Was Dylan too freewheelin' in borrowing for Nobel lecture?
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Phrases sprinkled throughout the rock legend's lecture for his Nobel Prize in literature are very similar to phrases from the summation of Moby Dick on SparkNotes, a sort of online Cliff's 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 Moby Dick, which Dylan discussed in the lecture along with Buddy Holly, The Odyssey and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Then Andrea Pitzer, a writer for Slate, delved into the supposed quote and wrote in a story Tuesday that the line was not in Moby Dick but was very much like a line from the SparkNotes summary of the book.
Pitzer went on to find, and The Associated Press has verified, 20 other sentences with traces and phrases from the Moby Dick 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.
