Dylan too freewheelin’ in Nobel lecture?

ANDREW DALTON

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES — The whiff of plagiarism is blowin’ in the wind for Bob Dylan.

Phrases sprinkled throughout the rock legend’s lecture for his Nobel Prize in literature are very similar to phrases from the summation of Herman Melville’s novel

on Sparknotes, a sort of online Cliff’s Notes or Coles Notes that’s familiar to modern students looking for shortcuts and teachers trying to catch them.

The saga began when writer Ben Greenman pointed out on his blog on June 6 that Dylan appeared to have invented a quote from

which Dylan discussed in the lecture along with Buddy Holly, and

Then Andrea Pitzer, a writer for delved into the supposed quote and said in a story Tuesday that the line was not in

but was very much like a line from the Sparknotes summary of the book.

Here’s Dylan: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness”

And Sparknotes: “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness.”

Pitzer went on to find, and The Associated Press has verified, 20 other sentences with traces and phrases from the Sparknotes. She cites no examples in Dylan’s discussion of the other two books, and the AP found none.

The cases Pitzer found are not blatant or explicit — there are no verbatim sentences, only identical phrases and similar phrasing. Other examples: — Dylan: “Moby attacks one more time, ramming the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.”

— Sparknotes: “Moby Dick rams the Pequod and sinks it. Ahab is then caught in a harpoon line and hurled out of his harpoon boat to his death.”

— Dylan: “The ship’s crew is made up of men of different races.”

— Sparknotes: “... a crew made up of men from many different countries and races.”

Dylan and a spokesman for the Swedish Academy weren’t immediately available for comment.

The AP asked three literature teachers and professors whether they would call out their students for similar work in a paper, and all said they would, if not for the plagiarism, for using the modern equivalent of Cliff’s Notes.

“A high school student would get nailed,” said Joseph Vasquez who teaches English at Rosemead High School in California, “since she should have done the reading, and the closeness of text suggests she didn’t read the text but rather the Sparknotes.”

Dylan has been accused of lifting lines from older artists for his songs in the past, though many fans dismiss it as simply reflecting the common borrowing of the folk-and-blues milieus he drew from.