{"id":15501,"date":"2016-12-28T07:15:42","date_gmt":"2016-12-28T14:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=15501"},"modified":"2016-12-28T08:15:13","modified_gmt":"2016-12-28T15:15:13","slug":"its-all-right-ma-its-only-snowing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/12\/its-all-right-ma-its-only-snowing\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s all right, Ma, it’s only snowing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"DC\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s not really a Montana Christmas until you have spent part of it on hands and knees in snow and mud, trying to pry something or other loose from the cold claws of winter.<\/p>\n

I knew the holidays had arrived in full when I found myself on Tuesday kneeling on a \u00a0sidewalk in downtown Livingston, trying to extract a hat that a 65 mph gust had blown from my head into a perfectly inaccessible spot under a parked car.<\/p>\n

We weren\u2019t even supposed to be in Livingston. Heading home from Missoula, we had spent Monday night in Butte because we were hungry and it was getting dark and icy. At around noon Tuesday, we were diverted through Livingston because high winds had closed Interstate 90 for seven miles. So there I was, clawing for my hat under a stranger\u2019s car while my wife borrowed a broom from a nearby shop.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere for the holidays?\u201d the cheery store clerk asked. When we explained the situation, she chuckled.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do that on purpose,\u201d she said, a well-aimed joke even if it is probably as old as the automobile.<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t even the first time this Christmas had brought me to my knees. The day before, the car hung up on a snow bank in my daughter\u2019s front yard in Huson. My son-in-law and I spent a couple of hours trying to dig it out before a kindly neighbor, whom we had never met, drove over with his pickup and pulled us loose, taking only a few Christmas cookies as payment. Ah, country living.<\/p>\n

All that crawling around, and even that extra night in Butte, were worth it, of course. We got to spend a few days with Arthur King Philips, our 2-month-old grandson, who has quickly learned to treat his loyal subjects with exactly the proper mix of affection and royal condescension.<\/p>\n

And we spent a large chunk of two long drives listening to 82 songs by the newest winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Most of the songs were on a four CD set<\/a> released in 2012 in honor of Amnesty International\u2019s 50th anniversary. All of the songs, with one exception, are covers; the Nobel Prize winner himself, Bob Dylan, contributed his own version of the album\u2019s title track, \u201cChimes of Freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>The covers, ranging from Dylan\u2019s earliest folk days to his latest mournful ballads, put the focus where it properly belongs for a Nobel Prize winner: on the words. And all I kept thinking was: What took the Nobel committee so long?<\/p>\n

I get the criticism of the award. Literature, by strict definition, is words meant to be read. Expanding the definition to include song lyrics makes it easy to overlook quality writing from authors who have audiences far smaller than musicians do.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, failing to expand the definition would exclude seminal figures like Shakespeare, who has been dead for 400 years, much too old to travel to Stockholm to pick up the award, and Homer, a spoken-word artist who would be even older.<\/p>\n

The restricted definition of literature has led me to Nobel Prize winners I would otherwise have never read, or even heard of, such as 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta M\u00fcller, whose \u201cAtemschaukel\u201d (English title \u201cThe Hunger Angel\u201d) is an extraordinary fictionalized memoir about Germans in Rumania who were forced to work in Soviet labor camps after World War II.<\/p>\n

There are great writers on that Nobel Prize list, and others who might be great, such as Australian writer Patrick White, whose \u201cThe Eye of the Storm\u201d has languished unread on my book shelves for at least a couple of decades.<\/p>\n

But the list of winners also includes Mikhail Sholokhov, whose \u201cAnd Quiet Flows the Don\u201d impressed me so little in college that I never intend to give it another chance. And it includes Hermann Hesse, a writer I first despised when he became a popular counterculture author in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Much of Christmas week, when not crawling around in snow or doting on grandsons, I spent rereading Hesse\u2019s \u201cSteppenwolf.\u201d If it seemed self-indulgent and overblown when I was 19, what chance would it have to impress me when I\u2019m 66? Zero, apparently.<\/p>\n

But Dylan is always worth a long car ride in the snow. Most of his lyrics may not hold up well on paper but some lines do:<\/p>\n

\u201cShe know there\u2019s no success like failure<\/p>\n

And that failure\u2019s no success at all<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018You know, they refused Jesus, too.\u2019<\/p>\n

He said, \u2018You\u2019re not him<\/a>.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe cops don\u2019t need you,<\/p>\n

And man, they expect the same<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhile one who sings with his tongue on fire<\/p>\n

Gargles in the rat race choir<\/p>\n

Bent out of shape from society’s pliers<\/p>\n

Cares not to come up any higher<\/p>\n

But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I could go on and on\u2014eighty-two songs, and I could immediately think of a dozen more that could have been included. More importantly, Dylan wove together a wide strain of American music: folk, rock, pop, gospel and, in later years, even the Great American Songbook. His tastes, and his knowledge of American music, were encyclopedic. He was the sponge from which was wrung much of what we think of as American culture.<\/p>\n

When Walter Taylor recorded \u201cDeal Rag\u201d in 1930, he sang, \u201cDon\u2019t let the deal go down.\u201d In 2006, drawing on a tune made famous by Bing Crosby and using images from the Bible and 19th century poet Henry Timrod, Dylan was able to answer, \u201cI\u2019ll be with you when the deal goes down.\u201d<\/p>\n

That fusion of imagination and style lifted Dylan above all of the other good songwriters into the deserved company of writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner. Dylan wrote some clunkers, but those guys wrote a few, too.<\/p>\n

Creeping at 3 mph down a snow-covered detour in Livingston, I\u2019ll take Dylan over the whole lot of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not really a Montana Christmas until you have spent part of it on hands and knees in snow and mud, trying to pry something or other loose from the cold claws of winter. I knew the holidays had arrived in full when I found myself on Tuesday kneeling on a \u00a0sidewalk in downtown Livingston, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[1108,5319,5318,5317],"class_list":["post-15501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-bob-dylan","tag-herman-hesse","tag-herta-muller","tag-patrick-white","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}