BOB DYLAN: And the Nobel Prize for Literature

The prizes awarded to Bob Dylan include an Oscar, a Golden Globe award, a number of Grammy awards, the Pulitzer Prize, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and now the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Yet Bob Dylan understands more than most what such awards mean: very little.  Since the announcement, Dylan has made no public statement regarding the award.  Nor has there been any acknowledgement that Dylan will attend the Nobel ceremony.   Apparently, this is causing dismay.

The committee referred to Dylan as having “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”  With the announcement of Dylan’s name as winner, you could hear gasps in the audience.  A small number of authors also took umbrage – probably because they did not receive the award.  Some snubbed had unkind words about Dylan.  Others seem to feel providing the award to someone so popular is beneath the dignity of the Nobel Prize committee. 

I suppose some history of the Nobel Prize for Literature is necessary.  Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, purportedly created the Nobel Prize out of sense of guilt due to his profiting from the sales of arms.  In his will, he bequeathed his fortune to finance the Nobel committee.  So far as literature goes, members select the award on an annual basis.  The committee includes professors of literature, members of various literary societies, former winners of the prize, and presidents of various writing organizations.  The committee probably doesn’t include any ditch diggers.

The first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Sully Prudhomme, a French poet, in 1901. Next we had Theodor Mommsen from Germany, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson of Norway, Frédéric Mistral of France, José Echegaray of Spain, Henryk Sienkiewicz of Poland and Giosuè Carducci of Italy.  We can forgive even literary professors for being unfamiliar with these authors. The first memorable writer to receive the award was Rudyard Kipling in 1907, and he was likely controversial enough for the committee to then not select any other winners that were household names prior to World War I.

There were some fairly well known authors who did not receive the award, however.  This would include Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Admittedly, some of these writers died too young to ever win the award.  Still, these were deserving authors who we will long remember.  In other words, the Nobel Prize committee was often wrong.

Like most committees, the Nobel committee from the start was afraid to generate controversy.  Individual critics, on the other hand, are sometimes very contentious.  And because committees make so many compromises, the selections by the Nobel committee were often uninteresting.  Some of its better choices only came about following criticism that the committee needed to expand its horizons.  Even in recent years, the committee could not bring itself to award Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, or Allen Ginsberg the Nobel Prize – almost certainly rejected because of the controversial nature of their works.  Cormac McCarthy is a living writer who may still receive the award, but time is running out for him as well.

So that brings us back to Bob Dylan – the songwriter from Hibbing (in the heart of Minnesota’s Iron Range) who many continue to accuse of being unable to sing.  One Iron Range writer had fun with Dylan’s critics: “To those on the Iron Range that still might not appreciate Dylan, they should know that the Nobel Prize is the Stanley Cup of literature.”  (For those who do not understand the joke, the United States Hockey Hall of Fame is in Eveleth, Minnesota, which is about 25 miles away from Hibbing and also in the heart of the Iron Range.)

While in the end it really shouldn’t matter, there certainly could be a lot worse choices for this award.  Dylan has made a number of controversial stands – some probably wrongheaded.  Yet he kept himself almost always non-partisan and never voiced support for any politician.  Whether you like or dislike his songs, he certainly had a personal impact on many individuals that many writers who won the Nobel Prize never did.  Unlike so many recipients of the award, Dylan’s reach goes far beyond just those college students or professors whose greatest interest in an artist is the kind of treatise they can write about the artist.

© Robert S. Miller 2016

October 26, 2016

THE JUNGLE BOOK (2016): Third Disney Remake

Rudyard Kipling’s classic children stories contained in The Jungle Book was first filmed as a cartoon by Disney in 1967, then in 1994, and finally into a more updated animated version in 2016.  Though the latest version comes closest to capturing the spirit of the stories as Kipling envisioned them, this still is little different from the previous films.

Disney did try to make a production out of this 2016 version of The Jungle Book.  With an estimated budget of $175 million, The Jungle Book provides a spectacular visual viewing.  (Despite the amazing scenery depicted throughout the movie, the moviemakers apparently filmed The Jungle Book in some Los Angeles warehouse.)  Also, Disney did not hold back on the casting.  The voices of the characters include Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Walken, and Garry Shandling among others.  Director Jon Favreau and the producers of the film were also wise enough to keep the movie to 106 minutes to keep the interest of young viewers.  Bill Murray and Christopher Walken also provide some good comic relief as the film may otherwise be a bit too dark for those only familiar with the earlier Disney versions.

Mowgli (Neel Sethi – the only live actor shown on the screen) is a young boy raised by wolves in the jungle, befriended by a bear named Baloo (Bill Murray), and counseled by a wise panther named Bagheera (Ben Kingsley).  What otherwise would be paradise for Mowgli is threatened by his enemy, a tiger named Shere Khan (Idris Elba), who disdains any man entering the jungle.  Attempts by Bagheera to bring Mowgli back to a village inhabited by humans are unsuccessful.  Mowgli runs into several adventures where he is put under the spell of a cobra (Scarlett Johansson), temporarily kidnapped by a large orangutan called Louie (Christopher Walken), and eventually returns to his home where the wolves live.  Mowgli eventually gets Shere Khan to follow up into a tree where a branch snaps and the tiger falls to his death.  Mowgli is then once again free to run with the wolves.

At least two critics I’ve read stated that Disney wished to avoid controversy by leaving out Kipling’s colonialist message.   Unlike the Kipling stories, Mowgli never returns to civilization in the film.  This would likely be too complex of a twist to be contained within such a short film – even if Disney did not give Kipling intent in writing the stories a second thought.  In the Disney versions, the jungle is not such a terrible place for a young boy to live.  In the Kipling version, failure to abide by the rules of the jungle, which would be almost impossible for even a boy like Mowgli to follow, would lead to almost certain death.

Though it is understandable leaving out Mowgli’s return to society, since the intent of the movie is to be charming rather than compelling, the film ultimately is little different than the cartoon version filmed almost fifty years ago.  One only has to consider all of the sequels and remakes made today in Hollywood to understand how moviemakers wish to bring in more dollars.  And so while The Jungle Book is momentarily entertaining, we will probably forget about the movie until Disney attempts to create another version with even more updated visuals.

August 31, 2016

© Robert S. Miller 2016

ELI WEISEL: Plight of a Gentle Jew

When Eli Weisel died on July 2, it was astonishing to discover he lived to be 87-years-old.  By all probability, he should have been dead in 1944.  I also felt some shame as I had not read or thought about the author and holocaust survivor in quite a few years.  I had read Night when I was in college and was jarred by almost every sentence in the memoir.  In this book barely more than 100 pages long, Weisel speaks about his recollections of Auschwitz.  Much more personally, he speaks about the death of his mother and sister and, at greater length, the murder of his father that he was present to witness.

Night is not merely a depiction of the horrors or Auschwitz.  Weisel devotes much of the book towards how his experienced impacted his religious beliefs.  Some of the most moving pages of Night take place in the years before Weisel even knew Auschwitz existed.  During his early teenage years, Weisel sought instruction on the Cabal, and was mentored by an eccentric teacher who prayed chiefly in order to learn how to pray.  Weisel sought such instruction because – deeply sensitive as he was – he knew that the organized Jewish faith was not enough to satisfy his mystical cravings.  

It was this same teacher, by the way, who was first to warn the small community about the manner in which Jews were treated in Nazi-occupied territory.  A firsthand observer of a slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, Weisel’s teacher faced mockery in his community who thought he was mad.  No one knew how truthfully he spoke until the trains entered Auschwitz. And it was what Weisel saw at Auschwitz that made him declare: “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.  Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.  Never.”

While struggling with my own religious beliefs during my college years, this was in great deal a pose to demonstrate my intellectual independence.  Weisel struggled because of his inability to come to terms with what he saw in the Nazi concentration camps.  If one ended with what Weisel communicated in Night, you would assume Weisel no longer believed in God.  Yet whatever happened in the intervening years, Weisel later stated that belief in God was a continual necessity for otherwise one would cease to exist.

I do not feel I am in the position to question anyone who had seen such things regarding his inability to believe in God, nor his finding religious significance in what he had seen.  So I spent years trying to reconcile the Weisel making his statement about the death of God and his later statements about his belief.

Weisel did engage in political controversy long after he became famous as a writer.  He was a strong advocate of Israel and thought such a nation entirely necessary because of the manner that so many countries abandoned the Jews before and during World War II.  He begged President Ronald Reagan to not visit the Bitburg cemetery in 1985 because buried there were members of the SS.   Reagan did visit the cemetery after making the statement that the Nazi officers buried there were also victims.  However, Reagan did change his itinerary by also visiting the Bergen-Belsen concentration site.  Weisel was also firmly opposed to providing Iran any sort of opportunity to develop nuclear devices.

Disagreeing with Weisel over such issues proves almost as difficult as disagreeing with him over his statements about religious beliefs.  The problem in confronting Weisel is that you had in one man a holocaust survivor plagued by guilt, an author and intellectual, whose ideas sometimes appeared to be contradictory, and a decent man who was a truly deserving award winner of the Nobel Prize.

With his passing, we are coming towards the end of holocaust survivors who can speak about their experiences.  Sadly, such lessons do not appear adequately learned by most of us, and we may be in danger of raising a new generation who thinks little more about the lessons of the holocaust than they will about the Spanish Inquisition – which they already probably know little to nothing about.

I wish I had come across Night in some other setting than a college class.  It is a book that more individuals should seek to read on their own in the privacy of their homes where the lessons can be truly absorbed.

July 31, 2016

© Robert S. Miller 2016

MUHAMMAD ALI: 1944-2016

If he didn’t rule boxing, Muhammad Ali at least dominated the conversation regarding the sport for twenty years.  When it came to conversation, other fighters had little else to say.  As great as his boxing skills were, we won’t remember him for this alone.  What made him probably the most famous boxer in history was the manner in which he inserted himself into popular culture through his boasting, his conversion to Islam, the changing of his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, and his refusal of induction to the Vietnam draft.

He called himself the greatest, but in later years he admitted that he really didn’t mean it.  Ali actually picked this gimmick up from watching the professional wrestler, Gorgeous George.  The highlights of his career included his defeating Sonny Liston and later George Foreman – both holders of the heavyweight championship at the time of these fights and viewed as being almost invincible.  Ali actually defeated Liston twice, but the second fight ended so controversially that it’s difficult to know what credit Ali should receive.  But from winning the gold medal in the 1960 Olympics to revenging his defeat against Leon Spinks in 1978, there were many moments of brilliance during his fighting career.

Ali knocked out Archie Moore in four rounds.  He twice defeated former champion, Floyd Patterson.  Even late in his career he managed to outbox Ernie Shavers, one of the hardest punchers in heavyweight history.  And no one will ever forget the three fights he had with Joe Frazier – the last in Manila and probably one of the greatest fights of the 20^th Century.

Yet with his dazzling speed and his remarkable ability to slip punches thrown at his face, we forget that he had his awkward moments in the ring.  Henry Cooper knocked the then 21-year-old Cassius Clay down, and that fight may very well have ended in a knockout if not for the delay tactics of Ali’s corner man, Angelo Dundee.  Ali did have trouble with a number of lesser fighters like Oscar Bonavena, Ron Lyle and Jimmy Young.  And while he fought both Ken Norton and Joe Frazier three times, it’s arguable that both of these opponents actually got the better of Ali overall in these fights.

It’s obvious now that Ali’s greatest mistake was staying around the boxing ring too long.  Like Jim Jeffries and Joe Louis, he had to see if he could make that one last comeback against a superior foe.  Larry Holmes, whose boxing skills were probably as great as Ali’s when Ali was in his prime, won by TKO over Ali in ten rounds, and it was a fight that many of us now wish had never happened.  This would probably include Holmes who was in tears after the fight for inflicting so much damage upon his hero.  (Holmes went on to make a similar mistake when he attempted a comeback fight against Mike Tyson.)  Ali still did not learn his lesson and tried to fight one more time in a losing effort to a boxer named Trevor Berbick.

We will never know how much more there would be to say about Ali’s boxing career if he had not lost three years of his boxing career due to his refusal to serve as a soldier.  The boxing world stripped Ali of his championship.  He then had to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to unanimously rule that he was certifiably a conscientious objector.  Only then could he again fight.  Whatever else we can say about Ali’s judgment, he at least did not flee the country and he risked jail time rather than serve in what he called an unjust war. Ali stated in his own defense: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”

Yet just like during his boxing career, we forget that Ali was not always the perfect public personality.  In fact, at times the monologues could be grating and extremely self-righteous.  Ali seemed most comfortable when he was the center of attention, and only did he during his later years seem to get past his own narcissism.

Ali said many unflattering things about his greatest rival, Joe Frazier.  Ali went so far as to call Frazier an “Uncle Tom” – a slight that is almost unforgivable considering where Frazier came from.  Ali directed this remark at a fighter who came up in much worse circumstances than Ali ever did.  Frazier, the son of a sharecropper, grew up in poverty.  Frazier gave Ali money during the time Ali could not fight.  When defeating Ali for the first time in his professional career, Frazier earned the victory and deserved respect.

Time tends to make us forget.  I recall seeing Ali on the television screen for almost as long as I have been alive.  As kids, we debated about whom would win: Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali against almost whoever else he was fighting.  Many times we hoped Ali would come out on the losing end, but that almost never happened.

Ali outlasted his opponents and the negative press.  Many sportswriters now rate Ali as the greatest heavyweight fighter in history.  Muhammad Ali, someone with little formal education, has received honors from Presidents and other world leaders.  Ali as a fighter and as a public figure endured the punishment inflicted upon him and perhaps this is where Ali’s greatness lies.  He never felt sorry for himself, and never criticized the very sport that likely contributed to his Parkinson’s disease.  Unlike the critics of boxing, he understood that he would never have had the fame and celebrity he did without his great boxing skills.  And so he took the almost 30,000 punches to the face while participating in the sport that he loved.

In the future, we will mostly read about other great fighters in the record books.  Ali’s name will show up in a large number of history books.

June 18, 2016

© Robert S. Miller 2016