Things have changed: Bob Dylan, Nobel savage

Studs Terkel: Some will say: listen to Bob Dylan, he’s talking street mountain talk now, though he’s a literate man, see.
Bob Dylan: [Laughs] I don’t think I am.
Terkel: How do you answer that
when they say it?
Dylan: I got no answer. If they want to think I’m literate, it’s okay by me.
— Interview, 1963, from And They All Sang

In a welcome break from election trauma, the usual Trump v. Clinton opining across my social-media feeds has been balanced this week by a different argument: “It’s high time Bob Dylan won the Nobel” v. “It’s a travesty Bob Dylan won the Nobel.”

Even amid my curation of friends and followers — heavily weighted as each set is with fellow folks and folkies in the orbit of the Woody Guthrie Center and that same city's new Bob Dylan Archive — the split has been nearly half and half. Like the presidential polls, such overall ambivalence is surprising, particularly because this particular box of Pandora’s has been wide open for some time. What’s been especially astonishing to me, anyway, is the vehemence with which some fans — of literature, not necessarily of Bob — cling to an outmoded compartmentalization of mediated experience.

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