Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture Says the Unsayable
He describes great literature at length both to explain his songs and to show why they’re beyond explanation.
If you’ve never gotten around to sitting down and reading Moby Dick, fear not, Bob Dylan will summarize it for you. Excerpted from his newly released Nobel Lecture in Literature, here is the opening paragraph of his description of Herman Melville’s opus:
is a fascinating book, a book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab—captain of a ship called the Pequod—an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he pursues him all the
