Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in literature. I have so many thoughts about this. No, well, actually they are all the same thought: What. The. Fuck.
In a way, it’s perfect because Dylan is the archetypal American: half-talented, fairly boring, emblematic of a bygone age never to return, and arrogant but at the same time not all that good.
If they had to choose an American, I’d recommend Kelly Link. Her stories are some phantasmagorical blend of Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Edgar Alan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges.
I know, I know — the Nobel Prize committee would never choose anyone who is associated with any “genre” works so strongly as Link (though they did choose Doris Lessing), but Kelly Link is the best American author qua author that I know now writing — her stories are haunting, evocative, thoughtful and never take a false step.
Bob Dylan. What a putz.
I’d give Dylan more credit than you do but yeah, kind of dumb award.
But Dylan is also what passes for deep among European middlebrow consumers that the Nobel mostly panders to.
If they wanted to honor a hippy-era singer songwriter then Joni Mitchell would have been a better choice with much more interesting lyrics (her musical structures are also way ahead of anything Dylan ever did too though technically that’s not supposed to count).