FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2015 file photo, Bob Dylan accepts the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year award at the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year show in Los Angeles. The Swedish Academy says it has received... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2015 file photo, Bob Dylan accepts the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year award at the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year show in Los Angeles. The Swedish Academy says it has received... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — Bob Dylan has completed his Nobel course requirements. 
 
 The Swedish Academy announced Monday that it has received the mandatory lecture from the 2016 literature winner, enabling Dylan to collect 8 million Swedish kronor ($922,000) in prize money. Spokeswoman Sara Danius described Dylan's talk in a news release as "extraordinary" and "eloquent." Nobel Prize officials said the 26-minute talk was recorded on Sunday in Los Angeles and an audio clip is posted on the academy's website, www.nobelprize.org. 
 
 Danius said its delivery to the academy meant that "the Dylan adventure is coming to a close." Dylan, widely regarded as the most influential songwriter of his time, received the Nobel Literature diploma and medal in April but was still required to give a speech to receive the money. Dylan took weeks to publicly acknowledge even winning the prize, announced in October and greeted with both joy and dismay that a rock star had received an honor previously given to William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro among others. He did not attend December's Nobel ceremony in Stockholm and his acceptance remarks were read by the United States Ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji. 
 
 Dylan's songs have drawn on literary influences from Beat poetry to Anton Chekhov and his recording was a celebration of books and music and of the common language among art forms. In a warm, raspy delivery, with lounge-style piano in the background, he called Buddy Holly his first musical hero, praised his "imaginative verses" and remembered seeing him in concert not long before Holly died in a 1959 plane crash. 
 
 "Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction," Dylan said of seeing Holly on stage. "Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened, he looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn't know what. It gave me the chills." 
 
 Dylan said that folk songs were his earliest musical vocabulary, but that books such as "Ivanhoe" and "Don Quixote" helped shape his view of the world and inspire him to write songs "unlike anything anybody had ever heard." From the start, he believed in absorbing classical texts and the vernacular of the day. 
 
 He discussed three works at length: "Moby Dick," (a reminder we "see only the surface of things"), "All Quiet On the Western Front" (in which "death is everywhere, nothing else is possible") and "The Odyssey," a "strange, adventurous tale" he likened to such modern pop songs as Simon & Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound." He concluded by noting that Shakespeare's words were meant to be spoken, "Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page." 
 
 "And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days," he said. "I return once again to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.'" 
 
 ___ 
 
 This story has been corrected to say that the academy did say where and when the lecture was recorded and fixes the web address. ||||| It’s Bob Dylan’s party, and he’ll skip it if he wants to. Though the musician was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, it doesn’t appear he’s all that interested in celebrating the occasion—or even acknowledging it at all. The Swedish Academy has reached out to the freewheelin’ folk star several times since his win last Thursday, but hasn’t heard back from him. Now, they’re giving up. 
 
 “Right now we are doing nothing. I have called and sent e-mails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now, that is certainly enough,” the academy’s permanent secretary, Sara Danius, said in a radio interview on Monday, according to The Guardian. His silence also makes it unclear whether he will attend the annual Nobel celebration on December 10. At the ceremony, winners typically accept a diploma and medal from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. 
 
 Dylan also has yet to say anything publicly about his win, despite playing a show in Las Vegas the same day as the announcement. There, he didn’t mention or allude to his new Nobel status at all. 
 
 But don’t think twice about the Academy’s feelings. It’s all right, Danius says. “I am not at all worried,” Danius said. “I think he will show up. 
 
 “If he doesn’t want to come, he won’t come. It will be a big party in any case and the honor belongs to him,” Danius added. 
 
 Though Dylan has remained silent, the world quickly weighed in on his award. While many have made a strong case for his unorthodox win (he’s the first singer to be given the literature prize), others have argued against the Academy’s choice. 
 
 “He is a musician, and his relationship with words is as a lyricist, someone whose prose exists inexorably with music,” Matthew Schnipper writes in Pitchfork. “To read his lyrics flatly, without the sound delivering them, is to experience his art reduced.” 
 
 “[Popular music] already receives the recognition it deserves. And apart from a few spoken-word awards, no one would expect the highest honors in music to go to a writer,” Anna North writes in The New York Times. 
 
 High-profile stars have also voiced some thoughts on the surprising choice. Leonard Cohen, the poetic singer-songwriter who might also one day claim a Nobel Prize, made a funny comparison when asked about Dylan’s win, saying it’s “like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.” 
 
 Perhaps one day we’ll also hear what Bob Dylan thinks about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize. But in typical Dylan fashion, he’s keeping things a touch mysterious. The times, they are a-stayin’ the same. ||||| 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 has completed his Nobel course requirements. The Swedish Academy announced Monday that it has received the mandatory lecture from the 2016 literature winner, enabling Dylan to collect $922,000 in prize money, reports the AP. Spokeswoman Sara Danius described Dylan's talk in a news release as "extraordinary" and "eloquent." Nobel Prize officials said the 26-minute talk was recorded on Sunday in Los Angeles and an audio clip is posted on the academy's website (it can also be found on YouTube). Danius said its delivery to the academy meant that "the Dylan adventure is coming to a close." The songwriter took weeks to publicly acknowledge even winning the prize, announced in October and greeted with both joy and dismay that a rock star had received an honor previously given to William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Alice Munro among others. According to the LA Times, the musician opened the talk by saying, "When I received the Nobel Prize for literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it, and see where the connection was." Dylan said that folk songs were his earliest musical vocabulary, but that books such as Ivanhoe and Don Quixote helped shape his view of the world and inspire him to write songs "unlike anything anybody had ever heard." From the start, he believed in absorbing classical texts and the vernacular of the day. He discussed three works at length: Moby Dick, All Quiet On the Western Front, and The Odyssey, and concluded by noting that Shakespeare's words were meant to be spoken, "just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page."