Winds of Change
I know you think I’m going to talk about Bob Dylan – but I’m not – because he’s not. But there is a lot of debris “Blowin’ in the Wind” surrounding the announcement from the Swedish Academy of Dylan’s five decade creative contribution to the world. If you find Dylan’s genre crossover “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” an odd choice for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, you might consider the irony of Alfred Nobel’s premature obituary published in 1888. Mortified by the prospect of being remembered as the merchant of death for his invention of dynamite and profiting from the sale of arms, Nobel decided to bequeath his fortune to the establishment of “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.” Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology and/or Medicine, Literature and Peace. Read More »