Rock-tober 15, 2016

Something interesting happened on the way to the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Stockholm. Bob Dylan has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, the first American to receive the honor since Tony Morrison in 1993. He joins the pantheon of American Nobel Laureates and now includes Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck among his peers. But there's a swirl of controversy around this particular award. Back in 2012, Joseph Epstein writing for the Wall Street Journal, said,

Would the literary world be better off without the Nobel Prize in Literature? Certainly it would be no worse off without the Nobel, for as currently awarded the prize neither sets a true standard for literary production nor raises the prestige of literature itself.

Ouch. Is it a valid point? Personally, I find it hard to believe all of Dylan's manuscripts have been elevated above the works of Mark Twain. I'll be the first to admit that Dylan isn't my cup of tea, but it may just be that I can't separate Dylan, the voice, from Dylan, the lyricist. Granted, the profundity of some of Dylan's lyrics make him sound like a zen master sitting on top of a mountain. But what does it all mean? What's it all about? Does Dylan even know. He told Playboy in a 1966 interview, "I do know what my songs are about."

Well?

"Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve."

Hipster Dylan - trolling the media before it was cool.

Regardless, I never would have guessed I would be writing about the Nobel Prize within the confines of this blog, so congratulations and thanks, Bob Dylan, for 57 years of profound, if not obtuse lyrics.