Ron Rosenbaum, writing about Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize essay:
It’s sad that this amazing essay has been almost entirely overlooked by Dylanologists, because it offers a skeleton key to something in my opinion quite essential about Bob Dylan.The title of this book excerpt: “Bob Dylan’s Superpower Is That He Doesn’t Get Embarrassed.” No, he doesn’t.
The comments in the “amazing essay” about the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, and All Quiet on the Western Front bear unmistakable traces of CliffsNotes and SparkNotes. Andrea Pitzer’s 2017 article “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” offers ample evidence from the SparkNotes for Moby-Dick and cites one phrase about All Quiet on the Western Front from CliffsNotes. She also provides links for anyone interested in Dylan's practice of appropriation in music and painting. My modest contribution: a post in 2017 with what I see as clear evidence that Dylan plagiarized from the CliffsNotes for the Odyssey : “Dylan, Homer, and Cliff.”
Pretty pathetic stuff. You’d have to have a superpower to not be embarrassed by it. Or to ignore it.
Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)
[There’s ample room in art and music and writing for the use of found materials and for the transformation of preexisting works. But swiping from CliffsNotes and SparkNotes ain’t that.]
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In an aside that's only slightly appropriate, an acquaintance was hiking over the Pyrenees, crested a hill, and came upon a couple, with the woman's head resting in the man's lap, while he read to her from the Cliff's Notes to Walden.
What a beautiful, moving scene!
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