Nobel Prize for Bob Dylan

Congratulations from 3:AM to Bob Dylan for winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature..

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan

“for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

‘If it is possible to produce misery one should produce it thus.’ Kafka.

‘Nothing can be drawn from these outbursts, this turmoil of death, that a non-poetic language could express… the poetic vision is not submitted to common reduction…‘ Bataille

‘He’s the imperishable actor whose confirmed sophistication drives a drama that’s fugitive, driven in an operation that’s always changing physically, materially, visibly and on the spot, that always asks about the revolution, knowing that everyone cries out for that even though they might not bargain for what they get when it arrives. He’s an occult crew of band slaves where human breath suddenly shifts and the voice molecularly transfers to a new register. Throughout he manages to hold down magnetically the openings and soarings in a mysterious, beautiful, mesmeric pure flight. The atmosphere that results is physically rotten with actual poetry, naked and atrocious. Dylan works the psychic state between the schism of spirituality and sensibility. There’s always an organic scream in his voice, a mood that’s bloody and light, definitive and opaque, gripping sincerity that has nothing to do with authenticity but more a matter of grace and dense concentration. And then there are these heartbreak songs where what haunts their edges are the monsters of copulation and catapulted breath. The heart is heavy here, and both betrayed and a betrayer. Forces have been gathered from other places, other voices, other times and then in a lukewarm psychic night of suicides and near suicides simple contradictions come home to roost. Here frailty and aberrant life are distilled into lucid sensibilities of martyred defeats and desire.’

‘Dylan rewrites Dante as a type of Orasmus Turner life cycle, the woodsman thing, a rapid eye movement that gave you the essence of pioneer life – kids arriving, neighbours, a railroad getting laid – four intervals – six months, two years, ten years and then a lifetime all coming into his head in a great water chute of energy – like, if you don’t know where you’re going then all roads are going there – mills, water-powered, single-bladed, and friction feeds, edgers, drying kilns, logs hauled to the river’s edge, splash dams, slender logs, crooked logs, rotten logs, sunken logs fished up from the river bottom, beams that made railway bridges, rafters in Gothic cathedrals, shingles, spools, pail handles, veneers, wooden furniture pegs, hemlock bark for the tannery, combing brains for reclamation, trees, doors, blinds, sashes, massive stumps, steep slopes, firewood, furnaces, charcoal, Hanging Rock, Allegheny Valley, Juniata, Scioto, Jackson, Vinton Counties, Ramapos Mountains, steamboats, steam engines, steam locomotives, where to imagine America without trees is to imagine another world. In this is ‘Scarlet Town’, his damned Titanic, New York, everything.

Memory and the soul collide in Dylan. Memory draws us back into time when the soul seeks release. The great tension in Dylan is awareness of the time coming where time ends. His consciousness of the history of this process is of ‘Two trains running side by side, forty miles wide… I think when my back was turned the whole world burned… we cried because our souls were torn, so much for tears, so much for these long and wasted years.’

Knausgaard on Dylan: ‘ “Peter wanted to see Bob Dylan’s childhood home, so we drove there first; it was just a few blocks away, up a steep hill behind the hotel. It looked exactly like all the other houses in the neighborhood, a small wooden duplex with a grassy patch in front. There was no sign indicating that Bob Dylan grew up here, nor was there a statue of him. That seemed appropriate, for in contrast to the other 1960s artists who were still alive, there was nothing about Bob Dylan to remind one of a statue, nothing about his music or his role had become rigid or clearly defined, no final form enclosed him. In fact, it was as if he weren’t really a person at all, but had somehow dissolved into his music. His old songs were constantly in motion, and the new songs emerged from the same stream. As he traveled around, permanently on tour, you couldn’t tell what came from him and what belonged to the American song tradition; he was just playing the music. On “The Basement Tapes,” you can hear how he discovers this mode for the first time, how he begins to live in the music, as he keeps tossing out one tune after the other, song after song, some of it fantastic, some of it junk, some of it interesting, some of it nonsense, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest, for the whole point is the lightness; that all demands for perfection and completion, for flawlessness, have been suspended; and the motion.

All writers, artists and musicians know the feeling: when you disappear into what you are doing, lose yourself in it and are no longer aware that you exist, while at the same time the feeling of existing is profound and total and what you make is never better. Work created in this state really shouldn’t be published in the artist’s name, because it has been created precisely by the artist’s non personal, non-individual, selfless side. Bob Dylan is the master of the selfless self, the king of the not-one’s-one, a deeply paradoxical figure who lived and breathed the music of this deeply paradoxical country”.

“Jam Magazine: What’s your opinion concerning Bob Dylan’s nomination to the Nobel Prize?

Greil Marcus: Well, if Dario Fo won a Nobel Prize, I think also Bob Dylan could….Seriously, as well as I don’t think Dario Fo’s is true literature, I don’t think Dylan’s songs are true literature, either.”

Don Dellilo talks to Greil Marcus about Dylan. Burroughs talks about Dylan, Patti Smith talks about Dylan