Dylan on 60 Minutes..., Sunday, Dec. 5, 2004 Options

[Trudes]

I hear he will be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for writing.

I see this all the time.

OK, there is NO Nobel Peace Price for litterature (nor medicine, echonomics, and so on. There is only one Nobel Peace Price and that's for... well.. peace.

Patrik,
Of course, you are right.
Thank you for correcting my mistake.
xo

[GoodDog]

I hear he will be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for writing.

I see this all the time.

OK, there is NO Nobel Peace Price for litterature (nor medicine, echonomics, and so on. There is only one Nobel Peace Price and that's for... well.. peace.

The other prices are just "Nobel prices". As in "the Nobel price for medicine this year goes to..."

And you really can't nominate anybody for the other prices except the peace price. The litterature price is decided by the Swedish Academy alone, and there is no way on earth Bob would ever get it. I'm sorry.



Patrik

PS Alfred Nobel, of course was this swedish guy who among other things invented dynamite. On realising it would be used mainly to blow up people he decided to at least give his fortune to something positive.

What Ed Bradley failed to mention in the 60 Minutes story is that Bob Dylan has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature EVERY year since 1996. His nomination comes from Professor Gordon Ball of VMI. Joining the chorus of supporters include Christopher Ricks, of Harvard & Oxford Universities, and Britain's poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. His support for the prize has increased each year from the academic community. So, I disagree with the comment he will never get the Nobel. I think his chances are quite excellent.

In 2000, Dylan, along with Isaac Stern, was awarded the Polar Music Prize in Sweden (home of the Nobel awards). The award was presented by the King of Sweden. This is somewhat an equivalent of a lifetime Grammy Award. Obviously, his music and poetry is highly respected in Sweden as well as the rest of Europe. I think the European press and critics in general have been much kinder to Dylan over the years, which makes me think his chances of a Nobel are very good. Maybe not this year, but I think it will happen.

For a very good analysis of Dylan's work from a critical poetic viewpoint, check out Christopher Rick's astute Dylan's Vision Of Sin.

(Edited for spelling mistake)

This post has been edited by GoodDog: Dec 7 2004, 08:55 AM

[amcorrea]

When I get it, I will burn a copy for you. (It will be a DVD) Be patient. The vine line is long, but I have a few other sources that may come through for me quicker. I want to see it very bad as well!

Thanks Dennis! I'll be good ("Patience is everything"). Promise.

I came across Slate's take on the interview...a bit cynical and whiny, but they made a good point (after complaining that it was boring):

Not that there's any need to put the 63-year-old artist through the wringer, but for God's sake, at least ask him something that rises to the level of mildly interesting cocktail chatter.

For example, when Bradley asked Dylan about Rolling Stone magazine's recent selection of (surprise) "Like a Rolling Stone" as the number one song of all time, Dylan was characteristically unimpressed: "Well, the lists, they change names pretty frequently ... I don't really pay much attention to that." Follow-up question that would be asked by ANY SENTIENT INDIVIDUAL at that moment: So, Mr. Dylan, what do you think is the greatest song of all time? Had the focus shifted for a moment off himself and his status as a legend, Dylan might have opened up a little, smiled, maybe even picked up a guitar and sung a Woody Guthrie song or something. But Bradley neglected to ask his subject anything about music, current events, pop culture or religion. Instead, the interview dwelled awkwardly on Bradley's amazement at the fact that Dylan might not enjoy being a celebrity. The basic Q & A template went something like this: Bradley: "Many regard you as a prophet/god/savior/genius. What do you say to that?" Dylan: "Argh, erm, well, hmmm." Bradley: "Wow, you're so enigmatic."

[amcorrea]

For a very good analysis of Dylan's work from a critical poetic viewpoint, check out Christopher Rick's astute  Dylan's Vision Of Sin.

I put Dylan's Visions of Sin on my wish list as soon as it came out (happily, Xmas is coming!). Ricks is a hero of mine...a literary critic with sound judgment and sheer love of words.

Here's an excellent NY Times article on it (sorry to quote the whole thing, but it's so *good*!):

'Dylan's Visions of Sin': It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Reading)

June 13, 2004
By JONATHAN LETHEM


CHRISTOPHER RICKS and I share a privilege. It's one you
share too, assuming you join in our almost fathomless
esteem for the songs and performances of the sui generis
poet-singer Bob Dylan. That is, to have had our lifetimes
overlap with an artist whom stone Dylan fans like Ricks and
I suspect future generations will regard, in his visionary
fecundity, with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman,
Picasso and the like. This concurrence of our lives with
his is a privilege that shouldn't be taken for granted: 40
or 50 years from now, one of the few questions younger
people will be certain to ask of elderly witnesses to the
20th century is, ''Did you ever go to a Bob Dylan
concert?'' If the reply comes: ''You have no idea what a
hassle Madison Square Garden could be,'' it will certainly
be met with shaming incredulity.

That Christopher Ricks? Yes, that one -- the great British
literary critic, newly elected Oxford Professor of Poetry,
to succeed Paul Muldoon in September. Ricks is an exemplar
of the diminishingly seen art of ''close reading,'' an
explicator of Milton, Keats, Tennyson and Eliot, praised by
none other than W. H. Auden as ''the kind of critic every
poet dreams of finding,'' and now the author of ''Dylan's
Visions of Sin'' -- a volume perhaps ipso facto to be
regarded as either the most intimidating rock-critical
treatise ever published, or the silliest, or both. Or, as
one friend blurted when I'd said I was reviewing the book:
''Does that mean you have to read all the way to the end?''

I did, with escalating ease and pleasure. Ricks, surely
aware of the oddness of his enterprise -- the elevation of
a member of the Traveling Wilburys to a place among the
greatest poets in the English language -- has anticipated
not only the possible resistance of his usual readership to
his subject at hand, but also the probable unfamiliarity
with his aims and methods in the potential new readership
he will have attracted. ''Most people who are likely to
read this book will already know what they feel about
Dylan, though they might not always know quite why they
feel it or what they think,'' is how he opens the book,
with typical brio and warmth. Soon enough Ricks also
addresses concerns that Dylan might not be properly treated
as a poet: ''The case for denying Dylan the title of poet
could not summarily, if at all, be made good by any
open-minded close attention to the words and his ways with
them. The case would need to begin with his medium, or
rather with the mixed-media nature of song, as of drama.''
Translation: if the lines in Shakespeare's plays, written
for and much enlivened by (sufficiently inspired)
performance, make a legitimate object of reverence and
study, what's your problem? Might it really only be that
you never had to see Shakespeare sing on ''We Are the
World,'' or accept an Oscar by live satellite feed from
Australia? If so, get over it.

Perhaps thinking of potential new readers, Ricks makes the
book a seductive primer in his own methods. Take a look, he
seems to say, at the pleasure in juxtaposing one poet with
another (he abuts Dylan with a wide array: Robert Lowell,
Marvell, Tennyson, Eliot, George Herbert and more): see how
they seem to read one another, while you and I, reader,
stand back and watch. Or consider the rewards of parsing
what you've taken for granted even in songs you praise as
masterworks: a lyric's exact strategy and means, what it
has in common with other human utterances, and what sets it
apart. Such clockwork analysis never seems to drain Dylan's
work of its vitality (a tribute to Ricks and Dylan both, I
suspect), but rather to renew a listener's amazement. For
instance, by the end of one such disquisition Ricks may
threaten to persuade you that rhyme, that corny tool, is
the central receptacle not only for Dylan's wit but for the
moral and emotional brilliance of his art.

Close reading, on close reading, turns out in Ricks's hands
to be a lively sport, full of beguiling allusions, teasing
asides and free philosophical musings, and bursting with
groanworthy puns. See, or rather hear, Ricks analyze
Dylan's use of pronouns in ''Like a Rolling Stone'': ''The
pronoun 'you' is the song's pronouncement, this being a
song in which, although 'they' may for a while be hanging
out with 'you' ('They're all drinkin,' thinkin' that they
got it made'), and 'he' may be doing so, too (even if 'He's
not selling any alibis'), 'you' will never, Miss Lonely,
enjoy the company of 'we' or 'us,' and never ever the
company of an 'I.' Of all Dylan's creations this is the
song that, while it is one of his most individual,
exercises the severest self-control when it comes to never
mentioning its first person. Never say I. Not I and I: you
and you.''

Elsewhere, Ricks riffs on one of Dylan's latest offerings,
the song ''Sugar Baby'' (2001): ''Two idioms were the
parents of this Sugar Baby, parents who -- despite not
exactly getting on with one another -- were determined to
make a go of it. They are the idioms to go without ('You
went years without me') and to keep going ('Might as well
keep going now'). Their child would be keep going without.
Meanwhile, lurking in the brains behind ma and pa is the
thought of getting going, which is why the words 'get' and
'got' get to usher in 'went without' and 'keep going.' ''
Ricks's lighter-than-air allusion to an earlier song --
''the brains behind ma and pa'' is a near-quote from
''Maggie's Farm'' -- reminds us of another lyric about
quitting and setting off down the road. There's madness in
his method, but Ricks's confidence in his reader's
willingness to follow him derives from the willingness to
follow displayed by Dylan's listeners.

Readers may indeed be disconcerted by Ricks's sheer
goofiness. But this is hardly confined to his writing on
this new, pop-culture subject: Ricks's ''Beckett's Dying
Words'' (1993), taken as a more or less random sample, is
equally antic, even as it worries at Beckett's deathly
gravity. Punning is less an ornament on Ricks's critical
prose than one of its central methods, one consonant with
the kind of linguistically embedded meanings he wants to
excavate in the first place. Bent on tormenting into view
the recalcitrant intention hidden in a writer's vocabulary,
syntax and rhyme, Ricks will stop at nothing to extract the
information he craves, even tickling. Happily, Ricks has an
ear for a tune as well as a trope. The songs he discusses,
taken as the contents of a mix tape, would consist neither
of Dylan's greatest hits (though many are here), nor of a
bunch of stuff rewarding to parse but musically dull.
Rather, Ricks has picked a lot of ''sleepers'' -- those
Dylan songs that emerge as favorites on long listening, not
purely for their lyrical sophistication but for their depth
in that mysterious conjunction of lyric, music and
performance. Ricks's book leads you back into Dylan's
music, no small virtue.

''Dylan's Visions of Sin'' seems a conscious attempt to
forge a post-biographical context for Dylan's art, to sweep
away in one gesture the defensiveness, gossip and, perhaps
worst of all, proprietary distortions too often imposed on
an artist's legacy while it is still in the making. There
are those who, like Kinbote staking his nutty claim to
interpretive possession of the poem in Nabokov's ''Pale
Fire,'' ask us to believe their approach to Dylanology,
pegged on Woody Guthrie, heroin or the cabala, is
exclusively correct. Ricks, on the other hand, has no
investment in persuading his reader that his particular
taxonomical trick, which consists of reading Dylan's songs
against the seven deadly sins, four cardinal virtues and
three heavenly graces, is anything more than what William
Empson called ''the right handle to take hold of the
bundle'' -- that is, a reasonably adequate stance from
which to begin contemplating the artist's accomplishment.
While using ''lust'' to treat ''Lay, Lady, Lay'' and
''covetousness'' as a measure of ''Gotta Serve Somebody,''
Ricks grants art's ultimate indifference to criticism --
so, despite a tone of vast assurance, his book is agreeably
humble.

In seeming to set, almost single-handedly, the course for
the future of ''Dylan Studies,'' Ricks has a great partner
in Greil Marcus. An American critic who began as a ''rock
writer,'' Marcus brings to the consideration of Dylan's
music a context of pop knowledge as thorough as Ricks's
more academic bearings. Beginning in the classic ''Mystery
Train,'' and then, more recently and extensively, in ''The
Old, Weird America,'' Marcus has placed Dylan deep in his
American context, the same swamp of indigenous voicings
that gave rise to alchemists like Walt Whitman, John Ford
and Chuck Berry.

In this, Marcus is both Ricks's twin and his opposite.
Certainly, it is Marcus who provides the corrective to
Ricks's seeming lack of interest in America, or in Dylan's
magpie appropriations from folk and pop traditions, as
opposed to his relationship to canonical poetry. For it
must be said: there are moments, while reading Ricks, when
you want to shout: The 16-year-old Robert Zimmerman didn't
want to be Lord Tennyson, man, he wanted to be Muddy
Waters! But Ricks himself wouldn't argue, and that's the
strength of his book. The critic has, seemingly, merely
wished to test the songs he loves against his own
pre-existing context, which happens to be Philip Larkin and
Matthew Arnold, not Blind Willie McTell. In doing so he's
found the songs all the more extraordinary, not wanting in
any measure. Fair enough. Any critic's a blind man, faced
with an elephant as formidable as the collected works of
Bob Dylan. But some blind men have extraordinarily
sensitive hands, and it is not impossible to imagine an
elephant's pleasure at their touch.



Jonathan Lethem's most recent novel is ''The Fortress of
Solitude.''

[patrik]

Well, the problem is that nominations are completely irrelevant to the picking of the winner. So you might nomininate him for 2000 years and it would still have no effect.

In the last decades the academy has seen it as it's task to give little known authors a platform, wich means there no authors well known to the general public (the possible exception beeing Günther Grass), not to mention a pop artist, be he great with words. To win you have to have written douzens of thick novels that either uses no commas or periods at all, are written in a language spoken by less than ten million people or tell about how you dream to have sex with your mother.

I mean this in no disrespect to Dylan, but I'm sure his name hasn't even been mentioned in kidding among the academy.

But you can always hope..

Patrik

Thank's for the link BTW.

[amcorrea]

I loved the interview, but it was just a tease.
I went out and bought 'Bob Dylan..Chronicles Vol I'.

As someone who was around when Dylan was a pup...
I am looking forward to reading this.
His interview showed his modesty and his unwillingness to see himself as anything more than someone who wrote songs with a passion.

And once you've read it, you can post your thoughts on that thread...it's *wonderful*, Trudes. You're in for a treat.

[aliasanything]

Hey, this is better Dylan discussion than most Dylan sites these days.

Wasn't it Allen Ginsberg who first urged Ball to write a nominating letter (and maybe wrote one himself)?

Patrik, I certainly defer to your expertise on the Prize, but when Toni Morrison won it 10-ish years ago, she was pretty darn famous, at least over here. Some also argue that giving it to a playwright whose words are meant to be performed/ heard/ experienced rather than read pushes the possibility of a Dylan win a few steps closer to fruition. I don't know if it will ever happen, but I think it would be pretty cool to see.

One more side note, people give me Dylan books fairly regularly because I'm a big fan, and Visions of Sin was one of a small handful I found interesting enough to finish. I definitely didn't agree with all the analysis (which would be impossible anyway), but I really enjoyed it.

Okay, maybe one more thing... how can I get in on this 60 Minutes outtake dvd? I can't believe they got him to talk for an hour and only showed 10 minutes of it!!

[eustacescrubb]

or tell about how you dream to have sex with your mother.

Which book is this, pray tell?

(Not that I want to read it. Just asking.)

[patrik]

That would be this years winner Elfriede Jelinek. I haven't read her, but she seems to be able to create nausea in the most hardened critic. I saw that film made on one of her books (The pianist or The Piano Player), and it was the most disturbing thing I've seen. Not denying her genius, but there are lot's of other feelings I'd rather explore through reading...

The 2002 winner Imre Kertész (he's the one without commas or periods) is well worth reading though.

You can find the list of winners here.

Patrik

This post has been edited by patrik: Dec 8 2004, 02:19 AM

[GoodDog]

The following a from The New Republic (online). An interesting analysis of the 60 Minutes piece.


Shelter from the Media Storm
by David Yaffe



"For as long as I've been here at '60 Minutes,' I've wanted to interview Bob Dylan," Ed Bradley announced last night. Bradley was not alone. Many writers and critics prophesizing with their pens would salivate at such an opportunity; Dylanologists have literally dug through garbage to find clues about the man and his work. Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One is a fascinating, surprisingly lucid memoir, spinning new yarns about encounters with Archibald McLeish, Tiny Tim, Norbert the Chef, and other characters real and imagined. But the book, which leads readers to believe that Dylan was self-generated on Bleecker Street around 1961, poses more questions than it answers. CBS offered teasers about Dylan's first TV interview in nearly 20 years, and it was leaked that he would discuss his relationship with his father. And what did Dylan finally disclose about Abraham Zimmerman? On Highway 61 Revisited, he already sang, "God said to Abraham, kill me a son." What was left to add? All we learn is that Zimmerman père didn't want his Bobby to run off to New York to be some meshuga folk singer. Somewhere in between a segment on middle aged national guard reservists getting shipped off to Iraq and Andy Rooney griping about Christmas shopping, "60 Minutes" gave Dylan about ten minutes. It was a big media week for the 63 year old.


Dylan sang of "Advertising signs that con you / Into thinking you're the one," on "It's Alright, Ma" in 1964. In a triumph of synergy, many commercial entities have decided Bob Dylan is the one, and it was no con job. Dan Rather quoted from the same song when he announced his retirement from his CBS news perch: "He who is not busy being born is busy dying." (In the Dylanesque eternal circle, Rather's gold watch will be slinking back to "60 Minutes.") Last night, Dylan recited lyrics from the song to Ed Bradley, as a raspy, oracular intonation, saying pointedly, "You try to write that." With his best-selling memoir published by Simon & Schuster, which, like CBS, is owned by Viacom, Dylan finally retracted his media non serviam. "You may be the head of some big TV network," Dylan sang in 1979, "But you're gonna have to serve somebody." From Dan Rather to Ed Bradley, a big TV network is serving Bob. Bob, in return, is sticking to the premise of his song: "The only person you have to think about lying twice to is either yourself or to God," said Dylan. "The press isn't either of them. And I just figured they're irrelevant."


The segment immediately preceding the Dylan interview was on adult ADD, appropriate for a program that reduced Dylan's entire life's work to gnomic soundbytes, and each one of them seemed wrenched out with great anguish. Why did Dylan bother doing it? For most of the interview he seemed like he would rather be undergoing root-canal work. (Rather might have even had an easier time chatting up Saddam Hussein on the show last year.) Bradley praised him, called him "Bob," was as deferential as possible, but was mostly met with stony, intractable, monosyllabic utterances. "Nothing is revealed," said Dylan's Frankie Lee to Judas Priest. Dylan revealed a little to Ed Bradley, but as little as he could get away with. In a Hemingwayesque exchange filled with awkward silences, Bradley and Dylan had this dialectic on the origins of "Blowin' in the Wind":

Bradley: "I read somewhere that you wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' in ten minutes. Is that right?"
Dylan: "Probably."
"Just like that?"
"Yeah."
"Where did it come from?"
"It just came. It came from ... uh ... like, uh, right out of that wellspring of creativity, I would think."


That wellspring of creativity also included the melody for the anti-slavery spiritual "No More Auction Block," a fact that was not lost on many folkies. In 1962, Dylan already anticipated that the revolution of the song could not be televised. "There ain't too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind," Dylan told Sing Out!, a folk music magazine, that year. "It ain't in no book or movie or T.V. show or discussion group. Man, it's in the wind--and it's blowing in the wind." By 1978, Dylan could say what was already apparent to many knowing listeners: "'Blowin' In The Wind' has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song, I don't know if you ever heard, called 'No More Auction Block.'" Dylan was similarly forthcoming in a recent interview with Robert Hilburn about his composing method: "I wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' in ten minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records," he said last April. "That's the folk music tradition. You use what's been handed down. 'The Times, They Are A-Changin' is probably from an old Scottish folk song."


Ed Bradley got the more evasive Dylan last night. Even if Dylan prefers to leave such matters to unseen forces, many a scavenging scholar (or muckraking journalist, the kind one can see on "60 Minutes") has tried to do some excavation. Bradley asked many questions and got many one-word answers. But wouldn't it have been a "60 Minutes" kind of thing to dig a little deeper? There would have been many places for a reporter to plumb this wellspring, however magical it is. Dylan has acknowledged that his art is not just about mere inspiration, but that he has engaged in some imaginative borrowing. It's not coincidence that he called his 2001 album Love and Theft--its very title is filched from Eric Lott's landmark 1994 study of blackface minstrelsy. The album is, among other things, a weird, old associative survey course. One minute you hear, "I'm gettin' up in the morning / I believe I'll dust my broom" from Robert Johnson. Another, you'll get dialogue from The Great Gatsby. A few were shocked that Dylan lifted several lines on Love and Theft from Dr. Junichi Saga's Japanese novel Confessions of a Yakuza. "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal," wrote T.S. Eliot. Dylan is definitely a mature poet.


Such things have been bandied about in recent days among literary folks and obsessive Dylanologists. It would have been intriguing if Bradley had prodded Dylan on the source of that wellspring, gently, respectfully, and in the interest of having a conversation about music. If anyone in TV news is up to this, it would be Bradley. He has had a longstanding relationship with Jazz at Lincoln Center (full disclosure: I wrote a script Bradley read on NPR about Duke Ellington) and is the only African American reporter on "60 Minutes." In the bizarre screenplay Dylan cowrote for his 2002 film Masked & Anonymous, he even had Ed Harris playing a blacked-up minstrel performer; he has invited such questions. It would have been fascinating for Bradley to talk to Dylan about how he loved and thieved; how he, as a Minnesotan, as a lapsed bar mitzvah boy, learned not only to sing the blues but even to talk the blues. Dylan says he's nobody's spokesman, but how does he not realize he sounds like one when he talks a little like a Zen koan recited by Muddy Waters? Rolling Stone just named "Like a Rolling Stone" the best song ever written. But "Like A Rolling Stone" was like Hank Williams and Muddy Waters, who identified themselves as rolling stones.


There's a scene in Chronicles in which we find Dylan, taking a break from a listless rehearsal with the Grateful Dead, describing an African American jazz singer getting under his skin. "The singer reminded me of Billy Eckstine. He wasn't very forceful, but he didn't have to be; he was relaxed, but he sang with natural power. Suddenly and without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul. It was like he was saying, 'You should do it this way.'" Dylan realized that he didn't need to strain to try to hit notes coming from a younger man's angst long eviscerated by nicotine and howling and doing just about everything a voice teacher would tell a student not to do. He realized that he could dig into his lower register, find his inner Muddy Waters (or Jimmy Rushing or whomever), and find a style that would allow him to deepen with age. If Ed Bradley were really doing an investigation, if he were telling a story that had not been told before, he would have looked up a newspaper report from San Rafael, California, to find out who was playing that gig (Dylan never names the singer in the book), and he could have done some follow-ups about the myriad sources feeding Dylan's "wellspring of creativity."


Instead, Bradley pushes Dylan about his resistance to being called the voice of his generation and insists that even if he didn't feel that way, many of his listeners did. Dylan's response? "They must not have heard the songs." Hearing Dylan's songs is a generally preferable experience to watching CBS, but we'll take whatever he gives Ed Bradley, and whatever the network allows us to see. But if you're looking for answers about Dylan on television, you don't need CBS to know which way the wind blows.


David Yaffe is the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing, which will be published next year by Princeton University Press.

[amcorrea]

Thanks for posting that, Dennis. Just from watching the interview, I got the impression that Bradley wasn't very familiar with Dylan and had just read Chronicle to prep. Seriously. It was pretty surface-level stuff...esp. for "investigative journalism." But again, I'll take anything I can get!