I’m a big Bob Dylan fan – I still have my LP and cassette versions of Blood on the Tracks among others, and that was the first CD I ever bought when the technology came out here in Japan – but a Nobel Prize in Literature? Since when is music literature? Unlike non-laureates Keats or Wordsworth, say, Dylan’s lyrics are written to be heard, not seen. These are not poems but lyrics, and that’s not a criticism. You can’t recognize one without the other. I thought the lesson was learned with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1932, which was presented to Of Thee I Sing lyricist Ira Gershwin and the show’s book writers while pointedly leaving out composer George Gershwin. (The Pulitzer people have corrected their ways since.) Those lyrics were not written in a vacuum; they’re inseparable from the music that accompanies them. It’s the same with Dylan, who of course writes both together. A Peace Prize would have made more sense – or maybe Chemistry in honor of the reaction that occurs when music and lyrics gel into one perfect whole. Dylan is amply deserving of something, maybe a new Nobel Prize for Culture. But let’s not put him on the level of Faulkner, any more than we should give Faulkner a prize for lyrics. Continue reading
Category Archives: Politics
Germany and migrants: I See Nussing
I don’t like venturing out of my comfort zone of theater, but a link I added to Facebook some weeks back attracted curious comments that deserve a response. I wasn’t even aware for a few years that “liking” an article left a link on my FB page; I thought I was just giving the writer a pat on the back.
The article in question by the great Mark Steyn was an opinion piece on the recent inflow of migrants into Europe, especially Germany. It noted that nearly 900,000 of the 1.1 million migrants in Germany last year were young males, an astonishing statistic if true.
Doesn’t that age and gender ratio strike anyone as odd? Continue reading
Tonya Pinkins: I’m every black woman
Hilarious: It seems that the actress Tonya Pinkins dropped out of a New York production of the classic Mother Courage because, as she puts it, her “perspective as a Black woman was dismissed in favor of portraying the Black woman, through the filter of the White gaze”. The production, which has a white director, had been reset to the Congo in contemporary times. I don’t know much about the production, or about the Congo for that matter. But from an Asian perspective, I find it funny that Pinkins thinks that because she’s female and black, she has special insight into the feelings of a Congolese woman trapped in a brutal war. Is there some Black gene that makes all black women worldwide think and feel the same way? I wonder if the fictional woman would even think of herself as “black” given that virtually the entire population of her country is the same; surely she would find her identity elsewhere. Continue reading
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