Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate

Subject: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Peter Laban
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 07:24 AM

A surprise but deserved win of the Nobel prize for literature.

Live coverage

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: voyager
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 07:40 AM

Huzzah for Mr. Tambourine Man, Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan -

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

Knock, Knock, Knockin on Nobel's Door (2013 NY Times)

voyager

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 08:28 AM

I'll go halfway with you, Peter, and agree that it was a surprise. 😉

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Johnny J
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 08:43 AM

Is there a Nobel Prize for Plagiarism?

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Roger the Skiffler
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 08:58 AM

The times certainly are a-changin'. I thought I'd get that in before the press do!

RtS

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,HiLo
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:04 AM

Well, this is a surprise. I have been a lifelong fan of Dylan, I admire his stance on many issues , I love his lyrics and I think he has been a pivotal figure in music.Having said that, if I was going to give a literature prize to a musician, I would give it to Leonard Cohen, or Joni Mitchell perhaps.
But I have no great problem with Bob Dylan getting it, especially when I remind myself of some of the mediocre writers who have been awarded the honour.So, good on Bob.
As for the accusation of plagiarism, utter nonsense !

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: alanabit
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:08 AM

Well if that was the case, Woody Guthrie would have been a good candidate for it too! Certainly both Dylan and Guthrie took ideas and even lines and tunes from other sources. The argument on their behalf is that they enhanced those ideas and made something more of them. Woody Guthrie saw this as an inevitable part of the folk process.
The case for the significance of Dylan's work rests more on the way he tackled several genres of American song and was able to extend the range of what could be achieved in them. In particular, I can think of no artist before him, who attempted the complex psychological profiles which you get in songs like "Ballad of a Thin Man",or "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding". You don't have to like him to recognise that he was artistically very ambitious.
Still, I had better shut up now. Little Hawk will be around at any moment - and he probably has the drop on most Dylanologists around here!

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Johnny J
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:16 AM

I'm not saying I don't like him. I do but it can't be denied that he "borrowed" several phrases and melodies over the years.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:19 AM

He borrowed quite a bit from Nic Jones, didn't he, forgetting to mention it...

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:23 AM

If Tom Lehrer wanted another reason why satire was superfluous he just got it...

Maybe I'll drop in to a Dylan-themed singaround and read a chapter of Jose Saramago.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Johnny J
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:31 AM

Plenty such sessions in Midlothian ;))

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:45 AM

Johnny J. it's called the 'folk process ' it's always happened and it always will.

Dave H

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 09:45 AM

I'm happy, but kinda surprised.

Subject: Bob Dylan: Nobel Prize for Literature.
From: Acorn4
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 10:56 AM

Well deserved Bob, a true poet if ever there was one!

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 11:01 AM

Also, Woody Guthrie is dead, and dead people can't win. But I'd have liked to see him honored in his lifetime.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan : Nobel laureate
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 11:09 AM

Only 40 years too late but well done at last. Best news for ages!

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 11:56 AM

This past summer the Centre Georges Pompidou devoted a floor to the "Beat Generation".   It was a WONDERFUL montage of photos, films, sounds and settings and manuscripts, (Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road rolled out in its original 200 foot scroll.)

Bob Dylan's "Subterranian Homesick" was projected on a wall.

See below for the story of its filming and its clip.





http://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-subterranean-homesick-blues-video/


Sincerely,
Gargoyle


You can notice Allen Ginsberg on the left side of the screen.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Roger Knowles
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 01:19 PM

Thats nice. It would have been also nice if the interim singer/picker/song collector & huge influence Rambling Jack Elliott was at least mentioned in Dylan's career.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 02:22 PM

Interesting take from Slate.com here.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Mr Red
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 02:57 PM

Cut Mr Zimmerman some slack guys. How is a singer/wrongciter gonna learn his trade if he doesn't immerse himself in a tradition?
He was a wordsmith before he started singing trad English.
He did more than learn songs, he learned how to construct them. He didn't pull his punches, even if they weren't there to smash the system. They woke up people.
And his influence - you can't argue he didn't influenced generations.

There were better singers, better musicians, but the prize is not for those. It is for his words, and their influence. Had he been British he would be Sir or even Lord Dylan of Laugharne.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Mr Red
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 03:18 PM

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. T. S. Eliot (Nobel Laureate)
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/t_s_eliot.html

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Dave Hunt
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 03:20 PM

Loved his words... but i'm afraid really hated his whiney voice...which meant i didn't listen to much of his stuff...
What would the reaction have been in the 60s/70s if someone had said that one day he'd be a Nobel prizewinner!!!

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 03:25 PM

I had totally forgotten lying in wait for him in the hopes he'd come to my college graduation, since his daughter was graduating too... thank you for reminding me his family name is Zimmerman!

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: fat B****rd
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 03:40 PM

Francis Ford Coppola once said, on apparently being accused of plagiarising King Lear with "The Godfather"*, "Well, if you're going to steal, steal from the best"
*I know he didn't write it!

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: voyager
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 04:28 PM

I had one encounter with Bob Dylan, the man, back in the mid '70s.
My brother and I were at a movie theater in Beverly Hills where the
the feature film was 'Children of Paradise' (Les Enfants du Paradis).

When the movie ended and the lights came on, there was one person still in the seats wearing dark glasses (so you wouldn't recognize him perhaps). When he was leaving the theater I caught a glimpse of Dylan looking much like his persona from the Blond on Blond era.

End of story.
For that alone, I'd recommend him for the Noble prize (guffaw).

Cheers
voyager

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 05:06 PM

"I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies..." Irvine Welsh

Like they say in Chicago... there's always next year (Go Cubbies!)

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Donuel
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 05:31 PM

Bob Dylan now belongs to the ages and will join all the other folk rock&rollers who have won the Nobel Prize.


THIS IS THE CUBS YEAR

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: meself
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 06:06 PM

I never thought of the Nobel committee as being made up of'senile, gibbering hippies', if that's what that unpleasant word salad is supposed to mean .... but then I've never thought much of the Nobel committee at all .....

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 06:19 PM

Well I found Dylan's "poetry" to be dense, exclusive and obscurantist. To me, poetry should be crystallising notions that I can't articulate clearly for myself, that are inchoate in my mind. Happy, sad, tragic, life-affirming, anything. But making me focus, providing an illuminating spark. Dylan's lyrics are nothing like that. They are for self-regarding ex-hippies who think they are "on to something" that the less sophisticated among us are incapable of seeing. Up their own bottoms in other words. Crap harmonica player too.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 06:53 PM

Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can't be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours"
I said that

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,pauperback
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 06:57 PM

God don't make no promises that He don't keep

You got some big dreams, baby, but in order to dream you gotta still be asleep

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up

When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

__________________

"The Beatles and The Rolling Stones heard Bob Dylan and it changed them forever; all-time great singer-songwriters Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon all looked up to him; so do such new generation stars as Marcus Mumford, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Adele. You can even hear his cadences in hip hop, where he is the most venerated veteran white songwriter, name-checked by everyone from Jay Z to Kendrick Lamar."

www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/bob-dylan-turned-the-simple-pop-song-into-fine-literature---of-c

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 07:15 PM

Big deal. Take the Beatles. Amazing music put to banal lyrics (I love them, by the way). Some influence. Chalk and cheese.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,pauperback
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 07:27 PM

Horse feathers

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 07:47 PM

But it's true. Show me any Beatles lyrics that come anywhere near to Dylan's flowery, obscurantist nonsense. Shallow copies at best. .

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Airymouse
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 08:12 PM

"I laugh, because I must not cry, that is all, that is all." President Abraham Lincoln

"A people who values its privileges above its principles, soon loses both." President Eisenhower

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" President Reagan

"Grab them by the pussy; you can do anything." Donald Trump

Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Gide, Albert Camus, William Butler Yeats, Eugene O'Neill, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann...

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 08:17 PM

"To be is to do" -- Socrates
.
"To do is to be"-- Sartre

"Do be do be do" -- Sinatra

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,pauperback
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 10:24 PM

Its measured ways I tread again
Quatrain by constrained quatrain,
Meting grief and reason out
As you said a poem ought.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Amos
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 11:08 PM

His lyrics deserve acknowledgement--decades of scintillating, deep, passionate and human images and spinning metaphysics laced together like the offspring of Thomas Jefferson and Artur Rimbaud. I think he deserved the prize, and I am very surprised the Committee agreed.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Oct 16 - 11:18 PM

And he had strange dreams...

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Neil D
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 12:02 AM

I think it's great and I'm not surprised. I kind of saw this as a possibility when he was awarded the Pulitzer a couple years back. Songwriters have always been an important part of our literary landscape, especially in the last 50+ years, and it's good to see that being recognized. Hopefully, this will open the door for a few more deserving candidates, like L Cohen and Tom Waits.
Now that the paradigm is shifting as far as what is accepted as literature, I think film making should get some consideration as well.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Tunesmith
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 02:26 AM

Well, Dylan certainly had the admiration of his peers.
Whoever you admire in the songwriting field, chances are that they are big Bob Dylan fans.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 03:01 AM

"Songwriting's just kinda like catching fish--you sit there and pull them out as they go by--though I think Bob Dylan's up stream from me somewhere."

Arlo Guthrie

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 04:25 AM

LOL

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,John rom Kemsing
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 04:43 AM

I have enjoyed much of Bob Dylan`s music, even if I found some of the lyrics rather strange but those Swedes who decided that he is the "world`s best living poet" - come on - smell the coffee!. They are in need of counselling. Perhaps treatment by some Nobel winning psychologist or psychiatrist might help. And, reading some of the commentators, the King`s New Suit of Clothes comes to mind.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Bloke in Groucho mask
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 04:49 AM

Only the other week, a few of us were being boring in the pub and I mentioned that Andrew Motion, back when he was Poet Laureate said that Dylan's Visions of Joanna was possibly the finest example of twentieth century poetry.

Mind you, if we get into distinctions between poetry and lyrics, someone will probably find the minutes of an irrelevant meeting in 1954....,.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Allan Conn
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 09:30 AM

I don't think the award was given because they think he is the greatest living poet though!!! It was given seemingly "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

So the big thing is that they have decided to give a literature award to a writer of song lyrics rather than a writer of poetry or prose. Why not I ask? Poetry, especially shorter lyrical poems and song lyrics can kind of blend into each other anyway. If they are going to give the award to a lyricist at some point then Dylan does seem the obvious choice. Whilst he's still here.

I'd have thought people who have an interest in song would be glad that the literary academics are regarding song lyrics as worthy of recognition.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,Bloke in Groucho Mask
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 09:57 AM

Yeah but just stirring it like....

American tradition maybe, but his reliance on English traditional in the early days gives such wording a sense of irony.

😎

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: Mrrzy
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 10:33 AM

Arlo, that was sweet.

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,LynnH
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 01:35 PM

Headline -in english- on a german newspaper today:

"How many words must a man write down....."

Subject: RE: Bob Dylan: Nobel laureate
From: GUEST,LynnH
Date: 14 Oct 16 - 03:05 PM

......but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies..." Irvine Welsh

Takes one to know one.........