Menu
70 Plus Life at the Top
Older. Wiser. Still in the Game.
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Our Mission
  • At Large
  • The Arts
  • Politics & Government
  • Marketplace
  • Agelessness
  • Opinion
    • Advertorial
  • Best of 70+
  • Contact Us
Close Menu
June 7, 2017

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture Says the Unsayable

Dylan Nobel
If you’ve never gotten around to sitting down and reading Moby Dick, fear not, Bob Dylan will summarize it for you. Excerpted from his newly released Nobel Lecture in Literature, here is the opening paragraph of his description of Herman Melville’s opus:

Moby Dick is a fascinating book, a book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab—captain of a ship called the Pequod—an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of the earth. It’s an abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. He calls Moby the emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab’s got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about now and again. You can anticipate what will happen.

He goes on for about 800 more words relating the events, the characters, and the feel of Moby Dick. Then he gives much the same treatment to Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front (“a horror story … a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals”), and Homer’s The Odyssey (“a strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war”). In the 27-minute audio clip released by the Nobel committee, you can hear Dylan deliver these Cliff Notes of classics in his extremely distinctive drawl over soft piano tinkling.

The lecture marks the fittingly odd culmination of Dylan’s saga with the Nobel Committee. Last October, the Swedish Academy named him as the recipient of writing’s top honor, triggering think-piece wars over whether music can be literature and then devolving into a comedy of manners. One committee member called Dylan “impolite and arrogant” for not returning the Nobel committee’s phone calls immediately; he skipped the main prize ceremony, though he did send a statement. The awarding of 8 million in Swedish krona that accompanies the Nobel was contingent on Dylan delivering a lecture by June 10—a requirement it was not clear he would fulfill until his monologue arrived online Monday.

The speech itself is typically Dylan in a few ways: It seems perched between sincerity and trolling, draws from Western culture’s most elemental influences, and works according to its own logic. Reaction has been mixed; some people have pointed out that Dylan’s writing has the sophistication of a high-school book report (e.g.: “Moby Dick is a seafaring tale. One of the men, the narrator, says, ‘Call me Ishmael.’”). But part of the point surely is in the colloquial style of his retelling: He’s turning tomes into folktales. He’s also arguably doing something more subtle. Through summary, he’s showing how literature and song defy summary.

Read more at The Atlantic.

A Sunny, Funny View of Old Age Top 25 Cities Where You Can Live Large on Less Than $70k

Related Posts

Maurice_Sendak

Books and Authors

Sendak: “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

Llosa

Books and Authors

The Elder Statesman of Latin American Literature

Ferlinghetti

Books and Authors

For Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nearly 100, the Beat Goes On

Search Our Site

Inside 70+

  • Mark Mobius Quits Retirement to Set Up New Firm
    Turns out Mark Mobius isn’t one for retirement.  Less than four months after leaving Franklin Templeton […]
  • Doctor: Trump Dictated Letter Attesting To His ‘Extraordinary’ Health
    In December 2015, Donald Trump’s personal physician released a letter describing his patient’s […]
  • Telemedicine is getting trendy, but doctors may not be keeping up
    For years, doctors have been told to look at the patient — not the computer — when providing medical care. […]
  • Philippines Orders Deportation Of Australian Activist Nun
    Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the expulsion of a 71-year-old Australian nun, giving her 30 […]
  • James Cameron Says Superhero Movies Are Played Out, Compares Avatar Sequels to The Godfather
    James Cameron, hard at work on his series of sequels to 2009’s sci-fi blockbuster Avatar, says the era of […]
  • How Robert De Niro Helped Bradley Cooper Cope with the Death of His Father
    Robert De Niro has been an anchor for Bradley Cooper in more ways than one. At the Tribeca Film Festival […]
  • More older Americans are smoking marijuana
    U.S. marijuana consumption is more prevalent today than during the conservative 1980s. Surges in drug use are […]
  • The British women who secretly served in the Cold War
    For more than 20 years, the green plains of Holderness, East Yorkshire, were the secret location of […]
  • Gmail set for ‘entire rewrite’ in biggest overhaul for five years
    Google is implementing the biggest overhaul of its popular Gmail webmail service in five years, bringing a […]
  • Queen Elizabeth II Celebrates 92
    Queen Elizabeth II marked her 92nd birthday on Saturday. The celebrations kicked off at Buckingham Palace […]
  • OK, robots have passed the Ikea test. Now let them clean our toilets
    Listen, I’ve probably been a bit hard on this whole robot uprising thing. The idea of losing my job to […]
  • ‘You were the reason’: Barbara and George Bush’s love story remembered at her funeral
    Some 1,500 guests filled the pews of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston on Saturday, including former […]

Archives

Back To Top
70 Plus Life at the Top
Our Sponsor
  • Front Page
  • Subjects of Interest
  • From the Editor’s Desk
  • Advertorial
  • About Us . . . and You
© 70 Plus Life at the Top 2021
Web development by Global Exposures