Dylan wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Everyone is entitled to an opinion.

Dylan is great because of the words he writes, nothing else. That’s literature. People can read the words to his songs without the music and have the same experiences as reading any other comparable short work.

There are also many to read, quantity as well as quality.

I understand the argument that putting the words to music provides an advantage. Perhaps an unfair one assuming certain rules that apparently do not exist. But one can also argue that the music makes the words even more powerful and hence of greater impact which is what I think the Nobel is mostly about.

Its an interesting development for sure. I can understand why traditional writers might not be happy. The game was just upped in a sense.

Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabakov, James Joyce, John Updike, Primo Levi, Virginia Woolf and Leo Tolstoy all never won the Nobel.  I don't think it effected anybody's thinking about these writers.  The Nobel is a contest fundamentally no different than an Academy Award.  Sometimes they get it right and sometimes it's questionable, but only the passage of time reveals the divide.  If Mr. Dylan is still relevant fifty years from now, then the Nobel committee probably got it right.

Very good point onhwy61.

Guessing you are a Dylan fan from moniker?

I was going to compare it to a beauty contest. I think its an even better analogy to demonstrate that its merely another popularity contest with a few simple rules in a totally different realm.

"Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed./...And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground."

~ Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9

the last stanza of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower,

All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too
Outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl

;-)

@onhwy61 That many of the writers you mentioned, particularly Nabokov, did not win a Nobel, but Dylan has, is testament to the myopia of the Committee.

It's as if, in a desperate bid to appeal to the masses, they chose a good lyricist. Kind of like an inverted analog of when Jethro Tull won the Grammy for best metal album in 1989.

again, I'm not faulting Dylan himself, nor am I diminishing the import of his work in contemporary pop culture (and counter-culture), but I'm skeptical his Nobel worthiness.

And Harvard professor notwithstanding, @dgarretson , I doubt Dante would want Dylan to accompany him down to Hell in lieu of Virgil, just as I doubt Dylan will still be read and listened to in 2000 years.