lighthouse" one, and going with it, only to find out ... those dividends aren't usable if you aren't "entitled," and going to be able sustain staying in that bubble -- which plenty of folks *are* willing to bite on, like a worm on a hook, just for the jouissance of feeling like they could (make no mistake, there's a real lure and appeal to this sort of thing, not unlike reading silver spoon novels or being fucking pleased to sit in the back row and be awed beyond your own ability to participate; why bother? Why miss this?).
Joyce was an apolitical Irish artist who got to go whoring in Zurich (while hardly anybody gets to even fuck at all without losing face or risking social disaster -- and while his wife was giving birth, no less) and thereby got to fancy himself the center of the Cultural universe; try and go back and re-establish links between Thackeray and Victorian England and the later-comers like Beats Burroughs and Kerouac et al. and you realize who's the culprits for this discontinuity in our Culture (and no, I don't mean John Dos Passos or Nelson Algren, either -- wait a minute, who the fuck are they?).
You want to talk about injustices in Literature, Samuel, you could at least feel how pissed off *most* people, one would imagine, would be at reading the words I wrote above. ("Wait ... he takes DAPHNE DU MAURIER as seriously as Murakami?")
Langue is langue; if it's dense and layered and gives pleasure, then it's Literature. Byron was a fan of Dante Alighieri's writing his "Divine Comedy" in the modern-day vernacular, not Latin, so people could read it; how far afield is that from Bob Dylan, regardless of how it reads *now* to whiny 11th-graders (or, the whiny 11th-graders in all of us, groaning at having to make the effort, myself no exception)?
If Bobby D. hit it, he hit it, didn't he? Maybe there should be a separate Nobel for songwriting, that's only fair -- albeit a different discussion. (Stephin Merritt's my first choice.) And comics. (Kate Beaton[*] goes first -- Clowes and Tomine will have to wait, IMHO.)
But let's pick one (1) debate here, shall we? More categories is one thing. Yea-or-nay Bob Dylan seems to be another -- hence the confusion, and malice and spite inspired, methinks.
I'm. Just. Saying.
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[*] http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php/index.php?id=56* -
Samuel Derrick RosenOct 25, 09:37am
I'm just astonished that I seem to be the only one.
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Mathew PaustOct 25, 02:47pm
Not sure why you give such a shit about this, Sam. Not that I give much of a shit why, albeit having an instinctive curiosity regarding the nature of fecal stinks, the satisfying of which in most every instance invariably leaving me the more curious.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 25, 05:42pm
Why does anyone give a shit about anything?
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Chris OkumOct 25, 05:50pm
I'll tell you who doesn't give a shit: Bob Dylan. He gives less of a shit than anyone here. That's why he's Bob Dylan and we're not.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 25, 07:13pm
I guess that makes him a god, he is better than us and our grandmothers and our grandmothers' grandmothers. WOW, what an epiphany, bodes well for what's coming!
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 25, 07:24pm
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Chris OkumOct 25, 07:41pm
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 25, 08:03pm
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Iain James RobbOct 25, 09:35pmI'm with Sam. I have no problem with Dylan winning a Nobel, but it should be in separate category other than the one he won in. It's ironic, you know, because it's not a very well kept secret that Dylan is most likely a Republican voter: but the Nobel award was indeed political, and it was a political decision in line with the long, long history of interference in the Nobel committee by the Far Left Wing. One of the weapons of the no national borders, no national sovereignty, single market, collectivist supremacy engineered for decades, planned since halfway through the last century, by the globalists - with their Fabian and Frankfurt School engineering and relentless Kalergi planning, is the destruction of Western culture organised by postmodernism - which was designed by the Cultural Marxists purely to eradicate long standing recognition of artistic values in order to bring the West one step closer to submission to global corporate Communism. Decimate the recognition of what art is, and you remove the idea of the artist. Do the same with poetry and high literature, and the idea of the poet or literary artist in general goes straight into the dustbin also. The idea is to discredit the very thing that most characterises the West in terms of world history, the ineffable achievements of its culture, in order to remove its special value, and thus the value of its other individualistic institutions, and ultimately democracy as an expansion of individualist merit expressed in art. Saying song lyrics are no different from poetry is part of that great institutionalised destruction. It is something we should find sinister, because the totalitarian Left already more or less completely monopolise poetry in the West in published form as well as the arts media and involuntary public funding to support their cronies: and have institutionalised the idea that poetry is an anti-art form that exists only for political expression, have done catastrophic damage already to our poetic literature, and the Nobel agreeing with their illusion that there is no such fixed thing as poetry is another step on the road to irredeemable ruin.
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Mathew PaustOct 25, 09:54pm
I wish one could simply award faves for comments here instead of dueling with links or having to respond with another comment, albeit some of the comments well worth the read. At the moment, I would award the five-star laurel to Chris's penultimate entry, his "give a shit" comment. I just now had a flash of insight wondering what an all out debate would look like in the fine print of this forum amongst Iain, Smiley and Strannikov (altho I just now scrolled up, thinking Edward had weighed in on this weighty topic, and found to a mix of chagrin and, admittedly, relief, that he did not
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Chris OkumOct 26, 12:57pm
Ugh. It's starting to stink in here. I know that smell. Never fails to make me run from the room. The stink of petty grievances.
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Mathew PaustOct 26, 02:42pm
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Tim G. YoungOct 26, 05:26pm
Dylan won, it's over. Who said you had to give a shit?
I'm fucking happy as hell about it. You be how you be. -
Samuel Derrick RosenOct 26, 09:30pm
I'm salivating at the prospect of Strannikov making an appearance.
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Mathew PaustOct 26, 09:33pm
Sure, Tim, but you know **whispering: his poetry is married to, um, music--cough cough--which means it's simply not lit'rachure**. Oh, hell, enuf of the fucking whispering: SOME PEOPLE DO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THAT!! And, of course, harumph, their opinions should be respected.
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Mathew PaustOct 26, 09:35pm
No you're not, Sam. No kidding allowed here, either. Honesty über alles is the literatus's motto, don't you know.
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Chris OkumOct 26, 09:51pm
I give a shit about everything, unfortunately. Except baseball. I could seriously give a shit about baseball.
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Samuel Derrick RosenOct 26, 10:52pm
Quite a few of my own poems could be set to music, I've sometimes on occasion fantasized about it.
At the poetry night I read out only one poem and it was accompanied by a female named Rita Bradd playing a lute, I think it sounded pretty good for a first attempt and I'd like to do it again. It is just finding the right people to take part and its going to be difficult, apart from myself and Iain James Robb (who btw gave a very good reading at the poetry night) I need 3 more people, preferably 2 female poets and 1 male.
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Mathew PaustOct 27, 08:10pm
Now you're talking! Stockholm awaits!
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Chris OkumOct 30, 08:09pm
I'm reading THE ICE AGE by Margaret Drabble. Maybe they should have given the award to Margaret Drabble. THE ICE AGE is at least as good as anything by Coetzee.
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Chris OkumOct 30, 08:12pm
My pick for this year's Nobel would have been James Kelman. HOW LATE IT WAS, HOW LATE is Beckett if Beckett were a drunk in a blind rage instead of an ascetic on a hunt for human bones. Kelman rules.
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David AckleyNov 01, 12:33am
The question is, if and when say you like a writer why is it necessary to denigrate another writer in the same breath? Chris? Is it not possible to think highly of James Kelman and Samuel Beckett at once? I love Beckett. I'd like, now, to read Kelman and maybe love him too. Everything good adds.
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Chris OkumNov 01, 12:48am
David, I honestly don't understand what it was I said that you took to be denigration of Beckett, whom I have nothing but the utmost respect. I don't understand. Was Beckett not a man who spend most of his time alone in a small room doing the metaphorical work of performing archeology on his psyche? I don't get your agitation. At all. I didn't say Becket sucks. I said Kelman rules.
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Samuel Derrick RosenNov 01, 04:00pm
I think Chris just meant they were 2 sides of the same coin and that neither is better than the other.
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David AckleyNov 01, 05:29pm
Sorry, Chris, I guess I misread the intent of your comparison.
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Jerry RatchNov 01, 08:55pmcan somebody tell Bob to send me that prize money though. he don't need it anymore. yeah, he don't need it anymore. no, he don't need it, anymore.
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Iain James RobbNov 01, 11:30pm
Chris Okum - I'd be fine with Kelman getting it too. My own pick would probably be Thomas Ligotti, though.
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Ann BogleNov 03, 05:09pmShe loves you, na-na-nah, she loves you, na-na-na-na-nah also busted flat in Baton Rouge also motorcycle mama won't you lay your big spike down or say it in dead flowers at my wedding or how about Peri Bathous or wann that april withe hes shoures soote?
We give it mind. Beautiful comment, Nonnie, and nice long quotation, Tim Young.
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David AckleyNov 03, 05:38pm
Aprille
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