Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize for Literature!

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

I guess if war criminals like Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger can win the Nobel Peace Prize, then maybe Dylan should get one for literature. Then, maybe we can give the prize for medicine to some prominent anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy. She IS a voice for her people (stupid people) after all!

[mc ukrneal]

Dylan wrote some good lyrics. But Nobel Prize for Literature? Give me a break. There, I feel better.

Seriously, I don't understand the choice, though it is also true that I never formed a connection with him or his music. But the choice is like putting a square peg in a round hole. Have any other musicians gotten one? I guess the criteria are not limited to books and such as I would expect. Perhaps someone could explain what "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" means.

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

My opinion: Dylan is a fly fart in a hurricane compared to this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4btOXkGpwA8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_05E56Nn0g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M0RGtmL2qY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-SWmHSEQfQ

[San Antone]

I guess if war criminals like Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger can win the Nobel Peace Prize, then maybe Dylan should get one for literature. Then, maybe we can give the prize for medicine to some prominent anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy. She IS a voice for her people (stupid people) after all!

You are ignorant about vaccines.  They are unsafe, one only has to read the package insert to know that.  Further, The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 eliminates manufacturer liability for a vaccine's unavoidable, adverse side effects.  Language the Supreme Court rubber stamped.

The law was created by Congress in response to lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry and medical trade associations to shield drug companies and doctors from civil product liability and malpractice lawsuits for injuries and deaths caused by federally recommended and state mandated vaccines.

The law, which acknowledged that vaccines carry serious risks, created a federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP).  By 2013, the VICP had awarded more than $2.6 billion to vaccine injured individuals and their families; however two out of three vaccine injury claims are rejected for compensation. Injuries and deaths from pertussis-containing vaccines lead in the numbers of compensation awards, followed by influenza vaccine, MMR vaccine and hepatitis B vaccine.

Sorry to derail the thread.

[Ken B]

You are ignorant about vaccines.  They are unsafe, one only has to read the package insert to know that.  Further, The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 eliminates manufacturer liability for a vaccine's unavoidable, adverse side effects.  Language the Supreme Court rubber stamped.

The law was created by Congress in response to lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry and medical trade associations to shield drug companies and doctors from civil product liability and malpractice lawsuits for injuries and deaths caused by federally recommended and state mandated vaccines.

The law, which acknowledged that vaccines carry serious risks, created a federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP).  By 2013, the VICP had awarded more than $2.6 billion to vaccine injured individuals and their families; however two out of three vaccine injury claims are rejected for compensation. Injuries and deaths from pertussis-containing vaccines lead in the numbers of compensation awards, followed by influenza vaccine, MMR vaccine and hepatitis B vaccine.

Sorry to derail the thread.

I am sorry but I will not let this pass. I respect you David, but this is dangerous tripe, and it is beyond ironic for you to call someone else ignorant about vaccines. Lawsuits? Will you cite Old Lady v McDonalds on the danger of coffee?
Sorry to continue the derailment.

[Ken B]

Puff Daddy was robbed!

[Ken B]

This is also a great tribute to the generation of ballad singers / song writers / poets. I just used a Jackson Browne song (For A Dancer) from the same era in my poetry class last week. 

Is it? Doesn't it really just pile yet more attention on the guy who already had more than the rest of them together? Would a Nobel for Madonna really be a tribute to the generation of baby-boomer Catholic girls born in the rust belt?

It's interesting what the fans of this award cite: the music, the voice, their youthful boners. Fine things all, but not really literary merit, and all tending to buttress Irvine Welsh's caustic observation. (I must add him to my reading list.)

[GioCar]

You are ignorant about vaccines.  They are unsafe, one only has to read the package insert to know that.  Further, The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 eliminates manufacturer liability for a vaccine's unavoidable, adverse side effects.  Language the Supreme Court rubber stamped.

The law was created by Congress in response to lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry and medical trade associations to shield drug companies and doctors from civil product liability and malpractice lawsuits for injuries and deaths caused by federally recommended and state mandated vaccines.

The law, which acknowledged that vaccines carry serious risks, created a federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP).  By 2013, the VICP had awarded more than $2.6 billion to vaccine injured individuals and their families; however two out of three vaccine injury claims are rejected for compensation. Injuries and deaths from pertussis-containing vaccines lead in the numbers of compensation awards, followed by influenza vaccine, MMR vaccine and hepatitis B vaccine.

Sorry to derail the thread.

Sorry but I cannot abstain from commenting that
?

Anyway, good for Bob Dylan but as already said before, many people deserve the prize more and before him. If anything, in terms of ... money?

[zamyrabyrd]

I guess if war criminals like Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger can win the Nobel Peace Prize, then maybe Dylan should get one for literature. Then, maybe we can give the prize for medicine to some prominent anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy. She IS a voice for her people (stupid people) after all!

Yassir Arafat also got the Nobel Peace Prize.

[The new erato]

Sorry to derail the thread.

Sorry to call this crazy.

[The new erato]

Yassir Arafat also got the Nobel Peace Prize.

jointly with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East".

[Marc]

Go ahead and be bitter, those that are. I don't care. I grew up in that era, and you can well believe that all those brilliant, totally obscure and nearly unreadable poets and novelists which you are lamenting as passed over, didn't have an ounce of influence over the world that Dylan has had. And if the songs you listen to are not poetry, you ain't listening to the right songs.

[ritter]

I hear Céline Dion is seriously being considered for the Grawemeyer Award....

[Jo498]

It's hardly a secret that the Nobel committee is fallible. They missed fairly obvious people even in hard sciences (e.g. Lise Meitner who should have received it instead or together with Hahn (but in physics, not chemistry) and the Peace Prize has been awarded to a number of war criminals (Kissinger) as well as terrorists (Arafat) or people who didn't really do anything for it (Obama).

The prize for literature is not quite but almost as bad with some clear political choices (Churchill, apparently they still had some qualms about the Peace Prize back then) and the odd balance between geographical regions without being able to escape a Western or even English language bias. A German writer in the 1950s said what is easy to translate will get that prize. (This actually makes sense, it's simply an unfairness that is almost impossible to avoid.)
There have also been candidates who already were world-famous and rich (e.g. Thomas Mann) when they received the prize, others not well known except among experts. It's certainly not supposed to be a prize to put a comparably young/unknown author on the map.
No musician I am aware of but a number of historians (Mommsen, Churchill ), Philosophers (most famous ones are Bergson, Russell and Sartre who refused it) received the prize and last year's laureat was more a journalist, AFAIK.

So I don't think it helps to blame the actual decision for the committee neglecting Tolstoy in the first 10 prizes (it cannot be awarded posthumously). I don't know why they did that. If one looks at the first laureates 1901-10 (several of which I had not even heard the name of) the only ones that seem close to Tolstoy in fame today are Kipling and Lagerlöf (today mainly known for a children's book...) and maybe Mommsen (a historian).

My impression is that the people most dissatisfied with Dylan getting the prize are fans of e.g. Philip Roth and other older American authors who have been perennial candidates but will almost certainly not receive it now because of the "geographical balancing" it will be a while until another American gets it.

[knight66]

Morning from the UK folks. I have had some corr with someone who is not happy about the temporary derailment of the thread. Please do not allow the current political issues, which are very widely explored elsewhere in the Diner, to infect this thread.

Thanks,

Knight

[Florestan]

this is 2016. WTF?

Precisely. Why giving the prize to someone whose main achievements date from the 60s and 70s of the last century?

And either you are using rhetorical excess to make your point, or you really know nothing about Dylan. In this case, I'm not sure which is true. If you had been alive and sentient in the 1960's, you would have a far greater respect for him, I can assure you. You might still not like him, but you would know what he was about.

You didn´t get it. I have nothing againts Bob Dylan. My issue is with the decision of the Nobel literary committee. The Nobel Prize for Literature (literature, for God´s sake) to someone who hasn´t written one single book in his whole life? Give me a break, amigo.

It's interesting what the fans of this award cite: the music, the voice, their youthful boners.

And a couple lyrics which I am sure have highly sentimental value for some people but whose Nobel-worth is highly debatable.

[Jo498]

I found the voice always fairly terrible and usually prefer cover versions (interestingly, several Dylan songs became most famous as sung by Hendrix or Joan Baez). But now reading through some of the quoted lyrics in this thread it struck me that they work much better sung (and probably in Dylans distinctive "ugly" voice and style).

So while I only familiar with a small portion of his output, I am ever more in doubt that this is great poetry. He also wrote one or more rambling "prose poems" as "liner notes" to his then (or ex) girlfriend Baez. I recall these as more of a curiosity but I am certainly not an expert on modern lyrical poetry. Not sure if he did any more of this stuff outside song lyrics.

[ritter]

Transcript of the deliberations of the Nobel prize committee:



- Let's give the prize to Haruki Miru...Huraki...
- It's Hikaru Makirumi
- Hariku Mukirami?
- Haiku...
- To hell with it, let Bob Dylan have it...

[Florestan]

Perhaps someone could explain what "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" means.

It means they have just sunk the NPL deep into irrelevance and silliness.

[James]

Dylan wrote some good lyrics. But Nobel Prize for Literature? Give me a break.

"An ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies," wrote "Trainspotting" novelist Irvine Welsh. "I totally get the Nobel committee," tweeted author Gary Shteyngart. "Reading books is hard."

Amen.