IRISH TIMES: Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize divides Irish writers and literary critics

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John McAuliffe

On a freshers’ night out in Galway, I asked the visiting dj if he would play a Bob Dylan song, possibly something off Oh Mercy. This was in 1990, and Dylan was my gateway to Ginsberg and the Beats, Sly and Robbie, The Fugs, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen and the rest. I was enthusiastic and insistent, I hadn’t been to a Dylan concert yet. The DJ, Dave Fanning, whose show had introduced me to so much of Dylan’s music, must have been used to such requests and he was not unsympathetic when he gave a long look at the packed dancefloor and said, “A nightclub’s not the place for a Dylan song”.

Which is a little bit like how I feel about the Literature Nobel Prize going to Dylan. Although awarding the prize to this great, mysterious shapeshifter of a songwriter will not stop me listening to Street Legal, or John Wesley Harding, or the 300-song Dylan playlist I frequent on Spotify, and I might even try to finish Tarantula again, or the Patrick Modiano backlist I started reading around this time a couple of years ago.

John McAuliffe’s fourth book,The Way In, is published by Gallery Press. He is chief poetry critic for The Irish Times and teaches at Manchester University