The past year has been such a tortured whirlwind that it’s very possible you have forgotten about two things, or at least, that they seem like they happened 3 years ago. Here’s a refresher: Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and then, when he begrudgingly submitted a recorded version of his Nobel lecture to accept the prize formally months later, he seemed to have plagiarized the Spark Notes to Moby Dick.
Nothing seems to have come of the very-unofficial accusations, first levied in a Slate blog. So little has come of it, in fact, that Dylan’s speech–pretty great with or without Spark Notes quotations–is now being released in a print version. Simon and Schuster published a 23-page “book” of Dylan’s humorous and insightful diatribe today. The book is also available in a limited collector’s edition: 100 “individually signed and numbered hardcover copies” are available for $2,500 each, which is highway robbery by any conceivable metric.
God bless Bob Dylan, nonetheless, and if you agree with that statement enough, you can buy the normal-person version of the printed lecture for $16.99. If you want to parse his observations about Melville, All Quiet on the Western Front, Odysseus, and Leadbelly in print, order here. Listen to the full, pleasantly audiobook-ish lecture below. [New York Times]
