Desolation Row
Bob Dylan, Reluctant Prophet of the Inchoate
I somehow can’t fully digest or even understand the news that Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sigmund Freud, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, and Toni Morrison are members of this most exclusive of clubs. The entrance fee has proven to be exorbitant, the requisite résumé really difficult to create or amass. And there are the perennial also-rans like Salman Rushdie Philip Roth, and Don Delillo or Saul Bellow.
Dylan (née Robert Zimmerman) has put together and created an artistic corpus that is varied, sometimes hysterical, sometimes profoundly angry. Like the man he named himself after, his verbal, poetic flights are bumpy but melodious, obtuse and puzzling or, often, meaningless.
His is a restless if not frenetic mind. We ask the perennial question about Shakespeare: Where and how did he learn all that about all that? Who taught him to read? Dylan came out of hardscrabble, rawboned Minnesota, pissed off, sick of the provincial snow, the carpetbaggers, and the dead mines. Like one of his lovers, he’s an artist, and artists “don’t look back.” He went to New York just as Shakespeare went to London, and as so many before him went to magic themselves from glove merchants into poets who would rock the world.
