Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

That's a parody of beat poetry, Scott. Quite well made, imo.

Two lines later it says 'She made a paper airplane out of the poem and sailed it across the room on strata of her own smoke.'

Its like a parody of what someone thinks Beat writing is.

Still Pynchon should win the Nobel and send Dylan to accept it. xp

JD, there's an area between getting universally positive reviews for a celebrity biography, and deserving the nobel...

― Frederik B, Friday, October 14, 2016 9:14 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago)

good grief, i was responding to your statement that including dylan's books would reduce the overall "quality" of his work. do you ever respond to any criticism of anything you say without trying to change the subject?

I responded to what you said. People think his lyrics deserved the nobel. I said there's an area between good reviews and deserving the nobel. Ergo a well reviewed book could still reduce the quality of his work compared to the lyrics.

good grief

How about this song from a lovelorn wittgensteinian? A better lyric than anything Dylan ever wrote!

It is something less than heaven
To be quoted Thesis 1.7
Every time I make an advance;
If the world is all that the case is
That’s a pretty discouraging basis
On which to pursue
Any sort of romance.
I’ve got a proposition for you;
Logical, positive and brief.
And at least it could serve as a kind of comic relief:

[Refrain]
Let P equal me,
With my heart in command;
Let Q equal you
With Tractatus in hand;
And R could stand for a lifetime of love,
Filled with music to fondle and purr to.
We’ll define love as anything lovely you’d care to infer to.
On the right, put that bright,
Hypothetical case;
On the left, our uncleft,
Parenthetical chase.
And that horseshoe there in the middle
Could be lucky; we’ve nothing to lose,
If in these parentheses
We just mind our little P’s
And Q’s.

If P [Mafia sang in reply] thinks of me
As a girl hard to make,
Then Q wishes you
Would go jump in the lake.
For R is a meaningless concept,
Having nothing to do with pleasure:
I prefer the hard and tangible things I can measure.
Man, you chase in the face
Of impossible odds;
I’m a lass in the class
Of unbossable broads.
If you’ll promise no more sticky phrases,
Half a mo while I kick off my shoes.
There are birds, there are bees,
And to hell with all your P’s
And Q’s.

And B's

did you read the book?

normally I would take it easy, but just yesterday a prominent poster got thread banned, so I don't think it's funny today

btw ur gonna be the next dane to win the Nobel Prize, for this post

Which one JD?

the one i mean is "chronicles." (i haven't read "tarantula.")

Okay, I was confused because I was just quoting V. No, I haven't read Chronicles, and in all honesty, it's probably better than Wiggle Wiggle. The standard for nobel winning autobiography is pretty darn high, though, and nothing I've heard about Chronicles suggest it's up there.

Imo the only good thing about Nobel Prize is that normal ppl get to read one or two articles per year about chemists, physicists etc. with successful research programs, successful or notable activists, and writers perhaps famous in their own countries but perhaps unknown or even largely un-translated. every decade or so you have to give it to intellectuals who broke through into popular consciousness like Einstein or Friedman or Marquez thereby spoiling the value of the prize, but that's the exception and, while it would be efficient not to award it to them, it would be too great a blow to the integrity of the prize. so giving it to Dylan, who p much everyone in the world already knows, and isn't even really, like, I mean the songs are good imo don't get me wrong, but no one would be rioting in the streets of Stockholm if he never got one, just totally upends everything I like about the ritual

― flopson, Friday, October 14, 2016 7:52 PM (two hours ago)

as much as i love dylan i think i p much agree with this take. i like that nobels tend to highlight ppl who wouldn't otherwise get wide recognition, so i'm a little disappointed that a lot of the responses to this were "why didn't delillo/roth/pynchon/murakami get it?" when all of those ppl already get plenty of attention. (it would be kind of cool to see how pynchon would collect his award, admittedly.)

Chronicles also contains chunks of stolen writing, ie plagiarism

he is the best stealer! he stole from mezz mezzrow, jack london, and time magazine. that is SO dylan. #PoMo #KathyAcker4ever

Bob Dylan winning Nobel is like when fine arts museums have an exhibit on ``The Art of Walt Disney'' or ``The Beatles''

I'm a pretty big believer in 'give the unthinking hordes what they want' but ffs

Or 'The Art of Bob Dylan'. Denmark's biggest art film festival is devoting it's yearly retrospective to the films of Neil Young this year.

Where's the idea that the Nobel prize is for the ilx contrarian antipopulist cabal coming from?

Fuck giving it to Dylan but also fuck the above too imo

If you had read my post carefully, you'll see that I said it's important that the Nobel is not restricted to the obscure (and of course I only mean obscure to the general population, not within their fields, within which they should be stars) to preserve its integrity. Dylan is bad because he is known to the general population AND hurts the integrity of the prize (not actually well-regard within field of literature)

The above in my post refers to my own first line fwiw. Coming across a little aggressive on rereading.

Wasn't a direct response to any one post flopson, but to an opinion offered repeatedly in the general discussion

ok punk

;-)

Where's the idea that the Nobel prize is for the ilx contrarian antipopulist cabal coming from?

ignoring that wording - i like populist books just fine, the idea that less popular writers win it comes from... the winners.

Where's the idea that the Nobel prize is for the ilx contrarian antipopulist cabal coming from?

oops

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature

nearest analogue in the list so far is winston churchill imo, then maybe kipling? (obv* i have not read all of them)

*i say obv even tho it hurts my ilx branding a bit

ps i have read all of kipling except some of his many many poems probably and his novel the light that failed

pps also i expect he wrote op eds that began "why oh why have we not colonised GREENLAND yet it is past time" i haven't read them

I only learned today about THE POLAR PRIZE FOR MUSIC which is apparently regarded as like a Nobel for music (though I don't know its exact relation to the Nobels).

Dylan has already won it.

Did the mention of Greenland remind you of it?

(xp) Surely the only time Paul McCartney and the Baltic States have shared a prize?

Pleasantland also referenced in a joint offensive manouvre

People keep saying its a category error but how many warmongers have been awarded the Nobel Peace prize?

if it's a category error, the busting probably already happened: there are several playwrights on the list and plays like songs are written to be performed (unless you think pinter got it for his poems, which is… possible)

(obviously if yr an arnoldian -- ?do i mean him? -- then you argue that the REAL shakespeare is on the PAGE and being acted merely degrades or distorts it)

an interesting test wd be whether a stand-up is allowed to be awarded it (i'm a derridean when it comes to drawing the hard line between writing and speech = it can't be done)

(sorry the connection between the last two thoughts is super-compressed -- what i'm getting at is that the refining of a joke as delivered on-stage to its most effective form squares more with why writing is considered writing than why speech is considered speech) (tbh if i decompress the the thinking much more i am going to rewrite of grammatology except abt gags)

too bad russell brand is only on for the peace prize

(unless you think pinter got it for his poems, which is… possible)

LOLz. Or his novel.

Where's the idea that the Nobel prize is for the ilx contrarian antipopulist cabal coming from?

To be honest, what I love about the Nobel Prize is the number of truly great books I've read that I would never have heard of if not for the prize. So yeah, to be honest, for me, the value of the prize is precisely in its uplifting of the obscure or obscure-outside-their-own-country. I love Alice Munro and I think she deserves every bit of her Nobel Prize but it means way more to me that they gave it to Svetlana Alexievich.

LOL I'd forgotten plays to be written as performed on stage (possibly because I have never formed a theatre going habit, they only live on the page for me)

Idly wondering where people would have drawn this line - like would there be as much protest if at some point it had gone to, say, Gil Scott-Heron or John Cooper Clarke.

(NB giving it to JCC would be fucking glorious).

Plays have always been considered literature, every literature course includes Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, Ibsen, etc. What would be new would be giving it to a filmwriter, for example. The difference is that plays are distributed in writing, and is meant to survive being performed by others. While many has covered Dylan, and while he originally worked in a folk idiom, my argument against him goes that his writings simply aren't that good on the written page. Take a verse like 'Now you see this one-eyed midget / Shouting the word "NOW" / And you say, "For what reason?" / And he says, "How ?" / And you say, "What does this mean?" / And he screams back, "You're a cow / Give me some milk / Or else go home" Without a very specific performance of it, it's simply crap. Take his breakthrough chorus, Rolling Stones favorite song of all time: 'How does it feel? / How does it feel? / To be on your own / With no direction home / A complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?' It's just not that good without the melody.

Otm

To be honest, what I love about the Nobel Prize is the number of truly great books I've read that I would never have heard of if not for the prize. So yeah, to be honest, for me, the value of the prize is precisely in its uplifting of the obscure or obscure-outside-their-own-country. I love Alice Munro and I think she deserves every bit of her Nobel Prize but it means way more to me that they gave it to Svetlana Alexievich.

exactly. as if deems even knew the list of previous winners anyway.

Idly wondering where people would have drawn this line - like would there be as much protest if at some point it had gone to, say, Gil Scott-Heron or John Cooper Clarke.

it just wouldn't happen. the only reason bob dylan was allowed to transcend this boundary is fame.

I'm questioning whether it's a boundary given those two artists self-identified as poets and Dylan doesn't really.

Dylan uses the term figuratively but literally stoning is a form of capital punishment for committing a crime. Among other places, it is described in the Old Testament of the Bible. For example, Deut. 13:10, “So you shall stone him to death because he has sought to seduce you from the LORD your God…”

The double meaning for “getting stoned”, meaning getting drunk or high, comes in later in the song.

seems a bit harsh going after deems for not knowing the previous winners, i only have a vague idea of them because of an old FT project which never got anywhere: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2005/10/freaky-trigger-best-of-lists-forlorn-idea-dept/

the missing picture is poor old unread sully prudhomme

yeah i don't expect him to know them off by heart, but given his comment.

I'm not hugely invested here it's quite OK I object to Dylan in general and this seemed like a fun puddle to jump in

You should listen to "Blood on the tracks", deems

in honor of bob dylan and mark s. i bought some books today:

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/14718862_1679367702376875_4612234056667266000_n.jpg?oh=f795f3c4510da5dd7838e010f72cc545&oe=5866CFC8

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/14642258_1679367892376856_3789853582198621489_n.jpg?oh=7de721dc435c72dde4ff5e17d7d61a76&oe=58643746s