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| Martha |
YAY!!!!
xxoo,
Martha
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Dylan, Tracy Letts win Pulitzers
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
13 minutes ago
NEW YORK - Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock 'n' roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall.
Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.
"I am in disbelief," Dylan fan and fellow Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz said of Dylan's award.
Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a tragic, but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize. Diaz, 39, worked for more than a decade on his first novel — "I spent most of the time on dead-ends and doubts," he told The Associated Press on Monday — and at one point included a section about Dylan.
"Bob Dylan was a problem for me," Diaz, who has also published a story collection, "Drown," said with a laugh. "I had one part that was 40 pages long, the entire chapter was organized around Bob Dylan's lyrics over a two year-period (1967-69). By the end of it, I wanted to throttle my like of Bob Dylan."
The Pulitzer for drama was given to Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," which, like Diaz's novel, combines comedy and brutality. Letts calls the play "loosely autobiographical," a bruising family battle spanning several generations of unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.
"It's a play I have been working on in my head and on paper for many years now," said Letts, reached by the AP in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, where "August: Osage County" had its world premiere last summer.
"There were just some details from my grandmother, my grandfather's suicide (for example) that I had played over and over in my head for many, many years. I always thought, `Well, that's the stuff of drama right there.'"
Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, already a National Book Award winner for "Time and Materials," won the poetry Pulitzer, as did Philip Schultz's "Failure."
"This is the book ... I have always wanted to write," Schultz told the AP. "Everyone is expert on one subject and failure seems to be mine. ... I was born into it. My father went bankrupt when I was 18 and he died soon afterward out of (a) terrible sense of shame. And we lost everything, my mother and I."
Other winners Monday: Daniel Walker Howe, for history, for "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"; Saul Friedlander, general nonfiction, for "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"; for biography, John Matteson's "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father."
"I wrote my book in a way that is generally accessible to the curious literate reader," Howe said. "And I think that's very important, and I wish more books were written that way."
"It's a special honor because it ties me even more to the country of which I'm now a citizen," said Friedlander, who became a U.S. citizen seven years ago and won the German Booksellers Association's 2007 Peace Prize for his work on documenting the Holocaust.
"I am surprised, grateful, overjoyed — and a little embarrassed to do this with my first book," said Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College in New York City who added that his 14-year-old daughter was an inspiration.
"Not only did I understand parenting better after writing the book, but being a parent helped me to write the book."
Dylan's victory doesn't mean that the Pulitzers have forgotten classical composers. The competitive prize for music was given to David Lang's "The Little Match Girl Passion," which opened last fall at Carnegie Hall, where Dylan has also performed.
"Bob Dylan is the most frequently played artist in my household so the idea that I am honored at the same time as Bob Dylan, that is humbling," Lang told the AP.
Long after most of his contemporaries either died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and release highly regarded CDs, most recently "Modern Times." Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics — even digging through his garbage for clues — since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as "Blowin' in the Wind" made Dylan a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation.
His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences. His memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One," received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature.
According to publisher Simon & Schuster, Dylan is working on a second volume of memoirs. No release date has been set.
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AP Drama Writer Michael Kuchwara, Music Writer Nekesa Moody, and Associated Press writers Josh Hoffner, Douglas J. Rowe and Erin Carlson contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS spelling of 'Blowin' in the Wind.' ) |
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| Sioux |
Interesting accolade for a guy who says he doesn't know what half his lyrics mean anyway....lol
But if they were going to give an honorary Pulitzer to a rock guy, guess it had to be Dylan. |
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| Gazza |
Grammys, Oscars, Kennedy Centre, Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, Polar, Pulitzer..have I missed any?
now if only those Nobel twats can get their act together.
[Edited by Gazza] |
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| pdog |
Way to be, Bob! |
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| Ade |
he deserves the gong, for his radio show, alone |
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| PartyDoll MEG |
This is great news for His Bobness fans.  |
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| Martha |
quote:
Ade wrote:
he deserves the gong, for his radio show, alone
Indeed!!!! It is so incredible.
xxoo,
Martha |
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| glencar |
The Pulitzers are rather passe at this point. But a paltry honor is still an honor, I guess... |
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| Martha |
What does he get? Will it be on stage with his Oscar now? |
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| GotToRollMe |
About fuckin' time! Good for you, Bobaloo! |
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| Gazza |
Dylan wins Pulitzer; Nobel should be next (seriously!)
TUSCALOOSA | When I was a freshman in college in 1966 I wrote the following on the back of one of my poetry class books: "At dawn my lover comes to me/And tells me of her dreams/With no attempts to shovel the glimpse/Into the ditch of what each one means..."
Those are the beginning lines of the last stanza of Bob Dylan's hallucinatory "Gates of Eden," from his 1965 "Bringing It All Back Home" album, which I bought my senior year in high school. It was my first Dylan album and although I didn't know it, was controversial at the time. Tha was because it was Dylan's first venture into real rock and roll -- one side was acoustic, the other electrified -- and the "folkies" who up until that time had been Dylan's most devoted fan base accused him of selling out.
How quaint that old controversy, and others, such as Dylan's embrace of Christianity, recording lush versions of standards, changing the tunes of his songs in concerts and on and on, seem now. This is written in context, of course, of the Pulitzer Prize Dylan was awarded earlier this week for, as the Pulitzer board said, his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power" over nearly half a century of work." Yeah, you rite, is what I say.
Dylan, who has also written books of poetry and an autobiography of questionable veracity, joins jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane in getting a "Special Citation Award" from the Pulitzer Board, so he is in pretty good company.
But if you ask me, I think he should also get the Nobel Prize for literature before his travelling days are done. And I am dead serious about this -- if the Nobel can be given to obscure Egyptian poets and the like, why not a musician who has written some of the most extraordinary verse of our age?
If you don't believe me, go here http://bobdylan.com/songs/ and just browse around.
For sheer ground breaking, draw-dropping power I would recommend starting with the aforementioned "Bringing It all Back Home," which begins with a jarring (and in retrospect, rap-precursor) "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "Johnny's in the basement/Mixing up the medicine/I'm on the pavement/Thinking about the government/The man in the trench coat/Badge out, laid off/Says he's got a bad cough/Wants to get it paid off/Look out kid/It's somethin' you did/God knows when/But you're doin' it again/You better duck down the alley way/Lookin' for a new friend/The man in the coon-skin cap/In the big pen/Wants eleven dollar bills/You only got ten" and the rest of his early "electric period" albums, which include "Highway 61 Revisited" (with the iconic, turn-the-radio-up-every-time-it-comes-on "Like a Rolling Stone") and the two-disc "Blond on Blonde."
Then there was the motorcycle accident, Dylan's retreat to Woodstock, N.Y. (where he recorded the great "Basement Tapes" with The Band, which were not released until years later) and his reemergence in 1968, at the height of psycedlica, with "John Wesley Hardin." The record sounded like a throw back to his earlier "folk" albums and at first had everyone scratching thier heads in bewilderment. But it also hinted at an awakening spirituality in Dylan in songs like "I dreamed I Saw St. Augistine," "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," and "The Wicked Messenger."
It also contained "All Along the Watchtower," in my opinion the only song ever wrested from Dylan's control when Jimi Hendrix covered it (in concert Dylan now plays an amped-up version closer to Hendrix's than his original). I particularily love its mysterious, foreboding quality and it is brief enough to quote here in its entirity:
"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."
"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
The riders and their mission go unexplained, to me a stroke of genius.
Obviously, I can go on and on in my enthusiasm for Dylan (did I mention that "Blood on the Tracks" is in my opinion his first "mature" album and perhaps my favorite and that I really like some of his most recent albums, too?), but every diehrd Dylan fan has their own mental construct of "Bob Dylan" and I won't bore you with any more of mine, save my conclusion that after 47 years of recording, most of the last 20 or so of it spent in constant touring, Dylan has become sui generis, beyond category, beyond analysis, perhapse even beyond understanding and the greatest bard of our time.
Give him the Nobel, damn it!
- Tuscaloosa News 9/4/08
[Edited by Gazza] |
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| PartyDoll MEG |
Thanks for the article, Gaz!
Well said..better than I could have written myself! |
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| Ade |
Chronicles Vol. 2 rumours and UK dates rumours:-
http://www.uncut.co.uk/news/bob_dylan/news/11394
Bob Dylan is at work on the second volume of his autobiography, his publishers Simon & Schuster have confirmed in the wake of his Pulitzer Prize citation this week.
It is understood that Dylan is spending the seven week lay-off between the end of his last American tour and the start of his European tour in May to work on “Chronicles Volume Two”.
No publication date has yet been announced, but there is speculation that it will appear before the end of the year.
The first instalment of Dylan’s planned 3-part autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One”, spent 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was one of five finalists for the American National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004.
"Most people who write about music, they have no idea what it feels like to play it. But with the book I wrote, I thought, ‘The people who are writing reviews of this book, man, they know what the hell they’re talking about.’ It spoils you … they know more about it than me,” said Dylan in an interview with Rolling Stone, shortly after the release of Volume I.
“The reviews of this book, some of ’em almost made me cry—in a good way. I’d never felt that from a music critic ever."
There are also strong but as yet unconfirmed rumours that Dylan will tour the UK in the second half of July, following the completion of 29 dates in mainland Europe.
Dylan was awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Tuesday (April 8) at the annual ceremony hosted by Colombia University in the US.
A Special Citation was awarded to Bob Dylan for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." |
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