The Dynamite Genius of Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize Committee, Dynamic Connection Between Nobel and Dylan: What is literature? Who’s asking? All of a sudden, everyone is. And the point is, it is Everyone. The Odyssey was sung. We teach it today as literature. When poets take to the stage rather than the page: our show today considers the case for Dylan’s music as literature as old as the hills.

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Criticism is said to have killed an enthusiastic diva and John Keats and been dead wrong (and snarky) about . . . well, name your favorite—Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, Henry Miller, we love these stories of not the last laugh but the continuing and eternal comedy of immortal life, the poet’s respect for the Truth and Beauty of the living word.

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All things birth-day, thinking of Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between the World and Me, A Parent’s Thoughts (coming soon to a neighborhood near you), and tomorrow, the first day of school, a new year, a new life: WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR OUR WORLD, WHAT WOULD YOUR LETTER BE? WHAT WOULD YOU TEACH, WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE BE LEARNED? And so, launched by thoughts of T.S. Eliot’s birthday, beginnings . . . beginnings . . .
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Dante, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, Rumi, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, Thoreau, Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, and Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life, to the music of Simon and Garfunkle, Stevie Nicks, Aaron Hall, Jacques Brel, musicals Carousel, Mondo Cane, and My Fair Lady, Beatles:

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Have fun my dear, my dear, have fun–Hafiz

I have conversed with the spiritual Sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill—William Blake

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