ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, October 4, 1996 TAG: 9610040042
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
Gordon Ball heard the news during a scratchy radio broadcast. Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday.
Ball was sure he heard it right, but he's still not sure what it means.
A little more than a month ago, Ball, a professor of American literature specializing in the literature of the Beat Generation at the Virginia Military Institute, made his own nomination for the most coveted literary prize in the world.
To the list of winners that includes T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Jean-Paul Sartre (who declined the award), and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ball wants to add Bob Dylan.
"I'm not actually certain if he's still in the running or not," Ball said from his hotel room in Lowell, Mass., birthplace of Beat author Jack Kerouac, where Ball is attending a conference.
Ball sent his letter Aug.30 to The Swedish Academy in Stockholm, nominating Dylan for "the next Nobel prize in literature." "I haven't actually received a response," he said.
If the Nobel people took the nomination as less than serious, they misread Ball.
"For a generation raised in a time of conformity," Ball said, "Dylan validated the imagination and independence of thought, and contributed very centrally to the questioning of the 1960s."
What happened in America in the 1960s had repercussions the world over, Ball said. In that sense, Dylan and his music changed the history of the world.
Ball said Dylan contributed to "the toppling of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe."
A few years back, when Ball taught in Poland, the students who discovered Dylan found the rock'n'roll poet gave them a sense of hope in the midst of oppression.
Dylan is the only rock poet to be quoted by an American president at his inauguration, according to Ball.
"He not busy being born is busy dying," Jimmy Carter said in 1977.
Ball nominated the 55-year-old former Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., at the request of a publisher in Norway.
The publisher and others had begun in January to find a way to get Dylan nominated. But nominations can only be made by members of The Swedish Academy, which chooses the winner, other countries' academies, former Nobel laureates and professors of literature and history.
So the group called poet and Dylan friend Allen Ginsberg for help. Ginsberg, who spoke at VMI and spent nearly a week there a few years ago, referred them to Ball.
Ball said the first time Dylan had an effect on him was in 1965, when he walked into a friend's apartment and heard "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which opens with people laughing and the announcement of "take two."
"I never heard people having such fun making music," he said.
Ball also was at the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan had the gall to take the stage with an electric guitar instead of his folky trademark acoustic. The story goes that he was roundly booed for selling out.
It sounded fine to Ball.
The scruffy, gravel-throated author of such protest ditties as "Masters of War" and "The Talking World War Three Blues" does not exactly fit the perceived image of the spit-and-polish, march-in-step VMI. But then, Ball points out, VMI's faculty and cadets are not really a homogeneous group.
Oft-quoted VMI Public Relations Director and Class of 1971 graduate Col. Mike Strickler is a big Dylan fan, according to Ball.
Ball uses Dylan's "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," written in response to the Cuban missile crisis, to show students what a ballad is.
He said he's heard Dylan songs echoing through the barracks plenty over the years.
So Dylan is popular, even among the crew-cut set. But presuming Dylan is in the running for next year, does Ball really think he has a chance at winning a Nobel prize?
"As Don Larsen, the only man ever to pitch a perfect game in a World Series, once told me, 'You never know,''' Ball said.
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File/1993. An English professor at VMI has recommendedby CNBthe rock poet Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize in literature.