Bob Dylan might seem like he's half-asleep, but his fan base is pretty passionate (and awake).
That includes academics, law professors specifically, who are holding a conference about Bob Dylan's songs dealing with the law, according to the Associated Press. One professor, Bruce Green of Fordham University, says, "We think it's important once in awhile to have fun, and to free the scholarly imagination." If there's anything I like to see in academia, it's that people make sure fun only happens once in awhile. You wouldn't want anyone to enjoy their line of work all the time or anything.
But I digress. Back to Bob.
Abbe Smith, a Georgetown law professor, says that Bob Dylan songs, while "beautiful," played fast and loose with the facts of criminal cases. Professor Richard Underwood from the University of Kentucky College of Law says Dylan "was not necessarily concerned with true facts. He took a lot of poetic license."
Nooo. Not our Bob Dylan, plagiarist extraordinaire!
As an aside: shouldn't a professor know to avoid using "true facts" in a sentence? The great comedian/social critic George Carlin included "true facts" on his list of Favorite Redundancies from his book Brain Droppings. Those redundancies included "future plans," "lag behind," "join together," and "occasional irregularity." He included a giant list, which sometime soon I'll talk about on this blog, if only because he's more interesting than Bob Dylan. True fact!
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