It’s alright ma, I’m only cheating: did Bob Dylan crib his Nobel speech from SparkNotes?
Claims have circulated that Dylan’s Nobel prize acceptance lecture may have leaned a little too heavily on a website favoured by plagiarising students
On 4 June, Bob Dylan made good on the lecture he was required to give in order to claim his $900,000 (£704,000) Nobel prize jackpot. His 22-minute reminiscence about his music and literary heroes was widely hailed, even though most university lectures are at least 45 minutes long and he didn’t bother putting PowerPoint slides on the departmental website.
In the past few days, however, it is said that the master has become the pupil, as Dylan has been accused of plagiarism. Writer Ben Greenman was the first to blog about how he couldn’t find a quotation that Dylan had cited in Moby-Dick: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.” Following this, Slate magazine discovered that the site SparkNotes contained a remarkably similar summary of the preacher character Dylan had quoted, as “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness”. Soon, other nuggets were compared. They came back with similarities. Dylan or his management are yet to comment on the matter.
This was a revelation, as much because you would assume an homme de lettres such as Dylan would be a fan of SparkNotes’ dustier rivals CliffsNotes. Whereas CliffsNotes, like Hoover or Frigidaire, has become a byword for summaries, in the real world Sparks has overtaken them.
CliffsNotes (originally Cliff’s Notes) date back to 1958, when a man called Clifton began churning out Shakespeare guides in his Nebraska basement. SparkNotes, meanwhile, is a child of the internet age. Harvard student Sam Yagan started the company in 1999 with a few friends. It began as an email-based dating business, and was a successful one – matching 250,000 users in its first few months. To drum up interest, the friends posted six literature guides. These soon became more popular than the matchmaking, disproving every adage about the web being driven by sex. The team expanded by recruiting a large, highly flexible workforce of Harvard students.
By 2000, the company had been sold to US book retail giant Barnes & Noble, which instituted a policy of ceasing to sell the CliffsNotes version of a text whenever it had printed a Spark version.
In the competitive world of summarising books too boring to be read by humans, Spark has edged it on the competition by being slightly clearer and more modern. In 2010, the New York Times offered up multiple guides to an English professor. Of a paragraph on Voltaire in CliffsNotes, he complained that the style was dated: “No one does biographical criticism any more. They haven’t since the 1970s.”
Yagan and his team sold out for a paltry $3.5m, but he soon went on to found online dating behemoth OK Cupid, as well as the Napster rival eDonkey.
While universities habitually run students’ work through plagiarism-detection software such as TurnItIn, there is no such equivalent for Nobel prize speeches, assumed to be the moment at which an eminent economist, physician, writer or peace-maker has earned a few free hits. SparkNotes does not advocate using its books instead of the text, preferring that you “check your comprehension” against their interpretation. The company does, however, have advice on its website for avoiding plagiarism: “By citing words and ideas that came from our site or books (to see instructions on how to do that, see How to Cite This SparkNote within each study guide), or by putting your own spin on our ideas.”
Or, as Dylan spontaneously riffed the other day: “This above all: to thine own self be true … Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
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