“Call Me Fishmeal” — Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize for Literature
“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” ~ Groucho Marx, 1949
Bob Dylan has reacted to awards in varying ways, from unhappiness (the Tom Paine Award, the honorary Princeton degree), to delight (the Oscar for “Things have Changed”). Dylan’s grin as he beamed in an acceptance speech from Australia for that Oscar may have had something to do with Melpomene being the only Muse he’s never successfully seduced.
God knows he tried. And God knows he failed, from his mostly absent performance in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” to catastrophes like “Hearts of Fire,” “Renaldo and Clara” and “Masked and Anonymous.” They should have gotten Cate Blanchett to play Jack Fate, Dylan later said of his probably final stab at acting. Perhaps winning an Oscar for what he does best is the reason he occasionally displays the (real? a replica?) Oscar in concert.
According to a thread on the Edlis Café Facebook page the Oscar is indeed a replica. To celebrate the occasion, a group of Australian fans obtained an 8" plastic replica which they claimed originally bore the inscription “World’s Greatest Grandma.” Any reader of Chronicles would have been sorely tempted to leave the inscription as it was, to match up with Dylan’s New Orleans t-shirt, but the fans replaced it with something more suitable to the occasion and a few days later were successful in tossing the faux Oscar onstage at Dylan’s performance in Cairns.
“The Master began to play ‘Things Have Changed,’” the post relates. “It was the first song of the first encore. At the end of the song, Darren launched the plastic Oscar onto the stage, missing the sphere of Bob, but serendipitously landing at the shuffling feet of bassist, Tony Garnier.”
Many miscellaneous items get thrown onto the stage almost every night at a Dylan concert. They mostly go unnoticed by Bob, get kicked to the side by the crew and are usually never seen again.
“Not so the little gold Oscar guy. Tony picks it up and shows it to Bob who is clearly thrilled. If this story ended there, it would have been cool enough. But, wait! There’s more. The very next night, at the Brisbane concert, the little plastic Oscar was sitting on top of Bob’s amp, near where he keeps his harp and picks and setlists!”
And maybe Dylan’s thinking about what he does best played a role in his response — or his initial non-response — to winning a Nobel Prize in Literature.
However Bob Dylan thinks about his work he doesn’t think of it as Literature with a Big “L.” “Literature” is the stuff you study in grammar school, Dylan says in his Nobel lecture. But if Buddy Holly and Leadbelly had introduced him to the vernacular and techniques to put his own spin on song lyrics, the literature he was taught in Hibbing were the building blocks that had helped him form a way of looking at life and human nature, specifically Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey.
His courage won’t save him, but his trickery will
Because he seemingly can’t resist trolling a public audience, even a Nobel Prize Committee audience, Dylan moves on in his lecture to the world’s worst review of that “fascinating book,” Moby Dick, relating the disingenuous insight that “Moby Dick is a sea-faring tale,” misquoting from it, and lifting plot and character summations from a Spark Notes study guide.
It’s not all dross. Dylan concludes with the thought that the 600-odd pages of Moby Dick can be reduced to a few sentences, “Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.”
You’re born. You survive in the world. Your destiny is the blight man was born for. Eventually you’ll hear the announcement, “You have arrived at your destination.”
Dylan’s turns to the next work on his list, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, “… a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals… Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces.”
After a harrowing description of war and the horrors of war, Dylan concludes his segment on All Quiet On the Western Front with what he claims are the lyrics to Charlie Poole’s “You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me:”
I saw a sign in a window walking up town one day.
Join the army, see the world is what it had to say.
You’ll see exciting places with a jolly crew,
You’ll meet interesting people, and learn to kill them too.
Oh you ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talking to me.
I may be crazy and all that, but I got good sense you see.
You ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talkin’ to me.
Killin’ with a gun don’t sound like fun.
You ain’t talkin’ to me.
Originally recorded in 1927, Poole’s “You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me” doesn’t contain that stanza, not surprisingly, as the lyrics Dylan quotes were composed some 58 years later and eventually posted in 2002 on the folk musicology site mudcat.org. Musician Jim Krause included the lyrics in a thread on “Draft Dodging Songs.” noting, “[Here are] some verses I once penned to Charlie Poole’s “‘You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me.’” Krause’s verses were later replicated on the antiwarsongs.org web site, which misattributed them to Poole, eventually correcting their mistake in 2017 after Dylan used the stanza in his Nobel lecture and sharp-eyed Mudcat detectives traced the error back to its origins.
More trolling on Dylan’s part? It’s possible that this was an example of the boy crying “Wolf” once too often, and an honest mistake by Dylan. Some unverified reports have Dylan rushing into recording a last-minute lecture six days before the Nobel deadline after dropping plans to deliver a closed-set concert performance filmed earlier in 2017.
It’s equally possible that he knew exactly what he was doing.
“You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it… his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will.”
Dylan concludes his Nobel Prize lecture with the flat assertion that unlike the dead place of literature — a space he equates to Hell, “…songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.”
And just as he’s advised over the years, he incites the Nobel Prize Academy “to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard,” not as dead words on dead paper.
On the other hand, he seemed to like the medal he was awarded a great deal, and it even appears to have inspired one of the songs on “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”
“Spirits were high. Champagne was had”
After declining to attend the official award ceremony, pleading other commitments, Bob Dylan accepted his gold medal and diploma at a private meeting with twelve members of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, appropriately enough on April 1, 2017.
“Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal,” wrote the academy’s secretary in a press release, “In particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse.”
Taken from Book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid, the medal’s inscription reads: “Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes.” Although usually translated into English as, “those who have improved life with discoveries in Art or Science,” the academy chose their own interpretation that day, “They who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery.”
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