Bob Dylan might have used SparkNotes for his big presentation
Bob Dylan's Nobel lecture was described as "extraordinary."
He also might have used SparkNotes to put it together.
Yes, like nearly every high school or college student, Dylan apparently didn't read the book before his assignment was due.
This comes from Slate writer Andrea Pitzer. She works off a tip from this blog by writer Ben Greenman, in which he notes Dylan seemed to have made up a quote from Moby Dick in his Nobel speech.
Pitzer takes things a step further, and discovers a lot of passages seem curiously close to the SparkNotes version of Moby Dick.
Dylan even has a line about "the embodiment of evil," a phrase that never appears in the actual novel's text but is used in the SparkNotes version.
Pitzer is an author herself, and in her piece also analyzes Dylan's frequent use of other works – which she argues is a reliance on appropriation.
Dylan, by the way, submitted his recorded lecture on June 4 – right before the six-month deadline. Without doing a lecture, he would have missed out on the more than $900,000 that comes with the award.
Still, here's Dylan's lecture if you want to watch it.
And here's SparkNotes Moby Dick.
