Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
"...and the Nobel goes to..."
The 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Though a defensible choice (after all, didn’t the Man in Black himself say of Dylan: “This man can rhyme the tick of time”*), we see little point in arguing the point.
The Varnished Culture congratulates him and trusts that he will not take it too seriously. We have written before on the alien ceremonies, the Noh system of awards, reserved for the very few. “Competitions are set by the people who win them” says a character in Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes and while that makes no sense, it makes perfect sense.
Here’s a shortlist of some writers who never received an award, let alone a Nobel prize: Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Austen, Brontë, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Céline, Lampedusa, Nabokov.
As Céline observed of the literary Nobel: “Every Vaseline-ass in Europe has one. Where’s mine?” Lost in the mail, perhaps, or tangled up in blue.
(photo: Jean-Luc)
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