Today, I applaud the
brilliant irrelevance of the Nobel committee. Murakami is an awful writer
anyway.
By this point, you
should have learnt not to overreact. To anything. So I hope it would not be too
much of an overreaction to say I don't have a problem with Dylan getting the
Nobel Prize in literature.
Not because of
Winston Churchill. Not because of some playwright from Mongolia who got the
Nobel prize before a million great writers now dead or living. Not because of
Obama. Not even because of the president of Colombia. But simply because I
think the man deserves it.
If this opens floodgates,
so be it. They have been open since John Updike died anyway. And I would love to see Leonard Cohen get it, too.
Not that Cohen would ever get it. After all,
this was just a bunch of old men trying to be hip and incidentally (or
accidentally?) doing something wicked. But since Dylan's book of lyrics has
fascinated me since I was a little boy listening to "Visions Of
Johanna" for the first time, I’m delighted.
Even that first time,
the poetry was physical, real and absolutely wonderful. Now, if he is awarded
for this by a group of awkward men at a disco party, who the hell cares?
