Rock musician Bob Dylan performs at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles. Photo by Robert Galbraith via Reuters

Bob Dylan should cut a check to the author of the SparkNotes entry on “Moby Dick,” since the singer’s Nobel Prize lecture appears to have cribbed from the online Cliffs Notes.

So says Andrea Pitzer of Slate.com, who joined Ben Greenman in accusing Dylan of plagiarism.

“In the interest of settling any potential moral debt, I would encourage him to throw some of his $923,000 prize to whoever wrote the original version of the online summary,” Pitzer said.

“In Dylan’s recounting, a ‘Quaker pacifist priest’ tells Flask, the third mate, ‘Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness’ … No such line appears anywhere in Herman Melville’s novel. However, SparkNotes’ character list describes the preacher using similar phrasing, as ‘someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness.’”

Others used online plagiarism-catchers to finger Dylan’s lifting of passages from SparkNotes.

Pitzer said that in 78 sentences Dylan used to describe Moby-Dick, “even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site.”

Dylan has been accused of copying ideas before. But the latest suspicion has dismayed his fans. He hasn’t responded yet to questions about the lecture recorded in Los Angeles.

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