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“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…
