Mixing up the Medicine
I’m not here, I’m back there – I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. It feels like a personal vindication – I am twelve again. I shout down the stairs to my mum and dad – “I bloody told you so!”
“We will have none of that sort of language in this house!” – it is the voice of my mother echoing down the years. There is no need to respond. I know when their argument has lost its foothold; they change the subject.
In response to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, The Irish Times brought together the response of forty Irish authors, poets and scholars to his literary honour. I have long been a consumer of Irish fiction, it is in my head as much as the work of Robert Zimmerman. These reactions from The Irish Times will now provide a future guide to my consumption of Irish literature – those with a churlish or superior response will disappear from my reading wishlist.
But what of those I have already read and admire. What, in particular, would Anne Enright have to say, would I be obliged to never open her books again. I need not have been concerned – not only did she approve, she came up with a one-liner worthy of the man himself – “And once you “get” Dylan, you can’t get away”.
On the day his Nobel Prize was announced, Migrant in Moscow, on Blipfoto, clicked on the tag ‘BobDylan’ and a stream of ‘likes’ came pouring into my mailbox. I had forgotten just how many times I have used his words on Blipfoto. Many of these images have already appeared on WordPress but, I repeat them here in celebration – good on yer Bob!