Roy Kelly, an old Bobcompadre, has sent me the URL for another blog posting about the Minneapolis Dylan Symposium: Aldon Lynn Nielsen's HeatStrings. This is very generously photo-illustrated. The bit that made me smile was this:

"You'll notice that both Steve Scobie (glasses and red shirt) and I are seen wearing black leather jackets. This is because we are both academics."

Roy Kelly also alerted me to a splendid website called Victorian London. This is built around a phenomenal "dictionary", with boundless info on every conceivable sub-subject... but I also like the idea of the Dickens Search Engine, and trying it out on the word "varnish", for no particular reason, yielded extremely quick results.

I'd have said that this was nothing to do with Bob Dylan, except that now we know that so much of other people's work has been smuggled not only into his songs but also into the prose of Chronicles Volume One - including bits of Mark Twain, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and Proust - perhaps a Dickens Search Engine may come in handy even for Bobcat business.