High time

Image by way of wikipedia.

My day started with some good news that carried me through it, so far anyway. I am of course referring to the news that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

I'm not sure this is a good thing, but Dylan has supplied the soundtrack of my life. I first became aware of his work, without knowing who he was, as a little kid when my late brother came home from college with a guitar and plunked out "Blowin' in the wind." The delivery didn't get me but the lyrics did.

I've said it before and say it again: Bob had--and has--the power of the word.

There were other times in my life when he struck me cold, like the time in my teens when I heard "Tangled up in blue" in a store.

Eventually I found out who he was and started digging into his work.

Of course, when you talk about Bob, you have to be more specific, as in which one? There's folkie Bob, political Bob, hipster Bob, country Bob--and that just gets you through the 1960s, There's way more. I tend to prefer the middle and older, more obscure Bob these days.

The intimacy between his music and my life is such that I've been know to buy the latest Dylan album to find out what I've been up to.

(I can also grade seasons of my life by Dylan album. Street Legal phases are kind of downers...)

I have no idea if he writes consciously or is just the vessel of the muses, although I lean to the latter hypothesis. I was once at an Arlo Guthrie concert where he speculated that Dylan fished for songs upstream so he could catch more than anybody else.

I hope he keeps on catching them. Congratulations, Bob!

(I just checked the Goat Rope archives for all the times Bob has been mentioned here. It's quite a bit.)

Nobel comments

The Nobel Prize for literature often goes to people I've never heard of, but that didn't happen this time around. Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa is very well known and as prolific as he is sometimes controversial.

I'm leaving political controversies aside to say that he is the author of what is probably the funniest book I've ever read, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. My ribs literally hurt from laughter while I was reading it.

The plot involves a young man's love affair with an older woman. He works at a radio station that produces novelas or what we would call soap operas written by a man whose stories hilariously spin out of control.

I'd recommend the book to just about anybody, with the possible exception of Argentines (the scriptwriter slammed them at every opportunity).

THE FLEXIBILITY OF MEMORY

Caption: This guy can't remember where he was going but won't admit it.

In addition to comments and links about current events, this week's Goat Rope provides a daily dose of Nietzschean nuggets for your dining and dancing pleasure from his odd little book Beyond Good and Evil.

Even though Nietzsche had a mental breakdown in his later years and was arguably unsteady all along, he had some occasional great psychological insights which have been appreciated by Freud, Jung and many others.

Today's selection highlights the pliability of our memory. It's long been known that autobiographies are anything but objective accounts of past events and that two or more people who experienced the same events will have widely differing memories of them.

How does that happen?

'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that'--says my pride, and remains adamant. At last--memory yields.

CALLING CONGRESS. If you haven't already, please consider calling your representatives today using AFSC’s toll free number: 1-800-965-4701 and urge them to override President Bush's CHIP veto. All WV's delegation is on board but congresspeople from other states need a push.

THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS went to members of the reality-based community this year. Winners included Eric Maskin, Leonid Hurwicz, and Roger Myerson who studied the limits of the market for delivering public goods (like education and health care). Here's an excerpt from Reuters:

Societies should not rely on market forces to protect the environment or provide quality health care for all citizens, a winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for economics said on Monday.

Professor Eric Maskin, one of three American economists to receive the award, said that he "to some extent" takes issue with free-market orthodoxy championed by U.S President George W. Bush and some other western leaders.

"The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods," said Maskin, a slight, soft-spoken 57-year-old who lives in a house once occupied by Albert Einstein.

Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing in his 1776 Wealth of Nations, but this empirical work is welcome and needed these days.

WOMEN STILL LAG behind men in earnings despite gains in educational attainment. One equalizer seems to be a union card.

CORPORATE WELFARE DEPARTMENT. According to the AP,

Seniors and other taxpayers could have saved nearly $15 billion this year if the government slashed administrative costs in the Medicare drug program and negotiated the same kind of discounts it does for poor people under Medicaid...

BONUS VAMPIRE FEATURE. If you're wired for sound, here's an amusing NPR story on the many faces of Dracula.

DINOSAUR UPDATE. We interrupt previously scheduled programming to report on the discovery of a new dinosaur that

was as tall as a four-story building. From nose to tail it was longer than a pair of tractor trailer trucks laid end-to-end -- or, if you're a dinosaur junkie, half again the length of a small brontosaurus.

The beast was unearthed in Patagonia and is believed to have lived around 80 million years ago.

UNEMPLOYMENT AT RECORD LOW IN WV. WV's Chicken Littles keep trying to create a climate of panic in the hope that this will give them the opening to unleash their version of economic shock and awe. Alas for them, the news isn't all bad all the time.

SINCE YOU GUYS HAVE BEEN PRETTY GOOD TODAY, here's a special treat via YouTube: Jesse Jackson reading from Green Eggs and Ham.

YOU TELL ME where else you can find a blog with Nietzsche, dinosaurs, Dracula, and Dr. Seuss all in the same post...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: MUY ALTO