FW: remember

["Lynch, Mary" <MLynch>]

nice little blurb on Dylan.  What the message below has to do w/ Jeff
Quilter, who used to teach here, I don't know.
much love,
g
________________________________________________________
From: MelvilleR on Tue, Oct 1, 1996 9:08 AM
Subject: remember
To: Faculty
File(s): dylan text

Jeff Quilter knows all the words of all the songs,  and has probably read the
book too.  So I'm taking it upon myself to pass around this important
information,  since he isn't here to do so himself.  All comments may be sent
to 
                Smacquil




<<<<<< Attached TEXT file follows >>>>>>

Still an exile on main street of literature
Bob Dylan has been nominated for a Nobel prize. 
IAN BELL explains why Mr Zimmerman deserves the award

 IT IS hard to believe that they will ever give the Nobel prize to Bob Dylan,
and just as hard to understand why they shouldn't. Beyond doubt, the news
that the singer's name has been placed before the Swedish Academy will
reignite the old, inane debate about high art and low, whether one is
intrinsically "better" than the other, and whether mass popular culture can
ever rightly even be called art. But that misses most of the point about most
things in the late 20th century.
 Dylan makes art. He is both literate and literary. He may be the most
significant figure to emerge in American culture since the Second World War.
He has transformed his medium and impinged on others in half a dozen ways.
But for many he will always remain the weird little Sixties survivor who
really can't sing, bears a grudge against guitars, writes insufferably
pretentious lyrics, and hasn't made anything resembling a hit record in 20
years.
 Can even the biggest prize in literature bridge such a gulf between
perceptions? Professor Gordon Ball, of the Virginia Military Academy, seems
to think so. Inspired by a campaign being waged by some of Dylan's Swedish
fans, he last week exercised his right to nominate the singer for the
#163#900,000 prize because of his contribution to the "oral tradition". It is a
worryingly vague recommendation. Is pop music a "tradition", suddenly? Is
folk tradition art, and is an oral art literature? Besides, how might the
Swedish Academy set about judging Dylan's output? Considered alone, the
various books of his lyrics might invite the conclusion that someone is
having them on. Few of them "work" very well, if at all, when printed on a
page. If the Nobel is to be understood as recognition for a poet, the
juvenile prosody, beat posturings and simple ballad structures of Dylan's
written verses disqualify him instantly.
 Stretch the definition of poetry to breaking point and you still could not
place him on the same literary planet as, say, Seamus Heaney.
 True, he did write a "novel" (Tarantula) once upon a time, and a few sleeve
notes which possess a certain gnomic charm. But the fiction is little more
than a reminder that young men should only be allowed access to James Joyce
and William Burroughs on the understanding that they don't attempt such
things at home, while the idea that the academy might be prepared to assess
album covers merely makes you wonder what the future holds for cornflakes
packets.
 The performances themselves, then? Performance art as literature, and worthy
of the richest prize on the planet? Ballads and songs are legitimate, of
course, otherwise the reputation of Burns and a few others would be in a spot
of trouble. But if you accept the view that a large chunk of Dylan's art is
bound up in his own performances of his own songs - an argument often
advanced by his admirers - you raise the prospect of the Nobel going to a
collection of CDs.
 Besides, these are not just songs but, irrespective of Dylan's status as a
maverick within his industry, pop songs, the musical equivalent of pulp
fiction, the disposable products of a disposable culture intended to be
cheap, potent and very little else. Is the prize that once honoured Yeats,
Shaw, Gide, Beckett and Eliot really to be given to a grouchy pop singer,
albeit one who holds an honorary doctorate in music from Columbia? Well, they
gave the first Nobel to one Rene F A Sully-Prudhomme in 1901.
 They gave another to Henryk Sien- kiewicz, one to Selma Lagerlof, one to
Carl F G Spitteler, and one to a certain Henrik Pontoppidan. Never heard of
them? Precisely. The Nobel, like any other prize, reflects its times, just as
the writers do. And few writers have reflected their times - few have made
the times, changing or not, what they are - so acutely and so intensely as
Dylan.
 His work is a panoptic portrait of America created from the language of
blues, folk ballads, surrealism and the beat revolution. It has been by turns
political, personal and sometimes almost psychic in its insights. It is in
what William Carlos Williams called the American grain more certainly than
any fiction this side of Saul Bellow, and any poetry short of Robert Lowell
or Frank O'Hara.
 But is it literature? They gave the Nobel to Pearl S Buck in 1938 and I
would hesitate to nominate any of her worthy works as literature. If
poetry-in-performance is the problem, why should playwrights like Pirandello
or Beckett, whose texts only achieve substance in performance, ever have
qualified? In any case, many composers have set poems to music, and many
poets (Auden notable among them) have worked as librettists.
  Add, merely, that the pop song,  so often earning every bit of  the
contempt it gets, has none  the less been one of the  dominant, defining art
forms of  the century's second half. Even  if we allow only that literature 
can be categorised as a verbal  artistic document, the dumb pop  song has
documented the age, at  least in the English-speaking  world, and Dylan is
the  acknowledged master of the form.  If he isn't a poet, Shakespeare  was
just a scriptwriter.
  The only person who might just  disagree, of course, is the  taciturn
55-year-old Robert  Allen Zimmerman himself. Asked  once about his art, he
answered  famously that he was "just a  song and dance man". The annual  song
and dance over the Nobel  Prize for Literature might just  be a little
different this year.

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