Clarissa&#039;s Blog

Dylan’s poetry and songs are amazing. I have loved them since the 1960’s. The political ones are the best of his works, of course. I am thrilled that he won this.

I am hoping that Nnedi Okorafor wins it sometime; she is the best living fiction writer I know.

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Clarissa

October 13, 2016

Pop singers have their own award. What is it called, Emmy, Grammy? Why do they have to squeeze out high culture if it’s already so marginalized? Should absolutely every cultural space be colonized by soap operas and the like? What’s next, giving the Tchaikovsky Competition award to Dr. Phil? I mean, I love Dr. Phil but he has his own place and that is not in playing classical music.

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David P. Bellamy

The same argument could be made against philosopher, mathematician and political activist Bertrand Russell who won the 1950 Nobel. I admire Russell overwhelmingly, but giving him the prize is more of a stretch than giving it to a poet.

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Clarissa

October 13, 2016

I find a comparison between Russell and some dime-a-dozen pop singer very strange. Russell’s writing was beautiful and his ideas were profound. While these Dylans are a dime a dozen. Hey, I dig Eminem but I’m not expecting that he should get a Nobel.

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Shakti

Song writing lyrics requires music and a singer to bring them alive. Without that, they are nothing and they do not stand on their own.

Rationalize that the ancient Greek epic poets were bards singing epic poems all you like, but to me singer songwriters are a distinct category all on their own from poetry, fiction or creative non fiction.

I’m very deeply into another artist right now and his lyrics on the page are not great, but his delivery is a completely different creature.

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Clarissa

October 13, 2016
“Song writing lyrics requires music and a singer to bring them alive. Without that, they are nothing and they do not stand on their own.”
- Absolutely.
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cliff arroyo

October 13, 2016

“lyrics requires music and a singer to bring them alive”

The line between pure poetry and song lyrics is fairly blurry.

There is poetry that can’t be set to music (to any possible advantage) and lyrics that cannot stand on their own at all.

Somewhere in between you get poetry that works when set to music (like Lieder) or some lyrics that can stand on their own without music.

If I didn’t know the song and just saw the words on the page I would think the following was originally written as poetry:

So why does it come as such a shock
To know you really have no one,
Only a river of changing faces
Looking for an ocean.
They trickle through your leaky plans,
Another dream over the dam.
And you’re lying in some room
Feeling like your right to be human
Is going over too.
Well some are going to knock you
And some’ll try to clock you.
You know it’s really hard
To talk sense to you,
Trouble child,
Breaking like the waves at Malibu.

(Trouble child, Joni Mitchell)

But I do think Dylan award was a gimmick to create buzz and assure ongoing coverage of the prize.

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 13, 2016
  
  Dylan is also very dated. I know he means a lot to people who are 20+ years older than me but the younger generations have no idea who he is and would find him very antiquated. I don’t get his music at all, for instance. And his lyrics sound primitive to me.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    October 13, 2016
    
    “Dylan is also very dated”
    
    Like I said before, it’s a prize to make middle aged male Euopean music critics feel good about themselves…. I came home today to watch just such a Polish critics expound upon why it was such a good choice…. blech.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      October 13, 2016
      
      “Like I said before, it’s a prize to make middle aged male Euopean music critics feel good about themselves”
      
      Absolutely.
      
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  2. Dreidel
    
    October 13, 2016
    
    “I don’t get his music at all, for instance.”
    
    In his heyday, Dylan was an excellent songwriter (and a horrible singer). This verse from “The Times They Are A-changing” totally summed up the attitude of the children’s crusader hippie revolutionaries of the late 1960’s:
    
    “Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land.
    And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
    Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
    Your old road is rapidly aging.
    Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand,
    For the times, they are a’changing.”
    
    Someday, your teenager daughter will say something very equivalent to you. 🙂
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      October 13, 2016
      
      Aging / changing? Some poetry, man.
      
      Jeez. I wrote “poetry” of this kind when I was 9. Roses / noses was my favorite rhyme. Also, love / dove / above.
      
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      1. Dreidel
        
        October 13, 2016
        
        “I wrote “poetry” of this kind when I was 9.”
        
        No, you didn’t write universal truths about adolescent attitudes at age 9, girl. You weren’t old enough to experience them.
        
        As to Dylan’s simple rhyme scheme– it isn’t the mechanics that made those verses ring true. It’s the content.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        October 13, 2016
        
        That content is as banal and trite as the form, I’m afraid. 😅😅😅
        
        For a more current version of the same thing, I recommend Eminem’s “White America.” Of course, I’m all outdated with my Eminem for 15-year-olds. 😅
        
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        Dreidel
        
        October 13, 2016
        
        “White America” isn’t about the same thing at all. Eminem’s song is a put-down of people whom the rap singer considers inferior white trash. Dylan’s verse is about the universal adolescent rebellion against parental authority that every generation experiences.
        
        There, explained it for you. 🙂 🙂
        
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        Clarissa
        
        October 13, 2016
        
        Inferior parental trash, inferior white trash, same diff. 😉
        
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        Dreidel
        
        October 13, 2016
        
        “Inferior parental trash, inferior white trash, same diff.”
        
        Ah, this debate isn’t leading anywhere, we’re just running laps. 🙂
        
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The Dylan songs are poems. He sings them, but.

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Dreidel

Whatever you think of Dylan’getting the Nobel Prize in literature, that prize has a better track record over the years than the Nobel Peace Prize, which has been given to Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, Yassir Arafat, Al Gore, and Barrack Obama!

The Peace Prize selection is always good for a laugh — if nothing else!

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Sugs

October 13, 2016

There are many singers who are also poets, Dylan (aka Robert Zimmermann) is one of the best known. I’ve loved some of his songs for decades. He started out very political in the early 1960’s so, yes he may be outmoded by now. So are many of us! I’m not claiming that everything he’s written is sublime, but there’s a considerable distance between his best work and the average pop music pap. Why should imaginative words, written with skill and passion, be considered less than ‘literature’ if they are sung?
Leonard Cohen, Canadian is another great singer songwriter, he started out as a poet and novelist. His songs are better than his novels!

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 13, 2016
  “Why should imaginative words, written with skill and passion, be considered less than ‘literature’ if they are sung?”
  
  Because they have a host of their own awards. We don’t nominate novelists for Grammies because somebody could sing them if they wanted to, do we?
  
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  1. Sugs
    
    October 13, 2016
    
    I get that, of course. I’m never impressed by any awards / ceremonials, they all have their own infighting and bias so the winner is usually a compromise candidate anyhow!
    Its the narrow acceptance of creative writing forms that I get tired of. If a writer won’t fit in, they don’t get published, or sung, or performed or whatever. Why can’t songwriting merge into poetry, poetry into play-script, into short story and via prose poem into something else entirely? Writing’s meant to be creative, so why are the forms so hide-bound?
    
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“The Times They Are A-changing” totally summed up the attitude of the children’s crusader hippie revolutionaries of the late 1960’s:

“Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land.
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly aging.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand,
For the times, they are a’changing.”

What makes that work (and I agree it works almost brilliantly) is how it forecasts revolution within an ultra-traditionalist setting.

That verse recalls both the populist song “This land is your land” and the pro-Union anthem “Which side are you on?”

“Come all of you good workers, good news to you I’ll tell”

It recasts the common people vs the elite sentiments of those songs

“They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair ”

in generational terms.

I disagree about how universal this is. It cannily captures the spirit of American youth rebellion but generational conflicts tend to play out according to cultural scripts that are not identical across the world.

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Another thought or two on the Nobel.

I was expecting something meant to create buzz as soon as I saw that the literature prize was scheduled last. IINM the peace prize is usually announced last and this year it was lost in the shuffle.

I think Dylan has been a nominee for a long time now I recall some American (dumb) writers calling for him to win around 10 years ago or so. Might have meant more to them then though….

I think they gave it to him because John Lennon is dead and they would have like to have given it to him for the worst-political-song ever, the dreadful Imagine which elites in the western world seem to be trying to operationalize.

I don’t think this is the absolute worst choice they’ve ever made, whatever you think of their writing and ideas, it’s hard to classify Winston Churchill or Bertrand Russell as producing “literature”.

And about 20 years ago they honored the Italian Dario Fo who wrote and performed in plays (that were as much improvized as put on the page and much of the text was in dialect impenetrable for much of the country) that was probably the worst literature award that I can remember (an Italian I knew at the time was as puzzled as everyone else, she had kind of heard of him, but didn’t realize anyone took him seriously).

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Clarissa

October 14, 2016

I love the Beatles but today nobody younger than me even knows who they are. Pop culture gets dated very very fast.

I have no idea who this Fo is but he sounds terrible.

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1. cliff arroyo
  
  October 14, 2016
  
  “I have no idea who this Fo is but he sounds terrible.”
  
  There’s a British TV production of one of his plays from 1983 or so on youtube. I note it says “adaptation” rather than just “translation” so I don’t know how close it is to the original….
  
  I couldn’t get through more than about two minutes of it….
  
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I’m wondering if the committee was aware of this performance of the Confederate anthem “Dixie”. I’m sure it’s considered very problematic by some….

Dylan first emerged as part of a larger roots revival that began in the 1950s (that codified some types of Apalachian music as American Folk music and he has always remained an admirer of musical Americana.

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Sugs

October 14, 2016

Dylan singing a controversial song? Not exactly unusual, he did write a few of them. I know he’s usually regarded as being from the opposite end of the political spectrum to ‘Dixie’, he’s probably singing it either because of his lifelong interest in old folk music sources or he was trying to get a rise out of someone..! I don’t believe he was unaware of its provenance.

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Dylan revisited… As early as 1967 the idea of Dylan-as-poet was around and this is an interesting experiment, dramatic declamation of his verse to pseudo-chamber music background.

God help me, this is my favorite version of this particular song and easily in my top 5 Dyland covers ever…. what is wrong with me?

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