In a seeming about-face, US folk musician Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman to a Litvak mother in Duluth, Minnesota, has now announced he will not attend a ceremony to confer the Nobel prize for literature to him scheduled for December 10 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported he had contacted the Nobel committee to say he wasn’t coming.

Initially the committee had been unable to contact him, and dedicated fans had hoped he would decline the prize as inappropriate and an attempt by the increasingly irrelevant Nobel prize group to remain relevant following earlier follies, including awarding US president-elect Barak Obama the peace prize for no reason. Nobel committee members attacked Dylan as rude and even arrogant for not answering their telephone calls.

Now it appears Dylan will accept the prize, just not in person.

The Guardian quoted the late Leonard Cohen, a fellow North-American-born Litvak, who advised Dylan the prize was superfluous: “…Before he died, Dylan’s songwriting peer and friend Leonard Cohen said that no prizes were necessary to recognize the indelible mark records like Highway 61 Revisited had made on popular music. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘[the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.'”

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