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

Yes, it is very good. The 'London Palladium' made me lol.

Why?

In the UK it has lots of old time showbiz connotations, and just seemed like a slightly odd venue for Dylan to pick out (the Albert Hall, to offer the most obvious counter-example, is much the bigger and more 'prestigious' venue.) Although I did see Lou Reed at the London Palladium on his New York tour, so there you go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki9e_LUZ8dY

bruce forsythe singing 3 minutes in

You mean like Flanagan and Allen?
(Xpost)

F&A I know very little about, but the Palladium was definitely home to mainstream Brit entertainers like, yes, Bruce Forsythe, or Tommy Steele, or Norman Wisdom - or visiting American showbiz royalty like Danny Kaye or Sammy Davis, Jr. It's just not a venue especially associated with rock or pop, and is not in the least bit hip or cool - maybe it speaks to Dylan's idea of himself as just a regular song and dance man, I dunno.

i know she had to stop and start a verse over again but otherwise i thought patti's smith performance was pretty incredible

I think it's more that it's associated -- via its long-running if intermittent TV incarnation -- with val parnell booking a tranche of popular american musicians that entirely predate dylan (and elvis) in style, if not in actual chronology: the las vegas supperclub crowd, from sinatra via danny kaye to sammy davis jr, bing to liza to frankie laine

(british performers were actually somewhat eclipsed in this regime, tho its's also hosted the royal variety performances many times for several decades -- which routinely include younger TV stars doing imitatins of flanagan and allen)

i know she had to stop and start a verse over again but otherwise i thought patti's smith performance was pretty incredible

this is long but worth it

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/06/05/listen_to_bob_dylan_s_nobel_lecture_video.html

Text: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html

I liked this speech.

You mean the one he plagiarised from Sparknotes? http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/06/did_bob_dylan_take_from_sparknotes_for_his_nobel_lecture.html

Makes it more impressive

That's some next-level trolling from a provocateur who has always fucked with institutions.

You guys are like Trump defenders. "He's playing 5D chess, man!"

Well I love Dylan's work, theft and all, and given the grudging nature of his delayed acceptance, and sending Patti Smith in his stead, and dribbling the ball over the line in the last few seconds to score the prize, one could be forgiven for thinking he was finding a way to enjoy it after all.

Or that he's a lazy fucker who has plagiarised before and then did it again because he had to turn in an essay in a few days or miss out on $1 million

What could be more american than that?

JM I don't see any conflict between what I said and what you said. Except "lazy fucker", I don't see how someone who at 76 years old plays 90-150 shows a year, every year, and has put out 45 albums, qualifies for that.

hang on, he gave a Nobel acceptance speech made up of précis of some of the most famous novels of all time?

yup

adding essayistic reflections, it's not a bad read at all, includes this:

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, "The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests." I don't know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

more fun than TED talks

I wonder who first wrote it.

Clive James.

(not really, but he might have)

the spark notes plagiarism is hilarious and terrifying. it's either a lighthearted way to revisit an old contention of his, that there is no authorship just re-contextualization, or a blackhearted gesture asserting nothing matters

Or maybe he just needed to write a speech in a hurry and his memory of certain books he wanted to talk about was a bit fuzzy?

Think the cited lifts were lines re Moby Dick only, and worked into his own rolling Dylanism, as happens in the songs sometimes; his takes on All Quiet On The Western Front and The Odyssey sounded Dylan-y as hell too, in a good way.

For those who think he's undeserving or just plain shit anyway, what difference would a purely original speech make.

Well, it would show that as a writer he could write his own words

Also, he got the sparksnotes thing wrong, and invented a quote that doesn't appear in the novel. I don't know, but a critical reading based on things that aren't in the novel? That's an F.

ha you don't get Dylan either do you

Well, it would show that as a writer he could write his own words

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Tuesday, June 20, 2017

makes you think

I think it was an intentional "easter egg" thing. He mixed the sparknotes lines into his own language pretty seamlessly, as he did the borrowed unattributed lines in chronicles. I am just confused about what it means that he keeps doing it.

That seems much less likely than that he keeps sloppy notes and forgets what belongs to him. That's how a lot of plagiarism happens.

If any Nobel Prize winner other than Dylan did this, they would be scorched as a charlatan. Copying fucking sparksnotes, and even getting it wrong, resulting in false quotes from the novel you're trying to detail. Come on, this is pathetic. But with Dylan, it's always an 'easter egg', it's something he was 'meant to do', something the rest of us 'don't get'. Of course, his fans don't 'get it' as well, they just pretend that there must be something deeper going on, just as Dylan must have had something intelligent to say about the sinking of the Titanic, or about minstrelsy, or about the old American songs he is covering, or about any of the other stuff he has taken on and done fuck all with the last few decades...

Hm

The emperor hasn't really had any clothes on for a loooong time, but it's getting absolutely embarrassing now.

It's got to be Paul Auster.

I think the frequent overt plagiarism it's an intentional artistic statement of some kind, i don't think it's necessarily a profound one. I do like Dylan though.

My stance towards Dylan is very ambivalent. He has always been stealing from others but somehow he made something original out of it. I am still a fan of his mid 60s stuff, after that the quality of his output became pretty erratic. when i listened to him reading his nobel speech - before even knowing that he plagiarized - i found it boring as hell. a nobel prize speech where the laureate basically retells the plot of books by other people, how dud is that?

I like singer/songwriter Nobel literature speeches that DON'T plagiarize Sparknotes

ps Fred B is the plague

I think basically he has floundered as a songwriting / album-making artist since the mid-seventies. Which is ok, I think at heart he has always been a folk-artist in the old tradition, retelling and redoing other peoples work in a more communal setting. Which is why his artistic work the last many many years has been his never ending tour. Not saying he hasn't released anything of value since then - I really like Time Out of Mind, but more as a weird soundscape - but honestly I think most of his releases has been done because that what you do, that's what he was supposed to do to stay in the cultural marketplace, and the shortcuts taken wrt plagiarism mostly relates to that.

The Bobness cultural industry is just stuck in a rut because he once shouted about Mr Jones and nobody knew who that was but it seemed really significant and it's really important to old guys that other old guys still are seen as being relevant.

But ymmv.

fred on dylan is like je55e and roundabouts, just a joy to read, dylan deserves this prize purely for enabling that IMO

Should've been shared with Stet & Keith in that case. Just saying.

https://media.makeameme.org/created/knowledge-is-knowing.jpg

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5522ccefe4b023edbe76f185/t/552914fbe4b0719b1e02e0f2/1428755709937/norman-wisdom-exhibition-1422980008_20141003-1740-Norman-Wisdom-1.jpg

johnny joey dee dee

Sadly no longer eligible but good suggestions.