Herr Tamburin Man

Did Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for literature? A better question might be, “Who is this cabal of Swedes that decides what greatness is?” Me, I don’t know, but on the face of it I suspect he does…

My friends are mostly elated about it, each of us under the spell of Dylan in some fashion or another. His award, if you believe their comments on it, is a return of literature to its rightful place, in a circle by a fire, with a blind poet plucking at a lyre.

People lose their minds over Bob, as Woody Allen lampooned in Annie Hall. When asked by Shelley Duval’s Rolling Stone reporter whether he’d caught a recent Bob Dylan show, Alvie answered, “Me? No, my raccoon had hepatitis.” (Woody never liked the Beats, or the counterculture in general.)

When Stephen Metcalfe of Slate laid out a case for why Dylan the musician was no poet of Nobel size, he punctuated it with a line whose sentiment comes up sooner or later whenever any writers doubt he deserves it: “We pathetic literati have a few days to pretend to world importance. We just lost another.”

Do we all have such petty, shriveled hearts? Do we look at what the world thinks of writers in general and feel we’re so under-appreciated we can’t clap when the old Stephen Foster and Reverend Gary Davis fanatic gets a medal pinned to him?

I think we can.