"There are novelists who still should win (yes, Mr. Roth, that list begins with you)..."

"... and there are many others who should have won (Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Auden, Levi, Achebe, Borges, Baldwin . . . where to stop?), but, for all the foibles of the prize and its selection committee, can we just bask for a little while in this one? The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the nose."

Writes David Remnick of the "astonishing and unambiguously wonderful thing" that is Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize in literature.

The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the nose.

The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the knows.

The wheel turns and sometimes this wheel’s on fire/rolling down the road/best notify my next of kin/this wheel shall explode!

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

If it were up to me, I'd have given the award to Erica Jong. 

I know what he means, because I understand Dylanspeak. He's gesturing at a song called "Highlands":

Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”
She goes away for a minute
And I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere

And I go away for a minute, because I have this rat picture I want you to see:



It's Rattatz, the official rat of the Althouse blog. You voted, remember? I had to run off and get him, because "Highlands" is one of the 5 Dylan songs with "rat":

Windows were shakin’ all night in my dreams
Everything was exactly the way that it seems
Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page
Same ol’ rat race
Life in the same ol’ cage

3 of the 5 songs have "rat" in "rat race." The other 2 are "Clean Cut Kid" ("They said Congratulations, you got what it takes'/They sent him back into the rat race without any brakes") and "It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)" ("While one who sings with his tongue on fire/Gargles in the rat race choir/Bent out of shape from society’s pliers/Cares not to come up any higher/But rather get you down in the hole/That he’s in").

And I don't care to come up any higher, but will get you down in the rat hole that I'm in, and say that the other 2 of the 5 songs are "Froggie Went A Courtin’" ("Uncle Rat laughed and he shook his fat sides") and "Motorpsycho Nightmare":

I was sleepin’ like a rat
When I heard something jerkin’
There stood Rita
Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins
She said, “Would you like to take a shower?
I’ll show you up to the door”
I said, “Oh, no! no!
I’ve been through this [movie] before”
I knew I had to split
But I didn’t know how
When she said
“Would you like to take that shower, now?”

Well, I couldn’t leave
Unless the old man chased me out
’Cause I’d already promised
That I’d milk his cows
I had to say something
To strike him very weird
So I yelled out
“I like Fidel Castro and his beard”
Rita looked offended
But she got out of the way
As he came charging down the stairs
Sayin’, “What’s that I heard you say?”

I said, “I like Fidel Castro
I think you heard me right”
And ducked as he swung
At me with all his might
Rita mumbled something
’Bout her mother on the hill
As his fist hit the icebox
He said he’s going to kill me
If I don’t get out the door
In two seconds flat
“You unpatriotic
Rotten doctor Commie rat”