The legendary singer and media baiter may have swiped passages in his required talk from SparkNotes, God bless him
As explained in a, there is compelling evidence to suggest that music legend Bob Dylan may have lifted sections of the speech he gave as part of his Nobel Prize win. The speech, given earlier this month in Los Angeles, was required for Dylan to collect the nearly $1 million in fund that came with the honor. In a talk that was called both “eloquent” and “rambling” by those in the press, Dylan focused on the connection between music and literature, citing passages in “The Odyssey”, “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Moby-Dick” as both an influence on him and proof of his point. It was, some saw, a response to the, a. As, not only does it appear that Dylan made up a passage from Herman Melville’s 1851 opus “Moby-Dick” in his speech, but that entire sections of the talk show distinctive parallels with posts on the literature works he cited available on, an online study guide similar to CliffsNotes. As one of many examples, Pitzer notes that Dylan cited what he claimed was a passage in Melville’s novel “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.” There is no such sentence in “Moby-Dick”. There is, however, this text available on the SparkNotes entry for the novel: “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness.” The article notes that of the 78 sentences on “Moby-Dick” in his speech, 20 show such similarities with the SparkNotes entry.
