Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the award was announced last October, people who care about such things were either elated or outraged: Fans of the man felt that Dylan’s work deserved such lofty accolades, but writerly snobs — the worst snobs — looked down on the troubadour, his popular music, and his “poetic” lyrics.

I’m a Dylan fan since I was a kid listening to my mom and dad’s Peter Paul & Mary – In Concert album: Mary was so beautiful on the record jacket and just hearing her sing on “Blowin’ in the Wind” made feel like I’d been born too late. I didn’t think too much about the award at the time as Dylan’s ambivalent reaction to the thing will no doubt go down as one of the jester’s best pranks. I was too busy laughing to think too hard on it all.

This week the prize committee released a lecture Dylan wrote — a requirement for receiving the award. Hearing about the lecture I began to ponder the arguments for and against Dylan again. As a songwriter and a poet I can assure you that musical lyrics and literary verses are completely different animals that flourish is mostly separate universes. That said, there is also some overlap and I’ve always believed that the best poetry is musical, and the best musical lyrics are poetic. One way to understand the difference between the two is to consider the ideas that Dylan brought poetry into pop music, but his comrade Leonard Cohen brought music to poetry. These two songsters have a lot in common, but their works lineup alongside one another like mirror images full of similarities in opposition.

You might not agree with me, but I think Dylan would. Here’s a bit from The New York Times take the lecture…

What does it all mean? Mr. Dylan dodges answering directly. But he argues that songs both are and are not literature, the work of novels and plays and epic poems. “Songs are unlike literature,” he wrote. “They’re meant to be sung, not read.” And he asks people to encounter his lyrics the way they were intended to be heard, “in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”

But, he added, the granddaddy of Western literature was a singer and a lyric writer, too. “I return once again to Homer,” he wrote, “who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’”

Here’s the full lecture…

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This year we remember the 65th anniversary of the publishing of Yukio Mishima’s first novel, Confessions of a Mask. One of my favorite writers and thinkers of all time, Mishima lived and died by the example that art and obsession can make great beauty if also a bloody tragedy.

Here’s the Wiki…

Mishima’s early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsuko, who took the boy, separating him from his immediate family for several years…Natsu was prone to violence and morbid outbursts, which are occasionally alluded to in Mishima’s works.[7] It is to Natsu that some biographers have traced Mishima’s fascination with death.[8] Natsu did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport or to play with other boys; he spent much of his time alone or with female cousins and their dolls.[7]

Mishima returned to his immediate family when he was 12. His father, a man with a taste for military discipline, employed parenting tactics such as holding the young boy up to the side of a speeding train. He also raided Mishima’s room for evidence of an “effeminate” interest in literature and often ripped apart the boy’s manuscripts.

…In 1946, Mishima began his first novel, Tōzoku (盗賊?, “Thieves”), a story about two young members of the aristocracy drawn towards suicide. It was published in 1948, placing Mishima in the ranks of the Second Generation of Postwar Writers. He followed with Confessions of a Mask, a semi-autobiographical account of a young homosexual who must hide behind a mask in order to fit into society. The novel was extremely successful and made Mishima a celebrity at the age of 24.

…Mishima was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times and was a favorite of many foreign publications. However, in 1968 his early mentor Kawabata won the Nobel Prize and Mishima realized that the chances of it being given to another Japanese author in the near future were slim…

The rest of Mishima’s celebrated, intense life and shocking death are illuminated in this episode of the BBC program Arena…

For more about Mishima, check out this previous post which includes a link to Paul Schrader’s outstanding biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

Stay Awake!

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