Did Dylan Swipe from SparkNotes for His Nobel Lecture?

That's the question recently raised by Vox.

It's not implausible.

I love Dylan. But it must be conceded that he has always been a heavy borrower, sometimes it's said, plagiarist.

There are the whole-cloth thefts of a southern poet on an LP some years ago, then his "original" paintings which turned out to be Dylan's renderings of post cards. Those are just a few examples his alleged artistic thievery.

But this seems to take things to a higher order of magnitude. It's one thing to mimic the musical styles of Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry, or to take the words of Rimbaud or Ginsberg as models for lyrics. It's another to swipe from an online equivalent of Cliffs Notes for a Nobel lecture.

Some will, I suppose, write this off as another example of Dylan's impish disregard for social norms and other people's opinions. But, this is actually serious business. Plagiarism is serious business, especially when it involves the most recent Nobel laureate for literature.

The irony here is that no artist I know of more jealously guards his copyrights. You can find some Dylan performances on youtube, but he routinely quashes a lot of videos of his performances from appearing there. And on Apple Play, Dylan's lyrics don't appear with his songs.

I still think that Dylan deserves his Nobel Prize for Literature. His body of work is filled with originality and daring re-imagining of old ways of writing and speaking.

Nonetheless, if this is all true, Bob, what were you thinking, resorting to thievery from an online source like some disinterested high school kid trying to make the deadline for a term paper?

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

"Let us not speak falsely now..." (Nerdwriter explains why Dylan deserves that Nobel Prize)

From the moment I heard about Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, I thought that it was inspired and deserved. Nerdwriter agrees.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Dylan will be a no show...

...which is really no surprise, though in fairness to him, the Nobel Prize for Literature wasn't a gig he sought.

Dylan, the Bible, and the Nobel Prize for Literature

Poet and pastor Malcolm Guite applauds Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature and explains the connections between Dylan's body of work and his reading of the Bible.

Years ago, I read an article in Rolling Stone about Roger McGuinn, lead singer and lead guitarist of The Byrds, a band that successfully covered several Dylan songs. This was during Dylan's "Christian phase." But McGuinn explained that in the mid-60s, ten years before Dylan's "conversion," Dylan told McGuinn that he always turned to the Bible for song-writing inspiration. You can hear it on every Dylan LP. He's steeped in the Scriptures and they're apparent in his cadences, sensibilities, and imagery.

Dylan deserves his Nobel Prize and my life has been enriched by his work.



[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature

Bob Dylan is among the greatest wordsmiths of the past 50 years, which is why I think his Nobel Prize for Literature is so well-deserved.

Just consider these lines from his 1974 song, 'Shelter from the Storm':

I’ve heard newborn babies wailin’ like a mournin’ dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”

In just these four lines, he portrays the human condition and the need we all have of one to give us shelter from it all. He portrays love at its most basic and wondrous level.

Those four lines are sheer beauty, part of a lifelong corpus of beautiful, insightful, soul-stirring lyrics.

Dylan's music has always meant so much to me. I'm so happy about this recognition of his work I feel like I got the award myself. I don't know whether to laugh or cry from the joy of it. Probably, if I can get away with it, I'll do a little of both.