AND NOW ANOTHER CONTROVERSY REVISITED

"Please God no  -  don't give Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize in Literature". This comes from a blog post by Chauncey Mabe here. Needless to say there are a number of agitated comments underneath his piece.

Chauncey Mabe sounds like an anagram to me. Possibly of Abeyance Chum or Acme Hyena Cub.

Thanks to Andrew Muir for pointing me to Mr. Mabe's posting.

My thoughts are with Gordon Ball at this time. Here's his entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (the highlighted sentences are those added for the updated paperback edition):

Ball, Gordon [1944 - ]

Gordon Victor Ball Jr., born Paterson, New Jersey, on December 30, 1944, is an underground filmmaker turned Colonel and Professor of Literature at the Virginia Military Institute, and is the man who has nominated Dylan for the Nobel Prize for Literature annually since 1996.

            He first took an interest in Dylan’s work in 1965, but his first published article about it was a review of Renaldo & Clara. Some early listenings to Dylan are recounted in his book ’66 Frames: A Memoir, published in 1999.

            In 1968 he was hired as ALLEN GINSBERG’s farm manager, later editing the poet’s early writings. His book Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He wrote Ginsberg’s entry in the Encyclopaedia of American Literature and JACK KEROUAC’s entry for the Dictionary of American Biography. At the Caen University Dylan Colloquium of March 2005 he delivered a paper on ‘Dylan and the Nobel’.

            GREIL MARCUS probably speaks for many when, asked if he thinks Dylan will ‘ever get the Nobel Prize for Literature’, replies: ‘I hope not. There are thousands of novelists more deserving than he is. It’s a prize for literature; he’s a songwriter, he’s a singer, he’s a performer. Anyway, Bob Dylan’s won lots of awards, he doesn’t need this one. There are plenty of people who need the money, need the readers.’

            Gordon Ball remains undeterred. In March 2007 he was a valuable contributor to the Dylan Symposium at the University of Minnesota, and an enthusiastic attendee on the pre-conference bus tour to Hibbing.

[Gordon Ball: ‘Review Notes and a Community Proposal’, North Carolina Anvil vol.12, no.567, Durham NC, 5 May 1978, p.8; ’66 Frames: A Memoir, Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 1999; Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Greil Marcus: interviewed by Thomas Storch, Isis no.122, Bedworth UK, Sep-Oct 2005, pp.47-49. Bob Dylan Symposium, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 25-27 Mar, 2007; Hibbing bus tour 24 Mar.]