* I’ve been surprised at the number of people who think Bob Dylan didn’t deserve his Nobel Prize for Literature. But here’s Rolling Stone’s take…

This is easily the most controversial award since they gave it to the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies, which was controversial only because it came next after the immensely popular 1982 prize for Gabriel García Márquez. Nobody can read the minds of the Nobel committee – it’s not that kind of award. You can’t argue that Dylan jumped the line in front of more deserving candidates, because there’s no internal logic to the process. Like most literary Nobels, except much more so, it comes out of the blue, giving Dylan fans a whole new glorious enigma to battle over. So settle in. This argument will take us years. If you’re looking to get silly, you better go back to from where you came.

According to the Swedish Academy, Dylan won “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Of course it’s not poetry, not even sung poetry. It’s songwriting, it’s storytelling, it’s electric noise, it’s a bard exploiting the new-media inventions of his time (amplifiers, microphones, recording studios, radio) for literary performance the way playwrights or screenwriters once did…. He won for inventing ways to make songs do what they hadn’t done before.

The best argument for Dylan’s Nobel Prize comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, even though he died a century before Shot of Love. His 1850 essay “Shakespeare; or the Poet,” from the book Representative Men, works as a cheat sheet to Dylan. For Emerson, Shakespeare’s greatness was to exploit the freedoms of a disreputable format, the theater: “Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads.”

This is a key point – Shakespeare was a writer/actor/manager hustling in the commercial theater racket for live crowds. He didn’t publish his plays – didn’t even keep written copies. Once it was onstage, he was on to the next one. (After his death, his friends had to cobble the First Folio together, mostly from working scripts, hence the deplorable state of his texts.) Low prestige meant constant forward motion. The theater was becoming a national passion, “but not a whit less considerable, because it was cheap.” He aimed his poetry at the groundlings: “It must even go into the world’s history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.”

Dylan didn’t write many books either – his songs came out of that same “rude warm blood.” He makes sure you can’t reduce his songs to their verbal content

Agreed.

* Your brunchtime Bob…