Bob Dylan - Literature, unplugged

Vaibhav Sharma in The Hindu

In the space of two years, the Nobel has shed decades of conservatism, and twice redefined what it considers, and what we must consider, ‘literature’

In 1997, Eric Zorn, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune, advocated for Bob Dylan to be awarded the Nobel Prize. “And though it's likely that snobbery will forever doom the chances of a folk-rock musician to join the roster of past winners that includes such literary giants as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison,” Zorn wrote, “the truth is that, for multi-faceted talent with language and sustained international impact, few if any living writers are Dylan's equal.”

A century earlier, in 1896, when the literature prize’s founding charter was read out from Alfred Nobel’s will, it recommended the award be conferred on the “person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”

Charter from another age

Alfred Nobel’s directive was formed in a time when the nineteenth century forms of the novel and the short story, along with the classical mediums of poetry and drama, constituted the zenith of literary expression. Nobel’s charter could not have imagined how these forms would remain significant and robust, but steadily become inadequate in representing the whole of lived experience in the twentieth century, the most violent in human history.

As the Nobel approached its centenary, around the time of Zorn’s plea to award Dylan the literature prize, it was clear that novels, poems, short stories and plays were not the sole expressions of literary prestige and value, but part of a wider constellation which included nonfiction reportage, narrative history and biography, academic treatises such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and — as acknowledged by Dylan’s award — the great tradition of songwriting, coming of age in the radical tumult of the 1960s.

But, as recently as two years ago, there lingered the sense that the Nobel remained, to its detriment, too faithful to its founding charter and strangely reluctant to recognise the varied art forms that so powerfully enhanced our understanding of the modern age. For every inspired choice, such as J.M. Coetzee or Mo Yan, there was a J.M.G. Le Clézio and a Patrick Modiano, which was evidence of a wearing retreat into a provincial, post-war European vision, one curiously at odds with the epoch being lived by the vast majority of the world’s citizens, of technological innovation, ever-imaginative forms of state terror and modern, industrial forms of violence and devastation.

It seemed the Nobel committee was reluctant to recognise that Europe was no longer the centre of economic and intellectual ferment, that countries such as India and China would shape the destiny of our still-nascent century far more than the Old Continent. Yet in an era of Europe’s rapidly declining significance to the world at large, 15 of the past 20 Laureates (before Dylan) were European. In 2008, in a statement that might have been true five decades previously, Horace Engdahl, the then-permanent secretary of the Nobel committee, said, “Europe is still the centre of the literary world.”

However, awarding the prize to Dylan, and last year to the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, allow us to tentatively suggest that the Nobel’s horizons, at last, may be becoming more expansive and modern.

The prize to Alexievich, a worthy successor to the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, gave a clue to the Nobel committee’s changing priorities. In a piece in the New Yorker, ‘Nonfiction Wins a Nobel,’ the writer Philip Gourevitch quoted from one of Alexievich’s essays in which she declared that “art has failed to understand many things about people.” Alexievich argued that, in our present age, “when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified,” journalistic documentation remained the best way of representing reality, while “art as such often proves impotent.”

Capturing our age

In his piece, Gourevitch narrated another fascinating exchange at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York where Alexievich stated: “I’d like to remember the great Chekhov, and his play ‘The Three Sisters.’ The main character in that play says over and over, ‘Now life is terrible, we live in squalor, but in a hundred years, a hundred years, how beautiful, how fine everything will be.’ And what has happened a hundred years later? We have Chernobyl; we have the World Trade Towers collapsing. It’s a new age in history. What we have experienced now not only goes beyond our knowledge but also exceeds our ability to imagine.”

Alexievich’s prize was, in a sense, the Nobel committee’s acknowledgement of a long-overdue corrective. Dylan’s award furthers that process, as if the Nobel committee was hastily making amends for the decidedly narrow prism with which it viewed the artistic and cultural ferment of the past half-century. In the space of two years, the Nobel seems to have shed decades of conservatism, and twice redefined what it considers — and what we must consider — ‘literature’.

It is also a powerful reinforcement of the oral tradition, the primary method of literary dissemination through the centuries, before the onslaught of print capitalism in the West began relegating it to the margins from the eighteenth century onwards. Salman Rushdie, delighted by Dylan’s prize, told theGuardian: “The frontiers of literature keep widening and it’s exciting that the Nobel prize recognises that.” What a blow for diversity of literary forms that, to access the latest Laureate’s work, we had to go to iTunes instead of Amazon.

Dylan’s award may be something we may never see repeated, for he is a truly singular figure: a prophetic bard whose songs contained the force of immediacy, but were simultaneously universal and timeless. Some of the best music critics of our time, such as Alex Ross and David Hajdu, have written of Dylan’s dexterity and towering influence across genres, which include blues, folk and rock-and-roll. The Nobel committee said they were giving the prize to Dylan as “a great poet in the great English tradition, stretching from Milton and Blake onwards.” Some have even interpreted it as a lofty rebuke to the sleazy, dismaying political climate in the age of Trump.

Of equal relevance to the world of letters at large may be Dylan’s stubborn refusal to become a pamphleteer and an easy vehicle for the partisan political passions of his age. A seer born of the counterculture of the 1950s and ’60s, Dylan yet remained sceptical of the evangelist temper of anti-establishment politics and the constricting nature of political categories, animated by an Orwellian distrust of Utopias and wary of the artistic perils of political allegiance.

‘A song and dance man’
In his farsighted suspicion of all “isms” that ravaged the twentieth century, and in his demurral to be a spokesman for anything at all, Dylan’s life has been a compelling case for an inalienable devotion to the integrity and autonomy of the artist. Perhaps there has been no greater, and simpler, expression of artistic independence than Dylan’s declaration that “I am just a song and dance man.”

No composer or songwriter is likely to win the prize again for a long while, but Dylan’s prize is significant for it heralds the Literature Nobel’s belated transition into the modern age. Zorn, the columnist in the Chicago Tribune, triumphantly noted that nineteen years too late, Dylan had finally got what he deserved. There are more correctives for the prize to make, such as overcoming the still dominant spell of Eurocentrism. But the literature prize, conceived in the nineteenth century, finally seems to be embracing the twenty-first.

Cricket: How to play spin

Sanjay Manjrekar in Cricinfo


Going into this grand home season for Indian Test cricket, many felt that India would find New Zealand the toughest team to beat. As it turned out, the New Zealand spinners were not all that potent and their batsmen did not quite measure up either. In the end it was a clean sweep for India, and with big margins too.

To be fair, you could say New Zealand did the best with what they had. Not once during the course of the three Tests did you get the impression that they were giving anything but 100%.

Their tactics were admirable. Throughout the series, you saw a definite, sensible plan in motion, one based on a sound study of Indian conditions and players. The problem was New Zealand's quality of execution, and it eventually came down to ability. In these conditions, the Indians were just more able, more skilled than New Zealand, and that decides the fate of a contest.

More than their bowling I was disappointed with the New Zealand batting, especially against spin. And this can be said of a few other teams too: the world is not playing spin too well these days.

The first and most basic thought when facing up to spin, especially on a turning pitch, is to try and judge the length of the ball. This has to be the only thought occupying your mind, nothing else.

Is this ball full or short? Depending on the length, you play forward or back. Watching batsmen play spin these days, I don't think enough importance is given to this thought. Maybe other ideas cloud their minds.

There is a chance you will survive on a seaming pitch without moving your feet too much, but on a turning pitch against good spinners, if you are not moving your feet, you have no chance.

The thing is, you can't attack your way out of trouble against spin. We saw this approach predictably fail when Ross Taylor tried it in the final innings of the series.

Reading what is coming out of the hand is not as necessary as it is to judge the length, and depending on it, playing off the front foot or back. Kane Williamson was the best at this for New Zealand.

The idea after that is to get the bat right to the pitch of the ball: even if you can't stretch forward too much to get your foot to the pitch of the ball, you need to get the bat right to where the ball has landed. Mohammad Azharuddin used to do this. He never stretched his front foot too far forward but ensured that the bat was still very close to the pitch of the ball. If you do this, you don't have to worry which way the ball is going to spin.

When you are unable to get the bat to where the ball has pitched, you need to go right back deep inside the batting crease, a la Virat Kohli, and then watch the ball off the pitch - which you should have time to do, since you have gone right back.

Despite your best intentions, there will be many occasions when you err in your judgement of the length and are caught half-forward, not quite to the pitch of the ball. This is when alarm bells must ring in your head, and you must become extremely wary of the ball, like you would with a deadly poisonous snake, for you have given it a chance to strike at you.

You now have to make a small, critical adjustment with just the bat; it's too late to do anything with your feet now. You have to be ready to quickly draw the bat away and not play the ball, open or close the face of the bat or simply change the original position of the bat depending on the behavior of the ball. It's like how a keeper changes his glove position when he is up to the stumps, as opposed to standing back, and there is a deflection off the bat.

When not to the pitch, I found there were far too many New Zealand batsmen offering rigid bats that did not change their original position if there was a change in ball behaviour. They were hoping that the ball would hit the centre of their bats. This is a recipe for disaster.

These limitations of the New Zealand batsmen should take no credit away from R Ashwin, nor should his performance be given less credit because it has come at home.

To start with, this series didn't have rank turners where all a spinner had to do was turn up. The jury is out on how Ashwin will fare overseas, but his returns in favourable conditions are mind-boggling, and his performance in this series has been truly praiseworthy. If a batsman gets 20 hundreds in 39 matches we call it Bradmanesque; what do we call this?

I stumbled on a remarkable difference between Ashwin and Harbhajan Singh with regards to their modes of dismissals.

When Harbhajan was at the 200-wickets mark in his career, he had a total of 47 lbws and bowleds. Ashwin at the same stage had 90, almost twice as many as Harbhajan.

This is no comment on who is better. Harbhajan will have had more bat-pad dismissals than Ashwin. But this is an important reason why Ashwin has a greater strike rate: along with bat-pad dismissals, he gives himself the opportunity to get lbws and bowleds too. He is willing to experiment and find new ways of getting wickets, while Harbhajan was quite one-dimensional and rarely had a plan B.

Finally, it was a delight to see Virat Kohli maturing quickly as a captain, in keeping with his rapid growth as a batsman in international cricket.

This observation does not come because he has just won a Test series; it is more to do with how he has been visibly more patient, when earlier his almost child-like exuberance seemed to get the better of him. The tendency to make frequent field and bowling changes seems to have gone now. Kohli's on-field tactics this series had the perfect blend of attack and defence; not once did it seem like he was over-attacking or ultra-defensive.

His cheerleading to get the crowd to make some noise and back his team up when things were quiet was a nice touch. Why, some fans might come to the ground just to be cheer-led by him.

Kohli was in the game every minute of the series.

Above all, for someone who is very much a modern-day product, in the way he looks and plays the other formats of the game, he showed he cares deeply for the five-day game. And that is a boon in these times for Test cricket.

Don’t call for another referendum – they cause more problems than they solve

Amol Rajan in The Independent


Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.

As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.

This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.

First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather. 

Second, they give excessive influence and airtime to single-issue campaigners and fringe groups who don't belong in, or represent, the mainstream.

Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.

Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.

And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.

It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.

The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.

Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.

Tum Toh Dil Ke Taar Chhed Kar

The Lata/Waheeda version

The Talat/Dev Anand version