Here we go again. Bob Dylan is being accused by a Washington, D.C., journalist of plagiarizing portions of his Nobel Prize for literature lecture from SparkNotes, a study guide like Cliffs Notes. 
 
 Dylan, who has been accused over the years of lifting passages from various poets and novelists for his song lyrics, was required by the Swedish Academy to give a lecture in order to receive his prize and the $920,000 that goes with it. 
 
 Opting not to attend the Nobel ceremonies in December, Dylan submitted the recorded lecture on June 4. In his speech, the Minnesota-born bard says Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby-Dick” — as well as Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Homer’s “The Odyssey” — had a big influence on him. However, when he references “Moby-Dick,” the passages apparently were taken from the SparkNotes summary of the book, not the novel itself, journalist Andrea Pitzer asserts in a story published Tuesday in Slate. 
 
 She offers side-by-side passages of SparkNotes and Dylan’s speech to support the theory that he cribbed narrative summaries. However, she does not accuse him of lifting opinions. Pitzer, a Washington, D.C., writer specializing in history, is the author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps” and “The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.” 
 
 Pitzer posits that 20 passages from SparkNotes’ “Moby-Dick” notes show up in Dylan’s Nobel lecture with similar wording. For example: 
 
 “There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels,” Dylan offered, “and he predicts Ahab’s doom.” 
 
 Comparing notes: Speech excerpts show similarity to SparkNotes analysis. A10 
 
 Pitzer cited the SparkNotes statement — “One of the ships ... carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom” — that does not appear in the novel. 
 
 Dylan’s been accused before 
 
 This seems to be the latest in an ongoing series of kerfuffles over sources of Dylan’s work, allegations that date to his first album of original material, 1963’s “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Detractors said he rewrote songs by Lead Belly and Henry Thomas, which Dylan said was part of the folk tradition, and that he borrowed the melody for “Blowin’ in the Wind” from a 16th century Protestant hymn. 
 
 Much ado was made over Dylan’s 2006 album “Modern Times,” the final in a highly acclaimed trilogy of comeback albums of potent original material. Researchers pointed out that snippets of lyrics could be traced to the works of Ovid, Henry Timrod and other poets. 
 
 Dylan himself addressed the indictments in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview with journalist Mikal Gilmore. 
 
 “In folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It’s true for everybody, but me. There are different rules for me,” Dylan said. “And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? … And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get.” He added: “It’s an old thing — it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back.” 
 
 Dylan continued: “I’m working within my art form. I work within the rules and limitations of it. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.” 
 
 The use of phrases from SparkNotes in the Nobel lecture is different from the folk process, said Alex Lubet, a University of Minnesota music professor who has taught classes on Dylan. He’d be concerned if Dylan had turned in a classroom assignment using this approach. But he considers the context. 
 
 “His lecture is wild and strange,” Lubet said Tuesday. “It’s meant to be a post-modern work of art. Any kind of a collage technique is fair game.” 
 
 Cultural critic David Yaffe, a Syracuse University professor of humanities who teaches a class on singer-songwriters including Dylan, doesn’t see this alleged plagiarizing as detracting from the value of the lecture. 
 
 “I was very moved by his speech and I’m not any less moved knowing this. I don’t find myself feeling like a dupe,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “He’s on the road all the time. He just turned 76. You could see him wanting to take a few shortcuts. I don’t think it makes him any less Bob Dylan.” 
 
 Will the Swedish Academy rescind Dylan’s Nobel Prize? 
 
 “That would be historic,” Yaffe said with a chuckle. “I don’t think they will.” ||||| Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images and SparkNotes. 
 
 If a songwriter can win the Nobel Prize for literature, can CliffsNotes be art? During his official lecture recorded on June 4, laureate Bob Dylan described the influence on him of three literary works from his childhood: The Odyssey, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Moby-Dick. Soon after, writer Ben Greenman noted that in his lecture Dylan seemed to have invented a quote from Moby-Dick. 
 
 Those familiar with Dylan’s music might recall that he winkingly attributed fabricated quotes to Abraham Lincoln in his “Talkin’ World War III Blues.” So Dylan making up an imaginary quote is nothing new. However, I soon discovered that the Moby-Dick line Dylan dreamed up last week seems to be cobbled together out of phrases on the website SparkNotes, the online equivalent of CliffsNotes. 
 
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 In Dylan’s recounting, a “Quaker pacifist priest” tells Flask, the third mate, “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness” (my emphasis). No such line appears anywhere in Herman Melville’s novel. However, SparkNotes’ character list describes the preacher using similar phrasing, as “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness” (again, emphasis mine). 
 
 Following up on this strange echo, I began delving into the two texts side by side and found that many lines Dylan used throughout his Nobel discussion of Moby-Dick appear to have been cribbed even more directly from the site. The SparkNotes summary for Moby-Dick explains, “One of the ships ... carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom.” Dylan’s version reads, “There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels, and he predicts Ahab’s doom.” 
 
 Shortly after, the SparkNotes account relays that “Captain Boomer has lost an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick. ... Boomer, happy simply to have survived his encounter, cannot understand Ahab’s lust for vengeance.” In his lecture, Dylan says, “Captain Boomer—he lost an arm to Moby. But ... he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.” 
 
 Across the 78 sentences in the lecture that Dylan spends describing Moby-Dick, even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site. And most of the key shared phrases in these passages (such as “Ahab’s lust for vengeance” in the above lines) do not appear in the novel Moby-Dick at all. 
 
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 I reached out to Columbia, Dylan’s record label, to try to connect with Dylan or his management for comment, but as of publication time, I have not heard back. 
 
 Theft in the name of art is an ancient tradition, and Dylan has been a magpie since the 1960s. He has also frequently been open about his borrowings. In 2001, he even released an album titled “Love and Theft,” the quotation marks seeming to imply that the album title was itself taken from Eric Lott’s acclaimed history of racial appropriation, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. 
 
 When he started out, Dylan absorbed classic tunes and obscure compositions alike from musicians he met, recording versions that would become more famous than anything by those who taught him the songs or even the original songwriters. His first album included two original numbers and 11 covers. 
 
 Yet in less than three years, he would learn to warp the Americana he collected into stupefyingly original work. Throwing everything from electric guitar and organ to tuba into the musical mix, he began crafting lyrics that combined machine-gun metaphor with motley casts of characters. Less likely to copy whole verses by then, his drive-by invocations of everything from the biblical Abraham to Verlaine and Rimbaud became more hit-and-run than kidnapping. The lyrics accumulated into chaotic, juggling poetry from a trickster willing to drop a ball sometimes. They worked even when they shouldn’t have. 
 
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 In the past several years, Dylan seems to have expanded his appropriation. His 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One is filled with unacknowledged attributions. In more recent years, he has returned to recording covers, as many legends do. In Dylan’s case, his past three albums (five discs in all) have been composed of standards. 
 
 Bob Dylan Is a Great Singer The Nobel laureate thinks we should laud his singing as much as his “poetry.” He’s right. 
 
 Dylan remains so reliant on appropriation that tracing his sourcing has become a cottage industry. For more than a decade, writer Scott Warmuth, an admiring Ahab in pursuit, has tracked Dylan lyrics and writings to an astonishing range of texts, from multiple sentences copied out of a New Orleans travel brochure to lifted phrases and imagery from former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. Warmuth dove into Dylan’s Nobel lecture last week, too, and found that the phrase “faith in a meaningful world” from the CliffsNotes description of All Quiet on the Western Front also shows up in Dylan’s talk (but not in the book). 
 
 Even many of the paintings Dylan produces as an artist are reproductions of well-known images, such as a photo from Henri Cartier-Bresson. For Dylan, recapitulation has replaced invention. 
 
 If the Moby-Dick portion of his Nobel lecture was indeed cribbed from SparkNotes, then what is the world to make of it? Perhaps the use of SparkNotes can be seen as a sendup of the prestige-prize economy. Either way, through Dylan’s Nobel lecture, SparkNotes material may well join Duchamp’s urinal and Andy Warhol’s fake Brillo pad boxes as a functional commodity now made immortal. 
 
 It’s worth mentioning that Dylan turned in his lecture just before the six-month deadline, ensuring that he would get paid. In the interest of settling any potential moral debt, I would encourage him to throw some of his $923,000 prize to whoever wrote the original version of the online summary. ||||| Did Bob Dylan make up a Moby-Dick quote for his Nobel Lecture? 
 
 
 
 
 
 Last fall, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. There were immediate complications. Dylan did not contact the Nobel committee to acknowledge the honor, nor did he travel to Stockholm to pick it up—Patti Smith filled in for him at the December ceremony, performing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” 
 
 For the award to be official conferred, Dylan also had to deliver a Nobel lecture. And that's exactly what he did. Yesterday, an audio version of the lecture appeared, produced a little bit like his old Theme Time Radio Hour (same sly cadence, and piano backing for some of it), along with a transcript at the official Nobel site . 
 
 
 
 
 
 Early in the lecture, Dylan remembers discovering music, specifically Buddy Holly, who activated his sense of songwriting and performance. Late in the lecture, he tweaks the Nobel committee for equating songs and literature (“Songs are not literature,” he says, “They’re meant to be sung, not read”). In between, he considers three books that were especially influential to his: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Homer’s Odyssey. Through this tripartite structure (which he also used in Chronicles, Vol. 1, his memoir, and Triplicate, his most recent record), Dylan discusses the works with passion and sensitivity, with an eye to both the great sweep of history and the intricate clockwork of individual decision-making. His remarks on Moby-Dick are perhaps the best of the three. He frames it as a novel that illustrates “how different men react in different ways to the same experience.” He talks about Captain Boomer, who also lost an arm to the great white whale but does not share Ahab’s need for revenge. He cannily plays with the way the novel plays with surface and depth. 
 
 
 
 
 
 One paragraph is especially interesting. Dylan mentions the typhoon that hits the ship, which is interpreted variously by different men: Ahab sees it as a good sign, Starbuck as a bad one. “As soon as the storm ends,” he says, “a crewmember falls from the ship’s mast and drowns, foreshadowing what is to come.” (As Melville describes it, “he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.”) 
 
 
 
 
 
 Dylan then includes a quote from the novel, an aphoristic utterance from a Quaker priest to the third mate, Flask: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness." 
 
 
 
 
 
 When I read this paragraph, I was intrigued, both because the insight is a compelling one and because I did not remember it from the novel. In fairness, it’s been a little while since I read the whole thing straight through, and it’s a long book at that, more than 200,000 words. I went and looked, mostly around Chapter 126, “The Life-Buoy,” which contains the falling phantom in the air. I couldn’t find it. I looked at another edition, and couldn’t find it there either. I went online, found an e-text, and searched on the relevant keywords, “injuries” (which doesn’t appear, at least not in plural form) and “bitterness” (which appears only once, in relation to the resentment experienced by men who are placed in charge of men who are superior to them “in general pride of manhood”). I searched in the Kindle edition, found nothing (though there were six occurrences of “subterranean”). 
 
 
 
 
 
 It appears, from all available evidence, that Dylan invented the quote and inserted it into his reading of Moby-Dick. Was it on purpose? Was it the result of a faulty memory? Was it an egg, left in the lawn to be discovered in case it’s Eastertime too? Answering these questions would be drilling into the American Sphinx, and beside the point anyway. As it stands, it’s very much in the spirit of his entire enterprise: to take various American masterworks and absorb and transform them. The mystery of it makes a wonderful lecture even more wonderful. And it’s worth ending with a quote from Stubb, the second mate, about the transformative power of singing and its centrality to life itself:
– Bob Dylan delivered what was described as an "eloquent" lecture this month as part of his Nobel prize requirements—but one writer says he may have approached the task like a high school student with an overdue project. Dylan discussed three favorite works from childhood and Andrea Pitzer at Slate suspects the Nobel Prize winner for literature may have cribbed much of the Moby Dick portion from SparkNotes. She says at least 20 of the 78 sentences involved strongly resemble SparkNotes passages and compares several of them side by side. Multiple phrases, including "Ahab's lust for vengeance," appear both in SparkNotes and Dylan's talk, but not in Moby Dick itself. He had to give the talk to collect $922,000 in prize money. "Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness," a quote that one blogger thought Dylan had invented, appears to be based on SparkNotes. Pitzer suggests that Dylan donate some of the prize money to the SparkNotes writer, though others are more forgiving. University of Minnesota music professor Alex Lubet tells the Star-Tribune that Dylan's lecture shouldn't be treated like a classroom assignment. "His lecture is wild and strange," Lubet says. "It’s meant to be a post-modern work of art. Any kind of a collage technique is fair game." In a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, Dylan addressed claims he had lifted lyrics, saying that in songwriting, "You make everything yours. We all do it."