Reactions To The Award To His Bobness

I've calmed down a little bit since yesterday, when I was vowing to cut off contact with any of my friends who dared to mock Bob Dylan. I've calmed down, and realized that it's not as if I have too many friends. (After I win the Nobel and phony friends start coming out of the woodwork -- THEN I can start hastily cutting people off.)

The number and stature of people who have praised the awarding of the Nobel to Dylan has also calmed me down. It may be just a coincidence that I ran into a bunch of the h8ers first thing yesterday morning -- or maybe it was no coincidence. Maybe the h8ers were more in a hurry to express themselves than the Dylan fans.

The beginning of an article in the New York Times, the part showing on the Google News page was so cheesy -- "Now, Mr. Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era, has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that elevates him into the ..." -- that I had to click and see who had written it -- Nat Hentoff, maybe? No, it wasn't Hentoff, it was several people I'd never heard of. In the first paragraph I read:

Some prominent writers celebrated Mr. Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr. Dylan [...]

-- and I didn't want to read much more. This is a great example of why I hate the New York Times so much: mentioning a great writer like Salman Rushdie, who I hope wins the Nobel soon, in the same sentence with someone like Stephen King. That literally made me nauseous, Times. Thnx a lot!

But of course, the Times can do much worse still: check out Why Bob Dylan Shouldn't Have Gotten a Nobel by someone named Anna North if you want to read something so inept that it's hilarious:

Yes, Mr. Dylan is a brilliant lyricist. Yes, he has written a book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Yes, it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan’s writing is inseparable from his music. He is great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.

As reading declines around the world, literary prizes are more important than ever [...]

CBS News reports: Writers divided on Bob Dylan's Nobel honor. They cite a bunch of heavyweight writers expressing approval of the award, a few silly twits being silly ("A musician won the Nobel! Does this mean I have a chance at a Grammy?" Not if you can't write better than that.), the Vatican newspaper disapproving -- does this mean that Francis also disapproves, or that Francis needs to clean house at his newspaper as he's cleaned house elsewhere? -- and the truly amazing pile of bile over the award spewed by Irvine Welsh, the guy who wrote Trainspotting. (What, did Welsh think HE might've gotten it this year? Hahahahahaha...) No, seriously, what Welsh has said about the Nobel going to Dylan is profoundly disgusting. I don't want to quote it, you can find it easily if you want to with Google.

More unintentionally funny anger over the prize ("I get it: writing books is hard.") has been collected by the New York Post under the headline "Bitter critics slam Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize."

In my opinion, in all seriousness, if the giving of an award, any award, to someone -- anyone -- makes you bitter, you should go see a doctor right now, because that bug up your ass has grown dangerously large and your life is dangerously devoid of depth and joy. An award can be an occasion for joy. If it's an occasion for bitterness, yr doin it wrong. I looked at the Amazon sales ranks for Irvine Welsh and Anna North, and wow, I can understand them being bitter, but it's not Bob Dylan's fault that their stuff isn't selling. Bob Dylan's books are selling a little better than they did yesterday -- and significantly better than Welsh' and North's -- but also nothing spectacular. His records, though -- wow. Surely this must be a big boost from the news of the Nobel. If his records have been selling as well as this, day in and day out, year in and year out, then the $900,000 from the Nobel wouldn't amount to a week's pay for him, maybe not even a day's pay. But surely, the current situation represents a big bump from the Nobel. (Another illustration of the Tom Petty Its-Ab-So-Lute-Ly-Bass-Ack-Wards Law of Microeconomics.)