gchat, circa 2008.

Date: June 18, 2008

Players: Me and a friend, who shall here remain anonymous should she object to me printing this heretofore private conversation.
Context: This is a very small excerpt from a very long gchat conversation. My friend and I were both about a year into our first post-college jobs, and thinking about applying to graduate school. We were discussing our future plans. I was reading Camus and Nietzsche at the time. (I have no idea what my friend was reading.)
Disclaimer: I found this chat while searching for something else in my gmail, and it amused me. I fixed some typos so as to appear smarter than I actually was at the time.

me: …weren't you going to enlighten me about the void?

friend: ah yes…ok, so the void

me:  i am interested in the void

  considering i am living in it

friend: no

  you are employed

  and have a home

  the void is the uncertainty

 

me: no, no, i am in the void

  there is uncertainty

  it is not like school

  where the end is clear, and the parameters set

  i could quit my job and wander through asia

  no one would stop me

  void

friend: no, that's not the real void

me: as long as there are no rules, there is void

friend: that's some other void

me: no, void is when you have to make up the plan as you go along

   unlike the transition from high school to college

friend: that's like the void of generally having a lot of time before death

 me: yes! VOID

She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all

If you had come to me yesterday with a wager that Bob Dylan would win a Nobel prize, I would have bet good money against it. And I think Bob would have done the same. Once he's over the surprise, though, I bet he'll start planning a cryptic and cutting speech full of biblical allusions, designed specifically to make everyone in the audience feel awkward and confused. It's gonna be so great.

I think everyone who loves Dylan has a story about how they started listening to him. Here's mine: when I was about 15, back in the age of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, I went over to the CD Exchange in Tenleytown (RIP) and bought The Essential Bob Dylan, a two-volume greatest hits collection. I would have been better off buying Bringing it All Back Home or The Times They are A-Changin', but at the time I didn't know anything about Dylan, except that my mother hated his singing voice and that he was almost never played on the radio, not even the oldies station.

As a teenager it was my job to clear and wash the dishes after dinner, and I would sometimes put music on while I was doing it. One night, I put on my newly acquired Dylan album. As I remember it, I got about halfway through the first CD when my father came into the kitchen and started singing along. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was on. If you know that song, then you know it's really, really hard to sing along to (it has a lot of lyrics and no chorus). But Dad sang along, taking particular relish in the beginning of the fourth verse:

Get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift

After we listened a few more songs, he asked me if "With God on Our Side" was on the album. It wasn't, but thanks to Napster (RIP) I quickly found it. I played it for him later, and he sang along to that one too. I'd never heard anything like it. It wasn't a song! It was just words spoken with the occasional guitar strum and some harmonica. It's seven minutes long! And, even more astonishingly, it had a point. That song is basically an essay. It's not my favorite Dylan song, not by a long shot, but it was quite an introduction.

I remember asking my father whether a song like this could even be considered music. I don't remember what he told me, but I think the Nobel committee just answered my question.