"[His diary] paints a portrait of Dr. Fauci as obsessed with himself, reveling in his own importance and the celebrities he knows..."

"... from the actress Julia Roberts to the singers Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand.... The entries were also full of references to Hollywood stars, some of whom seemed star-struck over him.... Barbra Streisand called asking for vaccine advice. When Dr. Fauci told her he listened to her music on Alexa, the virtual assistant, she confessed she didn’t know what Alexa was. 'I accidentally butt called her later in the evening,' Dr. Fauci wrote, and when he played her music over Alexa, she 'absolutely loved it!' Joan Baez painted a portrait of him. Julia Roberts introduced him at an awards ceremony. 'She is so charming, natural, fun and amazingly beautiful,' Dr. Fauci wrote of Ms. Roberts. 'When my image came up on the screen,” he added, “she gasped and said that every time she sees me her throat gets dry and she gets nervous.'"

From "Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame/Private entries, released by a Republican senator, have reignited a furious debate over whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab" (NYT gift link).

The "Republican senator" is Rand Paul, who's engaging in some taunting:

What Anthony Fauci looked like every night when he wrote about how great he is in his diary. pic.twitter.com/KbPvbtyi7g

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 27, 2026

And here's that Joan Baez artwork. Baez enfolds Fauci in her political schemata:

"The teams totaled 34 hits, and 14 pitchers combined to throw 444 pitches. It was the fourth game in major league history with at least 29 runs and 11 homers."

I'm reading "Brewers outlast A's 15-14 in 12 innings as teams combine for 11 homers and 34 hits in Las Vegas/Andrew Vaughn had four hits and four RBIs, including a two-run double that tied the score in the ninth inning, and the Milwaukee Brewers outlasted the Athletics 15-14 in 12 innings at Las Vegas Ballpark in a wild game that featured 11 homers" (WaPo).

No, I wasn't watching. That game started at my bedtime — 9 p.m.

I just noticed that there's a team now that's just named the Athletics — no city/state in the name. Just the mascot... and it's the most generic mascot. The Athletics. And they played in Las Vegas last night — "at the site of their Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas Aviators." They seem homeless. They're not in Oakland anymore, and their normal home these days is West Sacramento, but not enough of a home to become part of its name. Playing a few games in Las Vegas this week has something to do with Las Vegas being its future home. A new stadium will open in 2028.

But maybe you watched basketball last night. I'd rather watch a random baseball game than an important basketball game, but I did pause the movie I was watching and go downstairs to hear the National Anthem and catch a glimpse of Trump. The NYT says "Mr. Trump smiled and saluted in the face of deafening boos when he briefly appeared on the arena’s video board...." I went back to my movie — "A Complete Unknown," now, finally, on HBO — but I did look up the result this morning. I see Trump ruined everything:

Ooh, that Trump. The Knicks lost. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan won. That's what Joan Baez says to him at the end of the biopic: "You won." He's all "What did I win?" and then he rides off into the sunset on his motorcycle. 

What Joan Baez said about crashing her newly bought Tesla.

"Yes, I did. God was speaking to me, because I got this car—literally, I was trying it out. I drove for 45 minutes, I drove home—boom: I backed into a big tree and it was destroyed."

I read that in this Vanity Fair article: "Joan Baez Thinks Timothée Chalamet Was 'Too Clean' to Play Bob Dylan/The iconic musician opens up about her detachment from Dylan, her political engagement, and her real thoughts on A Complete Unknown."

I read that out loud and said: "That's a kind of corny old humor — something happens and you say 'God is punishing me' or something.'"

Meade said: "Well, she does have that song, 'I Believe in God.'"

The song is "God Is God" ("Yeah, I believe in God and God ain't me.... And I believe in God but God ain't us.... But I believe in God and God is God")(written by Steve Earle, who is, I think, the background singer).

"They say that the film is based on my book. But the film has virtually nothing in it that’s from my book."

"There are hundreds of moments [in the film] that didn’t happen. The film is fiction."

Says Eric Wald, quoted in "For Bob Dylan’s biographer, 'A Complete Unknown' is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction/Elijah Wald’s 'Dylan Goes Electric'inspired the new Timothée Chalamet-led Dylan biopic" (Forward).

Wald starts ticking off movie scenes that never happened in real life — Dylan arriving at Newport on a motorcycle, Van Ronk telling Dylan that Woody Guthrie is in the hospital... Joan Baez... being part of the Greenwich Village folk scene (no, Cambridge, she hated New York)....

“The example that keeps coming back to me, though,” Wald continues, “is the morning after the whole craziness goes down at Newport — with Dylan riding off on his motorcycle past the fairgrounds where Pete Seeger is helping put away the folding chairs. Dylan did not have his motorcycle at Newport and I don’t think Pete Seeger was out that morning putting away folding chairs.”...

That example says a lot about cinematic art. It's good to show specific, concrete things that carry a lot of meaning and evoke strong or delicate feelings. Wald says the movie is "poetically accurate." Yes, Bob with the motorcycle and Pete with the folding chairs replaces what in the book is extensive examination of Pete's devotion to communalism and Bob's individualism. A movie could just have Bob and Pete talking about these concepts and how they apply to events in their lives. That could work in live theater or even in a movie (as in my favorite movie, "My Dinner With Andre"), but movies are expected to be highly visual. If they're not, what was all the money for?

Dylan tweeted his approval of the movie, but he hadn't seen it yet. Wald says: "My sense is that he likes movies and he has never had any hesitation about fictionalizing his life." That sounds right.

"We’d go around, do this dog and pony show, and I would open up for him, singing, and people would all get together to hear David Harris talking about how we’re going to change the world."

Said Joan Baez, quoted in "David Harris, Leader of Vietnam Draft Resistance Movement, Dies at 76/An activist who went to jail for refusing to serve in the military, he teamed with and married Joan Baez and later became a journalist" (NYT).

"I walked into the Oval Office, and the president ... got down on one knee."

Said Dick Van Dyke, who's 95 years old, and who went to the White House on Thursday, a little reception on the occasion of honors being doled out by the Kennedy Center. 

The other honorees, according to The Hill, were Garth Brooks, Debbie Allen, Joan Baez and Midori. I can't tell whether Biden got down on one knee for all of them or just for Van Dyke.

The only other detail in the linked article is that Joan Baez sang "(Ain't Gonna Let Nobody) Turn Me Around." 

She probably only sang the first verse. Here's the second verse:

Ain't gonna let the administration turn me around...

Turn me around...

Keep on a-walkin'

Keep on a-talkin'

Gonna build a brand new world

Well, those are the lyrics as presented at Genius lyrics. Reading them, I conclude that singers improvise endlessly about the thing they're not going to let turn them around.

Is it pro-science when Joan Baez paints "TRUST FAUCI"? It's art, by a person presenting artist credentials, and it's telling you to trust an authority figure.

Dr. Fauci continues to be disrespected & marginalized by the administration's lack of commitment to science. My painting offers the message to TRUST FAUCI. We can put our faith in science & truth, not lies, smoke screens & snake oil. #TRUSTFAUCI #TRUTHMATTERS #SCIENCEMATTERS pic.twitter.com/candsYYDPt

— Joan Baez (@joancbaez) September 4, 2020

The Oxford English Dictionary "Word of the Day" is "Dylanesque."

The (unlinkable) OED defines "Dylanesque":

Resembling or reminiscent of Bob Dylan or his work, esp. his songs or records, which are characterized by poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics, a distinctive, abrasive vocal delivery, and music rooted in traditional American styles, such as folk, blues, and country; (sometimes) spec. typical or redolent of the folk music of his early records, which combined lyrics of social protest with acoustic guitar and harmonica playing.

I read that definition out loud to Meade and — saying I thought "poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics" got to the heart of it — asked him to dredge up a "Dylanesque" line from the junkpile of his memories. He said:

And she buttoned her boot
And straightened her suit
Then she said, “Don’t get cute”

That's "Fourth Time Around."

I said the first thing that came to my mind was:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon

But I knew I only thought that because I remember Bob on "60 Minutes" saying:

I don’t know how I got to write those songs.... All those early songs were almost magically written. Ah… “Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…” Well, try to sit down and write something like that.

If I'd really consulted the junkpile of my memories, I'd have said:

You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine

So you can see how Meade and I go together — he's got the suit getting straightened and I've got the leopard-skin pillbox hat balancing on the head. There is order over chaos in the midst of the poetic, often enigmatic.

By the way, I'm working on writing up my post for the 1964 entry in my "imaginary music project," and by chance it contains a ridiculous Dylan lyric:

Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp...
You always responded when I needed your help

Is that Dylanesque? It's not enigmatic. It's just a very ordinary statement about a relationship —  "You always responded when I needed your help" — and daring to put the least possible effort into finding a rhyme for "help."

The best advice re song lyrics and "help" — which only has 2 other rhymes ("whelp" and "yelp") — is don't put it at the end of a line. When The Beatles wrote a whole song "Help," they kept it at the beginning of lines, and made the words at the ends of lines all easy to rhyme ("down," "way," "ways," "insecure").

Do The Beatles have their own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary? Yes, but it's just "Beatle" — "Applied attributively to the hair-style or other characteristics of ‘The Beatles’ or of their imitators." The examples — all from the mid-60s — are about things other than poetry: "the Beatle cut," "Beatle fans," "Beatle wallpapers," "Beatle wigs."

And that sends me back to the enigmatic junkpile of Dylan lyrics. Dylan has 5 song lyrics with "wig" (and if you can name all 5 you get a Bob Dylan merit badge):

1 & 2 (the same line is in 2 different songs): "... they’re beatin’ the devil out of a guy/Who’s wearing a powder-blue wig..."

3. "... Jezebel the nun she violently knits/A bald wig for Jack the Ripper..."

4. "I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind/I’m no pig without a wig/I hope you treat me kind..."

5. "She took off her wheel, took off her bell/Took off her wig, said, 'How do I smell?'"

I wish I knew, but I've got this anosmia/I wish I could wake up and smell the cosmea...

IN THE COMMENTS: khematite remembers a 6th Bob Dylan "wig" lyric (which was obscured from my search because it's "wig-hat" (and I've always found that a funny expression, because a wig is a kind of hat, isn't it?))?

I sat with my high-heeled sneakers on
Waiting to play tennis in the noonday sun
I had my white shorts rolled up past my waist
And my wig-hat was falling in my face
But they wouldn’t let me on the tennis court

Hey! Man in shorts! Bob Dylan in shorts. Has that ever even happened?

I'm going to say no.

"JFK files: FBI documents allege Martin Luther King Jr. had secret lovechild, orgies."

The Sacramento Bee reports.

The material is less salacious than it seemed when it wasn't revealed. The man had a longstanding affair and other sex outside of marriage, it is said. And he "enjoy[ed] the abnormal by engaging in group sexual orgies."

Amazing how little it matters now... other than to make me ask Where is this person? about the "love child."

And it's interesting that one of the lovers was, allegedly, Joan Baez.

Bill Flanagan interviews Bob Dylan. Read the whole thing — it's nice and long...

... here. Bob is pushing his new album, "Triplicate," which is 3 discs of him singing standards like "That Old Feeling" (my favorite song when I was about 4 and had no old feelings) and "Sentimental Journey" (the song my parents considered their song for reasons I only came to understand, suddenly, 4 years ago).

Bob gives an explanation for why he put the 30 songs on 3 CDs when they would have fit on 2 CDs:  

Is there something about the 10 song, 32 minute length that appeals to you?

Sure, it’s the number of completion. It’s a lucky number, and it’s symbolic of light. As far as the 32 minutes, that’s about the limit to the number of minutes on a long playing record where the sound is most powerful, 15 minutes to a side. My records were always overloaded on both sides. Too many minutes to be recorded or mastered properly. My songs were too long and didn’t fit the audio format of an LP. The sound was thin and you would have to turn your record player up to nine or ten to hear it well. So these CDs to me represent the LPs that I should have been making.

That's either mystical, metaphorical, or bullshit.

Are you concerned about what Bob Dylan fans think about these standards?

These songs are meant for the man on the street, the common man, the everyday person. Maybe that is a Bob Dylan fan, maybe not, I don’t know....

"On Yom Kippur in 1937, the Day of Atonement and fasting, the 12-year-old Nat sat on his porch on a street leading to a synagogue and slowly ate a salami sandwich."

"It made him sick, and the action outraged his father. He had not done it to scandalize passing Jews who glared at him, he said in a memoir, 'Boston Boy' (1986). 'I wanted to know how it felt to be an outcast,' he wrote. 'Except for my father’s reaction and for getting sick, it turned out to be quite enjoyable.'"

From the NYT obituary for Nat Hentoff. The "author, journalist, jazz critic and civil libertarian who called himself a troublemaker" was 91.

While his sympathies were usually libertarian, he often infuriated leftist friends with his opposition to abortion, his attacks on political correctness and his criticisms of gay groups, feminists, blacks and others he accused of trying to censor opponents. He relished the role of provocateur, indirectly defending racial slurs, apartheid and pornography.

He had a firebrand’s face: wreathed in a gray beard and a shock of unruly hair, with dark, uncompromising eyes. Once a student asked what made him tick. “Rage,” he replied. But he said it softly, and friends recalled that his invective, in print or in person, usually came wrapped in gentle good humor and respectful tones....

In “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other” (1992), he attacked not only school boards that banned books but also feminists who tried to silence abortion foes or close pornographic bookstores; gay rights groups that boycotted Florida orange juice because its spokeswoman, Anita Bryant, crusaded against gay people; and New York officials who tried to bar South Africa’s rugby team because it represented the land of apartheid.

ADDED: Here's Nat Hentoff writing about Bob Dylan in 1964 in The New Yorker. Read the whole thing. Here's the first paragraph. They don't let you publish big bulky paragraphs like this anymore: