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Bob Dylan: Directly to Voicemail
About show business, Woody Allen said it best:
“Show business is dog-eat-dog. It’s worse than dog-eat-dog, it’s dog-doesn’t-return-other-dog’s-phone-calls.”
We all have our opinions about the Nobel Prize committee awarding the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan. I was skeptical. I thought it seemed a little over the top.
But I’m here to say: Bob Dylan has won my heart. Whatever else he’s done for literature, he has done more for the idea of civilization, and of decency, than anyone else on the world stage. I’m serious. This is magnificent:
The Nobel Prize committee has given up trying to reach Bob Dylan, five days after he became the first musician awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Dylan, 75, is yet to respond to the accolade, which was announced on Thursday. That evening he gave a concert in Las Vegas in which he spoke little, and did not mention the award.
Dylan has done an amazing and heroic thing — an utterly rare and almost extinct human behavior. He has remained silent. Despite his sudden appearance as a #trendingtopic when the Nobel news broke, he elected to do this crazy, wild, unexpected thing: he shut up about it.
The Swedish Academy, which awards the prizes every October and organizes the presentation in December, says it has not heard back from the Minnesota-born singer.
“Right now we are doing nothing,” said Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the academy. “I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now, that is certainly enough.”
Let the silence reign. Let it be somehow louder than the noisy culture it rebukes. Let it be an example to all of us: sometimes it’s okay to keep it shut.
Published in General
I love it.
I know he read Eliot:
They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.
They know and do not know, that acting is suffering
And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
In an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.
Mis, is that you?
Plan B: Ngugi wa Thiong’o
That was the name of the front runner, a Kenyan novelist, before the award was announced. I read that A Grain of Wheat is considered one of his best.
You’re welcome.
You’d know if you were in the P.I.T.
I don’t know much about the guy but the fact that he wasn’t “dying to take a picture with [Obama] and Michelle” is interesting.
The fact that Obama consistently finds a way to talk about himself when talking about others is a sign of what makes him uninteresting.
Sounds like my kinda guy. Send him a telegram; maybe he’ll respond that.
I suspect and element of humility which seems to be present in true artists. Leonard Cohen one of my favorite poet/singers had that quality as well. It sets these real artists apart from the crowds of arrogant screamers. I know that Dylan was in a relationship with Joan Baez early on in his career, and though I do not care for her politics, she had a very special quality of voice, particularly in her first two albums that spoke of something definitely missing from most popular entertainers, purity is the only word that seems to fit. Dylan possessed the same quality. There were no gimmicks in his music, no need for amplifiers or equalizers. I guess you might call that honesty. I heard it in Johnny Cash’s last album as well. I always found it a very attractive quality in a singer. I am not convinced that he deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, but given the standards by which Oscars and all other awards are granted, they could have done a lot worse.
This may be the first thing in reference to Bob Dylan that has made me smile.
I love it.
Alice Cooper tells a great story (he tells it much better) of sitting on a plane next to an older woman, Mrs. Zimmerman he learned, and they got talking. She asked him what he did for a living and he said he was in a rock band. She said that she thought her son did something like that too but she wasn’t sure. So maybe Bob gets this character trait from his mother.
The recent Dylan story that I like is the one from a few years back when he would wander about the childhood homes of other famous musicians. He was picked up for vagrancy around Springsteen’s old house. Didn’t make a fuss.
There is something about a guy who won’t give a young small town cop a hard time but won’t call back the Nobel folks that makes him endearing.
I love it for a while, but at some point isn’t it kind of bad manners?
I’ve been a fan since my roommate introduced us lo those many years ago. (Thank you, Larry)
I’ve always suspected he’s one of those people who goes home with a smile on his face because he still can’t believe they pay him, when he’d do it for free.
Dylan seems incapable of asking that aggressive, demanding question that so many celebrities ask: “Do you know who I am?!”
He appears more inclined to ask: “Do I know who I am?”
FYI, as of 11:03 EDT on October 17, Dylan’s official website does not mention the Nobel Prize win, even under the “News” section.
Another update:
This is good.
Apparently someone had added a reference to Dylan winning the Nobel Prize. It was added to the lyrics page, not the news page. Subsequently, the reference was deleted.
I hope we never find out the reasoning behind this.
How long can he ignore them? As long as he wants.
He may not accept. That would be so cool.
I read when he took his son to the wailing wall in Israel the prime minister asked to see him and he refused.
He played three shows in Israel in 1987, 1993 and 2011. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement pressed him to cancel his most recent performance — to no avail.
He does have a mind of his own.
That’s the best thing about Dylan. Lots of people want to claim Dylan for their own. There are people who think he is still the far leftist of his earliest days. There are people who think he is secretly very conservative. My theory is that he got disenchanted with far left politics very early and just wasn’t going to let people tell him what to think. I would be surprised if he was conservative in the sense that we think of the word, but I doubt that he is a party line leftist like a lot of Hollywood people. For example, there was an interview with Rolling Stone where he was asked about global warming and Dylan said, “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.”