The Nobel Prize for Literature is a big deal! Before Bob Dylan was announced as this year's Nobel laureate, no American had won the award since Toni Morrison in 1993. The Swedish Academy isn't exactly quick to honor songwriters, so Dylan's honor is truly rare. And if you win the award, you get to show up at a very fancy banquet, accept your prize from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf, and take home a gigantic pile of money. You'd think this would be a good deal for just about anyone. But the legendarily cantankerous Bob Dylan does not seem to give one single tiny sliver of a fuck.
Earlier this week, we learned that the Swedish Academy had not heard back from Dylan about the Prize and that they'd stopped attempting to contact him. And Dylan had only acknowledged the Prize in one tiny way: A sentence on his website about a new collection of his lyrics that included the phrase "winner of the Nobel prize in literature." And now, The Guardian reports that Dylan has removed even that tiny little mention of his towering literary honor.
To put things in perspective here: When the Recording Academy named Dylan the MusiCares Person Of The Year -- a far-lesser honor by just about any metric -- Dylan did show up to accept it, giving a rambling but riveting speech in which he settled old scores with Merle Haggard and Steely Dan. So if he was down to show up for that, but not for the fucking Nobel Prize, that's a hall-of-fame example of Bob Dylan being weird.
