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Introduction by GA: The other day I found the following comment under my Predators United article on unz.org. I am not in any position to validate or refute the explanation offered in regard to the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. Whether the story offered here is truthful or not, it seems as if Jewish power (pressure, relentless lobbying, the obsession with anti-Semitism etc.) is gradually becoming a comic act.
schrub says:
I recently heard a rather revealing story about Phillip Roth.
In or 2015 or 2016 the committee that was to chose the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature came under intense pressure to award the prize to the then-ailing Roth since Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded after a recipient’s death. Besides the scheduled time had come to award a Jew the prize.
Committee members absolutely abhorred the idea of Roth getting the award. Several felt that he was merely an extremely parochial and increasingly bigoted Jewish writer rather than an American one. These committee members had so far refused to acquiesce to the pressure that had been mounting for over a decade on them from Jewish groups worldwide to award Roth the prize.
Charges then started being made that the only reason for the refusal to award Roth the prize was because of antisemitism. This charge made many the committee members panic because of the potential effect that this charge might have on their own social standing and careers. A quick solution was sought.
Committee members quickly decided that only the choice of another Jew as the prize winner could neutralize the charge made against them.
These committee members then started looking far and wide for a suitable Jewish substitute.
Initially, their efforts were unsuccessful. Some potential candidates were dismissed as either being lousy writers or too obscure. Others were dismissed because of their active or tacit support of Israeli government’s policies towards the Palestinians.
Oddly enough, others were similarly dismissed from consideration because of their often virulent opposition to Israel’s governmental policies. This was done because it was felt that such a choice could potentially start another controversy and potentially reignite the dangerous charges of antisemitism. A Nobel prize might also give the newly selected writer a platform popularize this or her “dangerous ” beliefs.
One of the committee members suddenly came up with an absolute brainstorm of a candidate in the form of Bob Dylan to be the eventual prize winner. True, he wasn’t really a writer in the conventional sense, just a songwriter. His abbreviated scribbling would never be confused with those of Shakespeare’s or even a Whitman’s.
He had two significant attributes however besides his Jewishness: he was well known and his beliefs regarding current Israeli government policies were unknown if in fact he had any at all.
In a word, he was ideal. After all, who in the younger generation even reads full-length books now. Songsand songwriters like Dylan appeal more to younger people with their increasingly short, action game driven attention spans.
The Nobel Prize committee members were nervous about their choice of Dyaln. Would the public accept their rather bizarre choice.?
It turns out they had no reason to worry.
Leonard Cohen is probably now on the shortlist for a future Nobel prize in literature/song writing.
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“merely an extremely parochial and increasingly bigoted Jewish writer rather than an American one” is a fair assessment of Roth.
Leonard Cohen’s been dead for 3 years.
Literature has always been liberally defined. Bertrand Russell won it as a philosopher.
When will people begin to realize that accusations of anti-Semitism are a praiseworthy compliment.
After all, it’s only leveled at those who point out Jewish misbehavior or hold Jews to the same standard as every other civilized human being…
Sometime ago , there was a old women from the South America selected for the Nobel Price ..She could not read or write..But feminism is winning and conquering all that..A book was ghost written by feminists and hoopla the Nobel prize was promptly awarded…
Hilarious video!
What about another Roth for the Nobel? David Lee Roth. His qualifications for receiving awards are the following. “David Lee Roth lights the Menorah.” – Adam Sandler
I personally think “Ice Cream Man” is a poetic masterpiece. However, the deep meaning of “Shoo Bop” is literary genius.
Also, it is generally agreed by the impartial media that David Lee Roth was a better front man than Sammy Hagar. That warrants another Nobel Prize in a new category. Nobel for Best Lead Singer. Roger Waters will not be considered.
DLR also played a huge role in the intentional shaping of popular culture by covertly promoting sexual liberation as a form of political control. Roth ensured MTV watchers were strong proponents of Hollywood-corrupted morality (aka sex, drugs and rock n’ roll).
Dylan or DLR for a Nobel. Why not? Guys can wear dresses while at the same time show their genitals in “Pride” parades. This proves that Dylan and DLR were successful in their quest for Tikkun Olam.
Cohen’s unnoticed demise
Won’t bar him from winning the Prize.
It’s prestige is now zero;
Why not give it to Nero
For not writing Lord of the Flies ?
Her name’s Rigoberta Menchu;
“a old women” of which this is true:
Her phenomenal “book”
May not merit a look,
But she writes a bit better than you.
Ice cream man was written by John Brim of Chicago Blues fame(and un-fortune).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brim
Churchill won it as a war criminal
Leonard Cohen is dead so if Nobel prizes cannot be awarded to the dead…. He also is strongly rumoured to have written most of Dylan’s most iconic songs.
Ironically he also wrote Dylan’s best songs. I read a very convincing article once about it and came away convinced since it came down to style and literacy and I’m a great and long term fan of both men’s music.
In addition the Cohen fail, Dylan’s name had circulated for years as a potential Nobel recipient. That it come out of left field is clearly a fake detail.
Dylan expressed strong support for the Zionist state, too, in the very early 80’s and certainly has never taken it back. At least one of his sons was bar mitzvah’ed in Israel. So if being a Zionist were disqualifying, Dylan wouldn’t have made the cut.
Israel is the “he” here:
It’s hard to believe you’re a big fan of either if you think their styles are similar. They sure don’t seem that way to me.
Cohen credited the idea of putting his words to music to Dylan, in that he felt that Dylan was expressing deep thoughts in a popular format, with a similarly limited vocal range. Dylan was his example that rock songs could be “serious” art. That’s what he said, anyway.
Dylan had produced maybe ten albums before he met Cohen and just about all his “iconic” songs come from that early period.
There’s a vast body of Dylan bootleg material, outtakes and rehearsals from almost every recording session, that allow one to follow at least some of the stages of composition of a good portion of his songs. He would appear to be mostly doing it by himself.
I predict the Nobel Sanhedrin picks not Dylan or Cohen, but rather Paul Simon. He’s still alive, I believe.
Paul Simon was suggested as the likely author of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” by Miles Mathis, as I recall. I think it’s certainly possible — and Leonard Cohen was theorized as a likely ghostwriter of Dylan lyrics such as Tangled Up In Blue. During the time frames involved in those songs appearing, those hypotheses have the feel of plausibility to me. Yes, we have record of Dylan’s development of these songs, but no evidence to show that he didn’t have lyrics gathered from multiple sources in hand already, when he did all his puttering around in the recording studio.
Paul Simon would be a more popular and less controversial pick than either Leonard Cohen (too intellectually oriented) or Bob Dylan (too many turned off by his vocalizing in certain periods) — and anyway, they already gave the Boob the Legion of Honor (geez).
It is all tabloid gossip, with no substantial facts to back up the claim. That is what GA has become, a tabloid gossip writer who thrives on the downfall of others. Like watching a train wreck.
The most base of human emotions. Joy over the gore of blood and wreckage.
So disgusting. He has become addicted to it.
And this about Atzmon from a Palestinian support group.
How low he must feel what a slight.
I guess he needs to milk the Epstein case for as long as he can.
Atzmon: A nice informational & thought provoking article.
I wish to be positive & helpful here.
I would like to nominate the author of 12 fine books (I could be off by 1 or 2), Alain Soral, to receive the Nobel Prize. He is France’s and Europe’s finest Philosopher, and a courageous defender of Dieudonné. Soral is a proud Patriot and originator of the Equality & Reconciliation Movement.
He also supports the Yellow Vest movement.
Soral might use the $Money that comes with the Prize to pay the fines levelled against him by France’s Puppet Zionist Traitor Government. He might even lend Dieudonné a few Euros.
If my suggestion of awarding the prize to Soral is not heeded by the Nobel Zionist Committee, I nominate myself. I have 1 published book and some articles, a few hundred comments on UNZ and some feisty emails. Furthermore, although I and my family are Christians, I have some relatives who reside in Tel Aviv. I am not proud of this, but if it gets me the prize…
God Bless!
God Bless America!
Durruti
Oh, well. Just so long as it doesn’t go to Paul Simon…
I don’t read fiction anymore, but I’ve heard from my friends whom I trust, that Israeli writer David Grossman is a significant author. More, he’s “progressive”, so that would be a major plus for Swedish Academia.
Roth is too parochial, I agree (although he was, I think, great comic writer). He didn’t get the Nobel not because he was not enough American; his late friend, John Updike, didn’t get it because he was too American. He was just Nobel-unlucky, like Jorge Luis Borges.
As for Dylan, Cohen… nah, that’s not literature. Lyrics of even the best of songs are plainly inferior to real poetry (Yeats, Akhmatova, Rilke, ..).
Dylan also wrote’ Masters Of War’ but never told us just who he thought the masters of war were unlike Percy Shelley,(whose second wife Mary Wolstencraft Shelley, wrote Frankenstein),who spelled out real clearly who perpetrated the Manchester massacre in his poem ‘Mask of Anarchy’. He named names.I`ve always wondered why no rock musicians in the 1960’s or 1970’s ever made a rock opera our of ‘Mask of Anarchy.It’s very ‘sing-able’,even I can sing it. ‘ Mask of Anarchy’ was only published by Mary Shelley many years after Percy’s drowning many years after his death and sometimes I suspect that rhyme may have had something to do with his drowning.
God On Our Side
The Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now, too
Have God on their side
I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side – Bob Dylan,With God on our SIde
http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/anarchy.html
The Mask of Anarchy:
Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.
2
I met Murder on the way–
He had a mask like Castlereagh–
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
3
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight, 10
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
4
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
5
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem, 20
Had their brains knocked out by them.
6
Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.
7
And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
8
Last came Anarchy: he rode 30
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse………
Dear Ms. Taubman,
Have you ever considered stand up comedy ?
I could ask you the same thing, but you are the most incoherent writer on this post.
I like Philip Roth. I don’t see the problem with him getting the Nobel Prize; he’s certainly better than a lot of ‘great’ writers who come to mind.
‘…I’ve heard from my friends whom I trust, that Israeli writer David Grossman is a significant author…’
Yeah — but Leni Riefenstahl was a great film directress, and she didn’t get an Oscar.
Same principle.
You should ask a friend to review your writing, and explain to you how you need to with complete sentence structure so that your thought and or logic can understand.
Your writing is not readable as a logical thought process.
‘You should ask a friend to review your writing, and explain to you how you need to with complete sentence structure so that your thought and or logic can understand.
Your writing is not readable as a logical thought process.’
Keep this up, Fran, and your father is going to have to talk to you when he gets home.
What’s truly “incoherent” is your irrational belief in the impossible “holocau$t’ narrative.
You should be over joyed to know that ‘6M’ of your brethren were not murdered, instead you fantasize that they were.
As they say on the street: ‘That’s some sick shit’.
Your bizarre, hapless debates on the subject can be found here: https://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Fran+Taubman
However Dylan’s choice came about it is a good thing that the Nobel Prize for Literature has been opened up to productions outside the conventional (pale males’ conventions) literary genres.
It is high time the creators of commercials be similarly recognised:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2j-YzZRAA
Or
Or
So did Churchill. Both are bad jokes that mark the power of the Anglo-Zionist Empire.
The Nobel Prize for Literature has been a political hot potato almost since its beginning. And that means it has been a political tool. And that leads to various stories as explanations for certain winners and losers, like the story to which we are responding. Who knows if this one is true, but it is plausible.
This one dressed up a bit with Dylan pissing off a number of the Committee with his acceptance speech could be quit entertaining.
And that may be the most important part of the events: you can bet that a Phillip Roth acceptance speech would have been a semi-PC pile of dung feigning love of the ‘little guy’ while seething from below with contempt for all white ‘little guys’ and all Middle Eastern ‘little guys.’ And we know that Dylan’s speech tells some basic and fundamental truths that are fit for school boys and girls, truths that leftist professors of literature found revolting or comical.
Kissinger won Nobel Peace Prize
It’s wrongheaded to conceive of songwriting as “literature.” Songs are music. They’re made up first and foremost of notes.
Lyrics are part of songs, not the whole thing. People don’t understand music (or have contempt for it as an art form) so they overlook this. But without music, it’s doubtful Bob Dylan would never have achieved as much success being a poet.
Books were not meant to be hummed and songs were not meant to be read. Remove the music and you remove the whole point.
On the other hand words could be written first and then notes could later be written to accompany them and in fact in such a manner new combinations of notes that perhaps had never been written before would be created.
He won it for being Jewish.
Leonard Cohen would have been a better choice. He is more famous internationally and had written award winning novels. Cohen was also dying from cancer. Dead men cannot receive Nobels.
Paul Simon would have been a good compromise. Odds are the committee never heard of him, or thought he was dead.
Personally, I think ABBA should win the Nobel Prize for literature. I find their lyics more meaningful than Dylan’s.
There might be another reason why P. Roth did not get his Nobel prize. His winning was being predicted for many years and many people were betting with bookies on his win. Roth was bad for bookies. There are allegations that some members of the Nobel committee were engaged in betting.
Dylan also speaks, and much more recently & consistently, in the terms of a Christian. It is unlikely that the author of Masters of War and With God On Our Side and License To Kill is a big fan of Zionist theocratic fascism, any more than were Einstein, Arendt, Brandeis, Menuhin …. But it would be decent to let him speak for himself. Also, in this case, to ponder his words: “I just want you to know I can see through your mask.”
Dylan also speaks, and much more recently & consistently, in the terms of a Christian. He deserves to be allowed to speak for himself. It is unlikely that the author of Masters of War and With God On Our Side and License To Kill is a big fan of Zionist theocratic fascism, any more than were Einstein, Arendt, Brandeis, Menuhin …. But it would be decent to let him speak for himself. Also, in this case, to ponder his words: “I just want you to know I can see through your mask.”
Too bad that Dylan could not have been replaced by Phil Ochs, whose lyrics and talents really were as brilliant as Dylan fancied that is own were. Phil Ochs tho’ was not a candidate first of all because he’s dead, but second of all because politics for him was dead serious, and too important to be left to politicians. Bob Dylan posed as a leftist because it went with his chosen audience and persona. He told Phil Ochs that “politics is bullsh*t.” His sixties-era substitution of novelty for genius and a peculiarly portentious but ultimately empty beat poetry for authentic folk sensibility area good fit to the opportunistic choices of the Nobel committee. But – as others rightly point out – the posing and opportunism of the Nobel committee are nothing at all new-
he produced books … however as an analytical philosopher Russel fitted with Jerusalem…
Gilad, thanks for this. We are periodically told how important the Jews are to our society, their very advanced contributions, and as proof, the disproportionately high number of Nobel prize winners among them. You have now let the cat out of the bag on that point. Again, thanks.
There may be something to it. Jorge Luis Borges was also an “eternal candidate”.
Alright, I wrote this 2-3 times before, but let’s do it again. Here are people, acknowledged great writers, who didn’t get the Nobel for literature (I left out Kafka because he died too early). Here they are, from supreme writers to very good ones. I consider some of those authors supreme (Tolstoy, Proust), while I don’t care at all for Nabokov, who I think is vastly overrated. But, this is not my list, just these are writers global literary community acknowledges as significant or sometimes “great”:
Anton Chekhov
Leo Tolstoy
Emile Zola
Henrik Ibsen
August Strindberg
Joseph Conrad
Henry James
Hugo Hofmannstahl
Karl Kraus
Edith Wharton
D.H. Lawrence
James Joyce
Marcel Proust
Alfred Doeblin
Hermann Broch
Robert Musil
R.M. Rilke
Robert Walser
Theodore Dreiser
Franz Werfel
Joseph Roth (yes, this is the Roth)
E.M. Forster
Virginia Woolf
Anna Akhmatova
Ezra Pound
Robert Frost
Sergei Yesenin
Italo Svevo
Pio Baroja
Italo Calvino
Federico G. Lorca
Jorge Luis Borges
Giovanni Verga
Graham Greene
Vladimir Mayakovsky (his last words before suicide, reportedly: Don’t shoot, comrades!)
Yuri Olesha
Isaac Babel
Leonid Leonov
Marguerite Yourcenar
Vladimir Nabokov
Joseph Heller
Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz
Stanislaw Dygat
Yukio Mishima
Katherine Ann Porter
Thomas Bernhard
….
This partial lists of didnts is surely more impressive than those of dids.
I totally agree with your point, but even if the words are written first, the entire package is “music,” so it’s not literature and the Nobel people are reaching.
I’ll take it a step past that: It’s still music even if it’s a talking blues or rap song, where the words are the point and the music is minimal. This is what the Nobel committee failed to understand. And in doing that they showed they don’t get music as a genre or what constitutes it.
As Frank Zappa once wrote, the frame is the thing. You can take anything from a bunch of words to a bunch of noises to a baby crying, and if you make a recording and label it music, it’s music. Since nearly everything Dylan wrote was songs, that’s music.
He did write at least one book of “prose poetry” called “Tarantula,” which is obscure for a reason. Spin Magazine did an article mocking its most ridiculous sentences. If the Nobel committee had judged him by this and this alone, they might have recommend he take a remedial English course.
I think this comment needs more explanation, Gilad. “Russel fitted with Jerusalem” is meaningless to me, and just possibly I’m not the dumbest visitor to UR. So, please, explain.
A philosopher writes: lays out, communicates; explains his philosophy that way. Bertrand Russell wrote many books, did it because he was a philosopher, did it very skilfully, and was not lacking in brilliance. To make the abstruse readable is already literary brilliance.
How is Russell a bad joke? Okay, he was a member of the Brit aristocracy and Brit means Bad, but he was hugely opposed to Brit-land (or island or whatever) going into WWI and went to prison for it.
To me he was a good man. So, please help me to understand how and why he was a “bad joke”.
And Ken52, if Russell’s literary work was magnificent he won it for that, not for philosophy. If he was writing philosophy, technical not fiction, that makes his literature even more brilliant. Your example doesn’t show that literature is “liberally defined” in the Nobel Prize world.
One much greater philosopher, Henri Bergson, got Nobel. He was also a great stylist (so they say). But, considering that some philosophers got Nobel (Bergson, Russel), and historians too (Mommsen, Churchill) ..I say, this is a mistake. Imaginative literature is not philosophy or history. Anyway, list of those who got it is, apart from a few authors (Mann, Faulkner,…) far from impressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature
Menchu won the Peace Prize, not Literature.
Fran Taubman, I think yours is a “tongue in cheek” comment, if not, bite forcefully and sever that lying tongue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature
Intellectual value?
Thing is, from 19th & 20th C philosophy has been completely divorced from imaginative literature. In olden times, you could count Plato as a philosopher, but also some of his dialogs (Apologia, Symposion,..) possess high artistic value. The same with French philosophes of the 18th C (Voltaire, Diderot), as well as with historians like Gibbon.
So, when you read a history of Greek & Roman literature, you’ll encounter Heraclitus, Plato, Marcus Aurelius …plus one Aristotle’s work, Poetics. But if you read overview of 20th C literature, you won’t find significant philosophers among authors (Whitehead, Scheler, Spengler, Wittgenstein, Russell, Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, Bergson, Carnap, Dewey ..).
True, there are literary “philosophers” like Unamuno, Sartre and Camus, but they wrote novels, dramas & essays on life, like Montaigne or Emerson. That’s why, from older writers, Montaigne belongs to literature & not to philosophy proper. Montaigne, Unamuno, even Freud in his major works- those are wisdom writers, but not professional philosophers (let alone scientists).
Let me introduce another conspiracy here. This involves Frank Zappa and many rock musicians. Zappa was an atrocious musician but I did admire him for his stance on free speech.
http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/inside-the-lc-the-strange-but-mostly-true-story-of-laurel-canyon-and-the-birth-of-the-hippie-generation-part-v/
Are we living in simulation or has the reality been subverted by some advanced technology?
The most important Western leaders are apparently psychopaths and are shown to be compromised by blackmail by this “Epstein” case.
Though the ‘Ye Olde Oded Yinion Plan” has failed for now, if the enablers and handlers are not convicted and jailed, we will be strumming our air guitars forever.
This is a huge gang, maybe a million strong that controls all the major nodes of power and even the Nobel Prize committee fears them.
The Sicilian mafia is a schoolyard gang compared to the Kosher Nostra.
Many thanks for the Phil Ochs videos.
As far as I know Russell’s literary work is not noticeably magnificent, hence the other commenter calling his winning the prize a bad joke.
Some anecdotes about Russell: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/hewasreadingapaper.htm
Comedian Own Benjamin does a 10 minute parody and critique of Dylan at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXiI5Qfxa9I .
Owen, a Catholic, implies Dylan made a deal with the devil.
That is pretty interesting. *proceeds to cook eggs*
Central, not South, American (Guatemala.)
Think of Ruben Carter as Job. (Except for the small detail that he was really guilty.)
Whatever reason was behind the award going to Dylan, he was one of the artistic giants of the 20th century.
Dylan continues to release timely work at the top of his late form — Tempest is the latest and best of it.
And you didn’t answer my “fitted with Jerusalem” question.
I listened to Dylan’s music for decades. But I became disillusioned because of his inconsistent politics.
1. He strongly opposed the Vietnam War, which I think was the right move.
2. He strongly supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, writing “Neighborhood Bully” which was clearly in defense of Israel but played coy when interviewers tried to pin him down.
3. He was silent, as far as I know, about the US invasion of Iraq.
He criticizes American foreign policy no end–“With God on Our Side,” for example, but supports the same actions when done by Israel or when Israel benefits. Americans are murderous monsters. Israelis are acting in righteous self-defense.
Just no.
I didn’t answer because I don’t know what it means.
Are you thinking of Rigoberto Menchu? After all these years, I still remember her name. Yes, she was illiterate (or very nearly so, not that there’s anything wrong with that), but lefty feminists slapped her name on some unreadable screed and shoved her forward for us to admire. I think she was an indigenous Guatemalan; she wore brightly colored scarves and a jaunty straw boater. All in all, a very entertaining episode.