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. ||||| Here we go again. Bob Dylan is being accused by a Washington, D.C., journalist of plagiarizing portions of his Nobel Prize for literature lecture from SparkNotes, a study guide like Cliffs Notes. 
 
 Dylan, who has been accused over the years of lifting passages from various poets and novelists for his song lyrics, was required by the Swedish Academy to give a lecture in order to receive his prize and the $920,000 that goes with it. 
 
 Opting not to attend the Nobel ceremonies in December, Dylan submitted the recorded lecture on June 4. In his speech, the Minnesota-born bard says Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby-Dick” — as well as Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Homer’s “The Odyssey” — had a big influence on him. However, when he references “Moby-Dick,” the passages apparently were taken from the SparkNotes summary of the book, not the novel itself, journalist Andrea Pitzer asserts in a story published Tuesday in Slate. 
 
 She offers side-by-side passages of SparkNotes and Dylan’s speech to support the theory that he cribbed narrative summaries. However, she does not accuse him of lifting opinions. Pitzer, a Washington, D.C., writer specializing in history, is the author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps” and “The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.” 
 
 Pitzer posits that 20 passages from SparkNotes’ “Moby-Dick” notes show up in Dylan’s Nobel lecture with similar wording. For example: 
 
 “There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels,” Dylan offered, “and he predicts Ahab’s doom.” 
 
 Comparing notes: Speech excerpts show similarity to SparkNotes analysis. A10 
 
 Pitzer cited the SparkNotes statement — “One of the ships ... carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom” — that does not appear in the novel. 
 
 Dylan’s been accused before 
 
 This seems to be the latest in an ongoing series of kerfuffles over sources of Dylan’s work, allegations that date to his first album of original material, 1963’s “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Detractors said he rewrote songs by Lead Belly and Henry Thomas, which Dylan said was part of the folk tradition, and that he borrowed the melody for “Blowin’ in the Wind” from a 16th century Protestant hymn. 
 
 Much ado was made over Dylan’s 2006 album “Modern Times,” the final in a highly acclaimed trilogy of comeback albums of potent original material. Researchers pointed out that snippets of lyrics could be traced to the works of Ovid, Henry Timrod and other poets. 
 
 Dylan himself addressed the indictments in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview with journalist Mikal Gilmore. 
 
 “In folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It’s true for everybody, but me. There are different rules for me,” Dylan said. “And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? … And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get.” He added: “It’s an old thing — it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back.” 
 
 Dylan continued: “I’m working within my art form. I work within the rules and limitations of it. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.” 
 
 The use of phrases from SparkNotes in the Nobel lecture is different from the folk process, said Alex Lubet, a University of Minnesota music professor who has taught classes on Dylan. He’d be concerned if Dylan had turned in a classroom assignment using this approach. But he considers the context. 
 
 “His lecture is wild and strange,” Lubet said Tuesday. “It’s meant to be a post-modern work of art. Any kind of a collage technique is fair game.” 
 
 Cultural critic David Yaffe, a Syracuse University professor of humanities who teaches a class on singer-songwriters including Dylan, doesn’t see this alleged plagiarizing as detracting from the value of the lecture. 
 
 “I was very moved by his speech and I’m not any less moved knowing this. I don’t find myself feeling like a dupe,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “He’s on the road all the time. He just turned 76. You could see him wanting to take a few shortcuts. I don’t think it makes him any less Bob Dylan.” 
 
 Will the Swedish Academy rescind Dylan’s Nobel Prize? 
 
 “That would be historic,” Yaffe said with a chuckle. “I don’t think they will.” ||||| 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: ||||| There will be some who doubt Dylan’s right to the Nobel prize in literature. There are others who believe he should get a special Nobel just for being Bob Dylan 
 
 In the latest of many distinctions garlanding a career stretching back five-and-a-half decades, Bob Dylan has become the first member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to win the Nobel prize in literature. Some will argue against the award, as they argued against him in the long and infinitely tiresome Dylan v Keats controversy, and as others have contested the meaning and value of every phase and nuance of his output. Others will feel that he deserves the creation of a special Nobel prize simply for being Bob Dylan, however that condition is defined. 
 
 Pop lyrics aren't literature? Tell that to Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan Read more 
 
 So, to confront the familiar argument, can what he does be called literature? And if he is being judged on literary grounds, should Tarantula, his “novel” of the mid-60s (started and abandoned in 1965, widely bootlegged and finally published officially in 1971), be taken as evidence? His fans know the first line by heart – “Aretha / Crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him” – but few reached the end. There was no music, as Dylan himself must have realised when he set it aside. 
 
 Essentially, in the work of Bob Dylan, the words and the music cannot be separated. Just take your favourite Dylan line. Yours might be the ever timely “Where preachers preach of evil fates / Teachers teach that knowledge waits / Can lead to hundred-dollar plates / Goodness hides behind its gates / But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked”, from It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) in 1965. Or the eternal “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” (Visions of Johanna, 1966) or the mysterious “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl” (All Along the Watchtower, 1968). Whichever it is, when you say them to yourself, as we all do in times of need, you’ll be hearing his voice, his sound, his music. 
 
 Mine – at this moment, anyway, because the choice is bound to change from time to time when the library is so vast and rich – happens to be a simple line from Brownsville Girl, an 11-minute epic he co-wrote with Sam Shepard in 1986: “Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” This is not “literary”, or poetic by his former standards. There is no “midnight’s broken toll” or “geometry of innocence”. Dylan phrases it so perfectly in a single breath that the meaning is rendered starkly and with profound resonance. That’s what he does. 
 
 The admirable delicacy of the Nobel committee’s citation – “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” – will certainly have provoked a buzz among analysts of Dylan’s career. For one thing, the last two albums released by a man now in his 76th year consisted entirely of material drawn from what has become known as the Great American Songbook: compositions by the very Broadway tunesmiths, in fact, who Dylan the songwriter seemed in the eyes of his own generation to have been invented to destroy. Dylan, however, has always been fond of turning his own iconoclasm on the idea of iconoclasm itself, his protests against being called a protest singer just one example of that refusal to conform to even the freshest of stereotypes. 
 
 Similarly, he never wanted to tear down the walls of Tin Pan Alley. That was an inference drawn by others, useful in the early phase of his career, when he drew from what he had heard in the collection of antique songs on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music – the ballads and blues, the music of hard times – and somehow infused it all with the onrushing anti-authoritarian, anti-deferential spirit of his own era. 
 
 As the Nobel citation correctly suggests, Dylan knitted himself – without anyone realising it, perhaps even him– into the warp and weft of American popular music. Borrowing wholesale from the past, reshuffling melodies, images, characters and attitudes, he helped assemble the components of a rapidly changing present. 
 
 Fifty years ago he used a fairly minor motorcycle accident as an excuse to step away from the spotlight. But the end of the “perfect” Dylan – the one who fused what he had learnt from Woody Guthrie and the symbolist poets with the energy of rock’n’roll, and who mocked the world from behind impenetrable shades – did not mean the end of his creativity. In songs such as Tangled Up in Blue (1975), Blind Willie McTell (1983) and Cross the Green Mountain (2002) he explored ways of playing games with time, voice and perspective, continuing to expand the possibilities of song in ways that disarm all possible criticism of this new and perhaps greatest honour. ||||| Bob Dylan, Titan Of American Music, Wins 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Paul Natkin/Getty Images Paul Natkin/Getty Images 
 
 Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. The prolific musician is the first Nobel winner to have forged a career primarily as a singer-songwriter. What's more, he's also the first American to have won the prize in more than two decades. Not since novelist Toni Morrison won in 1993 has an American claimed the prize. 
 
 Dylan earned the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," according to the citation by the Swedish Academy, the committee that annually decides the recipient of the Nobel Prize. The academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius, announced the news Thursday. 
 
 The win comes as something of a shock. As usual, the Swedish Academy did not announce a shortlist of nominees, leaving the betting markets to their best guesses. And while Dylan has enjoyed perennial favor as an outside shot for the award, the prospect that the musician would be the one to break the Americans' long dry spell was regarded as far-fetched — not least because he made his career foremost on the stage, not the printed page. 
 
 Yet few would argue Dylan has been anything but influential, both in the U.S. and beyond its borders. The prolific singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has produced dozens of albums, including The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks. His track "Like a Rolling Stone" has taken on mythic standing in the decades since its release; many, including Dylan himself, have pointed to it as emblematic of a sea change in American music. 
 
 "Tin Pan Alley is gone," Dylan proclaimed in 1985, referring the dominant conventions established by music publishers of the early 20th century. "I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now." 
 
 Dylan, who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, "has the status of an icon," the Swedish Academy wrote in a biographical note. "His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature." 
 
 In an interview following the announcement, Danius elaborated on the Swedish Academy's decision: "He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition, and he is a wonderful sampler — a very original sampler," Danius explained. "For 54 years now he has been at it and reinventing himself, constantly creating a new identity." 
 
 And for his work, he has been amply recognized by critical community. Dylan has won Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S. Now, to that trove of honors Dylan has added a Nobel. 
 
 The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded since 1901 to writers who have produced "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." In that time, 109 prizes have been distributed to 113 writers. This year, the prize carries with it a purse of approximately $900,000 and, as usual, inclusion on literature's most illustrious list — the pantheon of Nobel winners. 
 
 The 75-year-old artist will receive his award in Stockholm on Dec. 10. ||||| Today in literature: How Bob Dylan became the favorite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature without doing anything, more details on the Jeffrey Eugenides Times Square billboard, and Rod Stewart is writing a memoir and he wants you to know it will be candid. 
 
 If you believe the betting firm Ladbrokes, Bob Dylan is now the favorite to win Nobel Prize for Literature tomorrow. Since the Atlantic Wire first looked at the Ladbrokes board last week, the odds against a Dylan win have shortened from 100-to-1 to 5-to-1 Tuesday afternoon. This is a fun story, but it's likely Dylan's rise is just a magnified version of the natural movement all point spreads and fixed-odds experience as more and more gamblers place their bets. Bookmakers adjust their odds based on the amount of action a bet receives, not who they think the most likely winners are. (For example: the odds of the Detroit Lions winning the Super Bowl are 12-to-1. Before week one of the NFL season, this bet was paying 25-to-1. They've won their four games, which has led to more people taking the bet. Which is why the line moved.) The same thing is happening with Dylan: in a press release issued earlier today, Ladbrokes said 80 percent of the bets the firm logged in a span of 12 hours yesterday were on Dylan. We asked RJ Bell, CEO of the sports betting Web site pregame.com, what usually drives such furious movement. "Public opinion are typically reflected by gradual changes in the odds," he wrote in an email. "Expert opinions are identifiable by extreme changes in the odds - the result of substantial betting driven by an expert's confidence." That holds up when the bet is about football, but nobody nobody really knows how to bet on the Nobel prize. So Ladbrokes spokesman Alex Donohue is technically right when he says "everything now points to Dylan taking the prize," but he had the advantage of being a name people recognized Now that he's moving, there's an impression that he's in the running win. Which might happen, anything's possible, but the actual odds of that are steeper than 5-to-1. [The Guardian] 
 
 Rod Stewart has signed a deal with Random House imprint Crown Archetype to write a memoir. The book is slated to come out next year. Like fellow 2012 rock memoirist Neil Young, Stewart swears he's planning to write an honest, unvarnished account of his personal and professional lives. Because he's Rod Stewart, he goes out of his way in the press release to say he'll be sharing stories involving "socks and knickers under the bed." [GalleyCat] 
 
 We told you yesterday about novelist Jeffrey Eugenides becoming newest and least likely Times Square billboard subject and more details on the picture are trickling in. Apparently Eugenides' wife Karen Yamaguchi was his stylist, which means she deserves the credit for finding the vest that Eugenides should start wearing to all public appearances, because it is now his trademark. Who the squinting, windswept Eugenides looks like is a matter of perception. A Farrar, Straus, and Giroux spokesperson suggested the Marlboro Man, but we see him more as Indiana Jones' globetrotting best friend from the comparative literature department. [The New York Observer] 
 
 Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at rgustini at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. 
 
 Ray Gustini ||||| Representing the Nobel laureate at the prize-giving, the US singer admitted nerves in performance at Swedish academy 
 
 A very nervous Patti Smith initially stumbled through A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall in Stockholm on Saturday in a performance given to mark Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize for literature. 
 
 Making the award, Horace Engdahl, a Swedish literary historian and critic and member of the Swedish academy that awards the prize, responded to international criticism of the choice of a popular lyricist as recipient. 
 
 Engdahl said that when Dylan’s songs were heard first in the 1960s, “all of a sudden much of the bookish poetry in our world felt anaemic”. 
 
 The academy’s choice of Dylan, Engdahl said in Swedish, “seemed daring only beforehand and already seems obvious”. 
 
 And it was an unconventional prize-giving night in more ways than one. Dylan’s failure to attend the august gathering in Stockholm meant that Smith, the American singer most famous for her 1975 album, Horses, and the hit song Because the Night, was attending as his proxy. 
 
 The occasion proved too much for the singer, 69, who faltered after a few verses. Forgetting the lyric “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”, she apologised quietly but profusely to the jewel-bedecked audience and asked if she could start that section of the song again. “I am so nervous,” she explained. 
 
 Smith was encouraged by applause from the gathered dignatories and members of the Swedish royal family. 
 
 Her performance followed Engdahl’s justificatory speech, which opened with the question: “What brings about the great shifts in the world of literature? Often it is when someone seizes upon a simple, overlooked form, discounted as art in the high sense, and makes it mutate.” 
 
 In this way, Engdahl argued, the novel had once emerged from anecdote and letters, while drama had eventually derived from games and performance. 
 
 “In the distant past all poetry was sung or tunefully recited,” he said. Dylan had dedicated himself to music played for ordinary people and tried to copy it. 
 
 “But when he started to write songs they came out differently,” Engdahl said. “He panned poetry gold, whether on purpose or by accident is irrelevant … he gave back to poetry its elevated style, lost since the romantics.” 
 
 The award, announced in October, was the first to be given to a songwriter. Dylan took two weeks to return the academy’s phone calls or publicly acknowledge the award – which comes with prize money of $870,000 (£734,000) – leading to one member calling him “impolite and arrogant”. 
 
 Dylan, 75, wrote to the academy last month to say he had been left “speechless” by the honour, but that other commitments had made it “unfortunately impossible” for him to attend the ceremony. 
 
 
 
 However, the foundation said that the folk singer would be presented with his prize some time next year, either in Sweden or abroad. 
 
 The no-show has created a stir in Sweden, where it has been perceived as a slight towards the Swedish academy, which awards the literature prize, and the Nobel Foundation. 
 
 Dylan’s Nobel address will be read out by Engdahl at the ceremony.
– "Bob Dylan" was one of the top Twitter trends Thursday thanks to the troubadour taking home the Nobel Prize for Literature. But while most of social media is beaming at his newest honor, Scottish author Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel Trainspotting, isn't terribly pleased, the AP reports. Welsh spent much of Thursday morning on Twitter retweeting posts that trashed Dylan's win, and tweeting: "I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies." His main beef appears to be the separation of a metaphorical church and state—in this case, songs and lit—that he thinks should exist, adding, "If you're a 'music' fan, look it up in the dictionary. Then 'literature'. Then compare and contrast." Other takes on Dylan's new laureate status: The Wall Street Journal lists feedback from major authors, from the gushing—Salman Rushdie writes on Twitter, "From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice"—to the eyerolling, including satirical writer Gary Shteyngart's take: "I totally get the Nobel committee. Reading books is hard." Jay Perini gives a thumbs-up at CNN, noting how Dylan's songs "speak to our deepest concerns" and how he's "filled our heads with language that both interprets and transforms the realities we confront." At the Guardian, Richard Williams looks at whether music and literature can actually be successfully linked (in terms of a Nobel Prize), and he breaks it down line by line to show the "profound resonance" of Dylan's lyrics. Robert Chalmers makes the slightly uncomfortable observation for GQ that "everything would be so much more simple if he were dead," as Dylan would have ascended to legendary status. But Chalmers still jumps on the pro-Dylan bandwagon, noting, "His voice may, like the Havana cigars and bourbon to which it is often lazily compared, be an acquired taste, but Dylan is responsible, as much as Billie Holiday, for reinventing the whole style of popular singing." Meanwhile, a naysayer singing the Black "Eating Crow" Blues: Alex Shephard, who wrote last week for the New Republic that "Bob Dylan 100 percent is not going to win. Stop saying Bob Dylan should win the Nobel Prize."