Stupid nobels -- Nobel for lit given to Bob Dylan :)

ah well
I still think it's kinda silly

Guess I won't ever listen to Dylan's stuff if that describes him fairly
 
Since we're discussing Nobel prizes, there's a serious case to be made that Bibi Netanyahu deserves the Peace Prize.
 
I think it can be said he also did memorable music. Just some of his most memorable work are all about the lyrics.
 
JohannaK said:
I believe he also has a Pulitzer. He probably is the only person to have a Nobel, a Pulitzer, an Oscar, and a bunch of Grammies.

Also I want to point out that I wasnt trolling when I said filmmakers should be considered as well. Arent scripts literature, and isnt cinema a language in itself that can be and is most frequently used with narrative purposes?


Possibly my favourite song...
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Bah, it's overlong imo. But every song on that album is superb. His rhyme and rhythm schemes are excellent. Now when are they going to give one to Nas for illmatic? One Love is lyrically one of the greatest songs ever written.
 
Chemists have won the Physics prize, and biologists the Chemistry prize, to little controversy (if anything, everybody just celebrates the impact of the relevant research). I wonder if those are analogous to this situation.
 
plarq said:
That would be much worse than Obama's peace prize.
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Perhaps if you don't subscribe to the cult of the Brutal Occupation, you see things differently.

Owen Glyndwr said:
Bah, it's overlong imo. But every song on that album is superb. His rhyme and rhythm schemes are excellent. Now when are they going to give one to Nas for illmatic? One Love is lyrically one of the greatest songs ever written.
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I don't want to come off as pugnacious here (and for the record I think very highly of Illmatic), but One Love doesn't really seem that great lyrically. I mean, it's a nice song, but it wouldn't rank in my top thirty. Maybe you're just referring to stuff like the 'theme' and 'storytelling' of the song, but those seem too subjective to give a prize on the basis of.
 
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Opens the way for TUPAC in a decade or two!
 
It is just a very nasty choice, in my view.
If people are focused on the writing itself, it doesn't make sense for them to be musicians.
Can't really see any way in which Dylan's writing is in the same league as any high literature. Yet there is also the (mentioned) added issue that a song is heard; you listen to the words being said. That robs a text already from the experience of the reader reading it in their mind. A bit- obviously not a full parallel- like a scene in a book is not the same as its presentation in a movie adapted from the book.

Tldr : This choice sucked, Dylan is not a great writer. The swedish academy should be repopulated with people of better taste :yup:
 
Oda Nobunaga said:
Alfred Nobel's own words in his will specify that it is to be rewarded for whoever confered the greatest benefits on mankind in the field of literature.
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Actually is should be "idealistic" literature too. And no one ever managed to work out what the devil he might have meant by THAT. (Though considering the incest-slasher-bloodfest his own much reworked, though never published, play was, it probably needn't be too staid an interpretation.)

Come on, inspired as old Alfred was, his instructions for the prizes were anything but clear. It took years of ardent litigation to work something out.

Biggest problem these days is how the science and medicine prizes as limited so that only three people can share. Considering how stuff get discovered these days, and have been for decades, you get three very happy Laureates, and a whole busload of more or less hacked-off people who possibly should have been in the running if it wasn't for that arbitrary rule — but who are simply condemned to ignominy.
 
plarq said:
He is a respectable singer/songwriter so he certainly deserve the Pulitzer Prize. However, Nobel Literature Prize is for "serious" writing stuff, so well yes, Borges would be more deserving than Winston Churchill (serious but not good enough), or Bob Dylan (good enough but not serious).
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Now it is. Didn't use to be though. In the 1930's the Swedish Academy had ideas about handing out based popularity. That's how Pearl Buck got it.

People think this is bad? Had it been the 1930's they would have awarded J.K. Rowling.
 
plarq said:
I partially agree. The Nordic intelligentsia do resemble a left-leaning social democratic political group. That is why while right-wing writer such as Borges complains about it, but the communists also hate them for being social democratic and generally anti-communist. China and Soviet Union have dissident writers who win it first (Pasternak and Gao Xingjian) before the officially approved writers winning it. The most funny part is the infighting of the left, when J.P. Sartre declined the nobel prize.

Edit: The caste system of social democrat:

1. Social Democrat: Brahmin caste, the best of the worlds, the best of capitalism, the best of socialism, the best of democracy.
2. Moderate Democrat: Kshatriya caste, the muscle of social democrats.
3. Dissent Democrats under right wing dictatorship: martyrs for social democrat cause
4. Left-wing dictators: Our friends who are a little edgy.
5. Dissent under communism: true believer of socialism against communist usurpers
6. Conservative Democrats: Main rival in the democratic country, our enemy at home.
7. Right-wing dictators: Basically scums.
8. Communists: usurpers.
9. Fascists: 100% scums, upgraded version of 7.
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Actually, heres The Eighteen who make the selection listed:
http://www.svenskaakademien.se/en/the-academy
 
A song's experience of 'being read in the mind' being robbed is as preposterous as saying that a performed play is robbed of being played in the reader's mind.

And 'high literature' too, bunch of bullcrap is what I call it. There is no literature that is 'high' just because it wants to be and is pretentious enough.

I guess Homer was a pretty trashy poet too, reciting all the time.
 
NovaKart said:
I always felt like his songwriting was good but his singing voice was god awful.
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It takes some getting used to, but he can be good singing also. And imho he did deserve the prize. Even if there are many others that do also.

luiz said:
Dylan is a good poet, but definitely there are bigger literary figures out there who should have gotten it instead. But as already said, the Literature Nobel is probably the silliest and most political of all Nobels. The OP mentioned Borges. Everybody in the Nobel committee recognized that Borges was hugely deserving of the award, but they didn't give it to him because his right-wing politics offended the left-wing intelligentsia of the time. That's also why García-Márquez got the award decades before Vargas-Llosa.
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I never felt Borges to write special stories, unique stories. Marquez did... or at least they struck me as such.
 
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Mouthwash said:
I don't want to come off as pugnacious here (and for the record I think very highly of Illmatic), but One Love doesn't really seem that great lyrically. I mean, it's a nice song, but it wouldn't rank in my top thirty. Maybe you're just referring to stuff like the 'theme' and 'storytelling' of the song, but those seem too subjective to give a prize on the basis of.
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I mean the storytelling is great, sure, but the raw lyrical quality of it is equally excellent.

"But yo, guess who got shot in the dome-piece?
Jerome's niece on the way home from Jones Beach"

Is my favorite couplet from any hip-hop song ever
 
Kyriakos said:
It is just a very nasty choice, in my view.
If people are focused on the writing itself, it doesn't make sense for them to be musicians.
Can't really see any way in which Dylan's writing is in the same league as any high literature. Yet there is also the (mentioned) added issue that a song is heard; you listen to the words being said. That robs a text already from the experience of the reader reading it in their mind. A bit- obviously not a full parallel- like a scene in a book is not the same as its presentation in a movie adapted from the book.
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High literature? What the hell is that? Can you provide us some examples of living writers who are writing "high Literature"?

JohannaK said:
A song's experience of 'being read in the mind' being robbed is as preposterous as saying that a performed play is robbed of being played in the reader's mind.

And 'high literature' too, bunch of bullcrap is what I call it. There is no literature that is 'high' just because it wants to be and is pretentious enough.

I guess Homer was a pretty trashy poet too, reciting all the time.
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:thumbsup: "Pretentious" is exactly the right word.
 
Indeed. Talk about high literature is usually the work of self-proclaimed intellectuals trying to assert their own superiority over the plebe.
 
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