So up come this guy with a guitar, frizzy hair, and a
harmonica hanging off his neck. He started to sing, the sound was like a cat
dragged by the tail, but the words, well the words had meaning. He was not the
Kingston Trio or Buddy Holley; he definitely was not Elvis. He was Bob Dylan.
The memory festered in my head after I dropped the young lady back in Nostrand and Newkirk, and then back to the Ferry and then straight to work, for
you see New York was not an easy place to get around. I would find it easier to
get to Moscow by plane than Brooklyn by train, and yes Ferry.
About a year later my roommate Bob Glasser had become a
Dylan fan. He had a guitar and that stupid harmonica, and song after song he
imitated the dead cat howling, but the words, they were the same, and that was
the power. He would sing Dylan and then listen to Jean Shepherd, or Shep, on
the radio. It was a time when words meant something. Dylan stirred the soul,
and Shep the imagination. You did not need an iPad, an iPhone, or an iWhatever.
You heard words and used your mind.
Then in the summer of 1966 I went to a Dylan concert in New
York, after the Dylan transmogrification into a rock personality. It meant
less, but then I had changed as well.
So where does this lead? To a Nobel prize, and one I feel as
a minor observer, well deserved. Dylan made many of us think, not wiggle with
Elvis, sing along with the Beatles, or blend in with Peter Paul and Mary.
To my surprise some you person who appears to have a view of
their own greatness feels the opposite. It appears in the NY
Times, where else? After all it is the NYT, that rag of record, which has
dragged its front page down the level of current day politics. One does wonder
what else is going on in the world. But alas, one gets more from China Daily or
RT, or even The Guardian and Le Monde. But from this lost lass we are told:
The committee probably did not
mean to slight fiction or poetry with its choice. By honoring a musical icon,
the committee members may have wanted to bring new cultural currency to the
prize and make it feel relevant to a younger generation. But there are many
ways they could have accomplished this while still honoring a writer. They
could have chosen a writer who has made significant innovations in the form,
like Jennifer Egan, Teju Cole or Anne Carson. They could have selected a writer
from the developing world, which remains woefully underrepresented among Nobel
laureates. They could have picked a writer who has built an audience primarily
online, like Warsan Shire, who became the first Young Poet Laureate of London
in 2014. Instead, the committee gave the prize to a man who is internationally
famous in another field, one with plenty of honors of its own. Bob Dylan does
not need a Nobel Prize in Literature, but literature needs a Nobel Prize. This
year, it won’t get one.
My first response was; just who are you? My second was; oh
well it is just the NY Times. Communicating ideas, complex thoughts, emotions,
are literature, and doing so as did Dylan, especially at that time, was world
changing. He started a process that lasted but a short while but which had
great and lasting consequences. My question would be; what let's this young
lass make such baseless a set of comments. The answer, the New York Times. Pity.
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