Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize for Literature!

[Madiel]

And that's exactly what's puzzling: "I don't really know or understand much about a particular poet's or musician's work", yet I still feel compelled to voice my opinion.

Well clearly you didn't read the rest of my post, because my stance is on ANY songwriter's capacity to win the Nobel. I can't help it if you're unable to think at one higher level of abstraction, but much of the discussion has been about whether or not a songwriter should win, not about whether a songwriter other than Bob Dylan would be a better choice.

And so my opinion is in support of a songwriter winning, not about whether or not Bob Dylan was specifically the right songwriter to win.

[Jo498]

I am against the literature Nobel prize in principle.

It was never a great idea to have it together with the science prizes; in earlier times it was sometimes used for famous intellectuals that were no poets (e.g. Bergson, Russell), not sure if this was the intention back then, they also still had the idea of "poets educating mankind" or politically abused (Churchill, on the plus side they still had more qualms about abuse of the peace price than later).

Dylan was not even the most bizarre laureate; Dario Fo or the trivial writer Pearl Buck were probably worse/less deserving (and of course there are many I have no clue about).

[Madiel]

Fair enough, that's a higher level question again: whether ANYONE should be getting it.

The Nobel Prizes in general are a bit of an oddity. It's not clear exactly why everyone else paid so much attention to them, my guess is that the amount of prize money was unusually large.