Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate

By David Remnick, The New Yorker

13 October 16

od is a colossal joker, isn’t She?

We went to bed last night having learned that the Man Who Will Not Go Away was, according to the Times, no mere purveyor of “locker-room talk”; no, he has been, in fact, true to his own boasts, a man of vile action. The Times report was the latest detail, the latest brushstroke, in the ever-darkening portrait of an American grotesque.

Then came the news, early this morning, that Bob Dylan, one of the best among us, a glory of the country and of the language, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ring them bells! What an astonishing and unambiguously wonderful thing! There are novelists who still should win (yes, Mr. Roth, that list begins with you), and there are many others who should have won (Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Auden, Levi, Achebe, Borges, Baldwin . . . where to stop?), but, for all the foibles of the prize and its selection committee, can we just bask for a little while in this one? The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the nose.

And please: let’s not torture ourselves with any gyrations about genre and the holy notion of literature to justify the choice of Dylan; there’s no need to remind anyone that, oh, yes, he has also written books, proper ones (the wild and elusive “Tarantula,” the superb memoir “Chronicles: Volume One”). The songs—an immense and still-evolving collected work—are the thing, and Dylan’s lexicon, his primary influence, is the history of song, from the Greeks to the psalmists, from the Elizabethans to the varied traditions of the United States and beyond: the blues; hillbilly music; the American Songbook of Berlin, Gershwin, and Porter; folk songs; early rock and roll. Over time, Dylan has been a spiritual seeker—and his well-known excursions into various religious traditions, from evangelical Christianity to Chabad, are in his work as well—but his foundation is song, lyric combined with music, and the Nobel committee was right to discount the objections to that tradition as literature. Sappho and Homer would approve.

To keep dull explanation at bay and to maintain the distance of mystery, Dylan has spent six decades giving interviews that often deflect more than they explain—it’s part of the allure, the fun of Dylan fandom to follow this stuff—but there have been many other times when he has spoken for himself in the clearest way possible. He did so last year when accepting an award from MusiCares, a charity that helps musicians in need:

The first record I ever purchased was a compilation called “The Best of ’66.” I must have bought it for “Help!” and “Cloudy,” but the song that stuck was “I Want You”:

How those lyrics and the Nashville-inflected music of that record—“that wild mercury sound,” Dylan called the recordings, on “Blonde on Blonde”—must have struck a seven-year-old is something that I would rather not contemplate. Who can remember? All I can tell you is that song was all I had to hear and that I was lost, and remain happily lost, in Dylan’s musical and lyrical world. It gave me most of everything: a connection to something magical and mysterious and human, connections to countless other artists. Somewhere along the way, if you’re very young and lucky, something, or someone, maybe an artist, points you in some direction, gives you a hint of where things are to be found and seen and listened to. Dylan’s records led me to so many other things of value: the Modernists and the Beats, the early music he incorporated into his own, a general sense of freedom and possibility. It has been that way for millions of others, and that’s part of what the Nobel honors.

But, look, there’s no way to celebrate this properly in a no-time-at-all hot take. The literature on Dylan is vast—there’s great work to be read on him by Ellen Willis, Alex Ross, Robert Shelton, Sean Wilentz, Greil Marcus, Sam Shepard, Christopher Ricks, David Hajdu—but the best way to celebrate today is the obvious way to celebrate: by listening. Here are a few performances of particular intensity over the years. Listen and celebrate:

1. At twenty-two, singing the tradition: “Man of Constant Sorrow.”


2. At Newport, 1964, “Mr. Tambourine Man.”


3. And “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”


4. The greatest tour ever: “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Dylan and The Band.


5. Part Two: “Like a Rolling Stone.”


6. “Tangled Up in Blue,” live from the Rolling Thunder tour, 1975.


7. “Gospel Bob,” Toronto, 1980.


8. Last week, “High Water,” in Indio, California, at the “Oldchella” festival.


9. For specialists, perhaps: The Rome Interview.

If Only Women Voted, Trump Would Lose. We Need Men on Our Side

By Jessica Valenti, Guardian UK

13 October 16

Can America’s kind and decent men please step up their game and help avoid electing a sexist monster?

f only men voted in the upcoming presidential election, Donald Trump - a man who brags about sexually assaulting women and deliberately walked in on naked teenage pageant contestants – would be our president. And here it was women who had to spend years convincing the country we weren’t too stupid to vote!

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver released a map this week showing Trump’s men-only win alongside a map of a Hillary Clinton landslide should only women vote. In that scenario, Silver estimates Clinton would take the presidency with 458 electoral votes, a landslide victory.

Fantasy voting maps aside, the gender gap in November will be historic: One current poll shows Clinton leading among women by a massive 33 points, and more than 68% of white women with a college education voting for her (a group that Mitt Romney won in 2012).

If there was ever an election that was a referendum on gender in America, this is it. But that doesn’t mean the moment is just about women.

In the wake of tapes that some still characterize as “locker room talk,” right now is an opportunity for undecided male voters to demonstrate that they are better than all this. That, no, not all men talk about sexually assaulting women and laugh. That it is not normal male behavior to treat women as if we were no more than a collection of sexualized body parts. And that voting trends aside, they won’t vote for someone who talks like it is normal.

Because the claim that “all men” when out of earshot talk this way is certainly offensive to women, but it also deeply underestimates men and their morality. But for Trump to bounce back from the tape, his campaign needs to send the message that what he did was not horrific or abnormal, just regrettable and mundane.

That’s why Rudy Giuliani has made the media rounds claiming that this is just the way men talk. And why, in a CNN interview, Ben Carson said, “that kind of banter goes around all the time.” Even when pressed about how the language Trump used described a sexual assault, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions said, “that’s a stretch,” and RNC communications director Sean Spicer said, “I’m not a lawyer.”

Perhaps most appallingly, when MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked Texas Rep Blake Farenthold whether he’d pull support from Trump if he was to say, “I like raping women,” Farenthold replied, “I’d consider it.”

This is cowardice. Are women really so disposable to these men – not just as “wives, mothers and daughters,” but as people – that they would abandon all sense of morality in favor of allegiance to a monster?

Women on the left are not necessarily shocked by this behavior from the GOP – their policies enshrine a basic disrespect for women’s bodies and autonomy.

But now conservative women are feeling fed up. In a scathing series of tweets, for example, one Republican woman blasted the men in her party who are still supporting Trump. She noted how conservative women have defending Republican men from sexism claims for years. “I fought on behalf of my principles while other women told me I hated my own sex,” she wrote. “Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out?”

“You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go.”

It cannot be up to just women – whether by our voices or our votes – to end this madness. Men need to step up. The white male voters who tend to vote Republican need to look at that map of red and feel ashamed. Women will likely be the ones who stave off armageddon this time, but we sure would like some company.