"All this gray — it’s so dark, it’s so gloomy, so ugly. It’s like seeing creativity and art and the colors of my community disappear right in front of my eyes."

Said Richard Segovia, 71, a longtime resident of the Mission District of San Francisco, quoted in "The house color that tells you when a neighborhood is gentrifying/A Washington Post color analysis of D.C. found shades of gray permeate neighborhoods where the White population has increased and the Black population has decreased" (WaPo)(free-access link).

But what does gray mean?

A white woman who owns a home decor company asserts: "It all comes down to this perception of wealth and luxury, this idea that neutrals indicate status.... Black homeownership in D.C. has been shrinking for years, which means the very culture of these neighborhoods has been changing. When we see house flippers try to take color out of a house, or a neighborhood, they’re making it more palatable to mostly White people."

But what's behind all this gray?

"You’re not actually finished until you do read poetry on the weekends for fun."

Someone says in response to someone who said "I vividly remember discovering Dylan’s whole catalogue in college and consequently falling entirely out of touch with everything else music-related for a solid year, I also grew my curls out and you best believe I was wearing scarves and dressing like someone who liked to read poetry on weekends for fun."

All of that was in an r/bobdylan discussion of this new clip of Timothée Chalamet, getting (too far?) into his impersonation of Bob Dylan:

Welcome to the Church of Bob, Timmy. 🙏🏻🎶❤️
pic.twitter.com/g7N7S9DfBk

— Melanie Young 🔧 (@FreewheelinMY) December 18, 2024

What poetry does Bob read?

"Some students averted their gaze, felt offended, said they were shocked.... some also alleged the teacher made racist comments....”

Said a teacher quoted in "Nude painting row at French school sparks teacher walkout" (BBC). 

The students were 10 to 11 years old. They were exposed to a Renaissance painting that depicts the story of Diana and Actaeon from Ovid's Metamorphoses — with 5 female nudes.

Staff felt they had been left unsupported and were working in a "degraded climate".... She said the case recalled the brutal killing of Samuel Paty, who was murdered after he showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class. French authorities believe untrue rumours spread about the class contributed to inciting an 18-year-old radicalised Chechen refugee to murder him close to the teacher's school in a Paris suburb....

"Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral. The only thing that is quasi-permanent..."

"... would be a book or work of art or photographs or something. Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life. If you set your hand on fire right now, it’s ephemeral. It would hurt, but Plato would say it’s not as real as something that transcends time. I am a person who was married, and was very happily married. Yet, that’s all gone now. Where is it?... People are seduced by the beauty of the close-at-hand, and they don’t have the discipline or the predilection or the talent, maybe, to say: 'I’m not going to go out tonight. I’m not going to waste my time on Twitter. I’m going to have five hours and work on my novel.' If you did that every day, you’d have a novel. Many people say, 'I’m going to pet my cat' or 'I’m with my children.' There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, 'I don’t have anything.'... But if you read Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses,' Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal. You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets. You're reading this, so I'm still alive...."

Said Joyce Carol Oates in a NYT interview.

Oates was married from 1961 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2019. Both marriages ended when the husband died.

"It’s easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, not the well-respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday."

Says Megan Rosenbloom, author of "DARK ARCHIVES/A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin," quoted in "Yes, Books Were Bound in Human Skin. An Intrepid Librarian Finds the Proof" by James Hamblin (NYT).

In fact, anthropodermic bibliopegy was not the practice of some singularly heinous regime.... Human skin leather looks indistinguishable from that of other mammals, and only recent developments in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to tell a skin-bound book from a forgery. The making and selling of such books was pursued at many times and in many places, including late-19th-century America. John Stockton Hough, a Philadelphia physician, is known to have bound three textbooks about reproduction in the skin of Mary Lynch, a local woman who died at 28 in 1869 of tuberculosis and a parasitic infection. During an autopsy, Hough removed and preserved skin from her thighs, and then bound his books with it — presumably as a form of homage....

Rosenbloom [details]... the techniques of tanning, soaking and scraping the “hides” to preserve them. At times her descriptions seem gratuitously to indulge the same morbid fascination that has long drawn people to these objects....

Cremated remains are manufactured into all sorts of keepsakes: paperweights, gazing balls, blown-glass "art," jewelry. Is that more acceptable because it's processed into glass and retains none of the feeling of a human body?

What if a dying person wanted her skin used to make a keepsake book? My hypothetical requires the future dead body to want to be used to make a book — what book would you want to be if you wanted to be a book? — and someone who wanted to receive such a book. Presumably, the cost would be high, so deduct that from your inheritance before you say, sure, I'd love a copy of "12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos" bound in the skin of my late father. 

Harvard classics professor who teaches a course on Bob Dylan gets vindication from Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize.

The NYT has an article on Richard F. Thomas, "who has been gently teased by colleagues for teaching a freshman seminar about Bob Dylan."

Mr. Thomas uses the course, simply called “Bob Dylan,” to put the artist in context of not just popular culture of the last half-century, but the tradition of classical poets like Virgil and Homer....

There’s a stanza that goes: “I’m gonna spare the defeated — I’m gonna speak to the crowd/… I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered/I’m gonna tame the proud.” That’s pretty much a direct quote of lines spoken in the “Aeneid” by the ghost of Aeneas’s father, Anchises, who he sees in the underworld, and who basically says to him: “Other people will make sculpture. Your art, your job as a Roman, is to ‘spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.’”...

[H]e’s like Virgil or Ovid: someone who came late enough in the tradition and has enough tradition behind him — T. S. Eliot wrote about this — that he can control it and also be part of it, recreating and refreshing it.I don’t see any difference between a poet like Catullus or Virgil and Bob Dylan. I think they are doing the same things. It has to do with control of language, connecting of lyrics and melodies. That’s what makes it timeless....

I like that Thomas has never met Bob Dylan and doesn't see much need or even value to talking to him: "Whatever I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Dylan is very careful at controlling what he gets asked."

I agree. We were talking about something like that yesterday, and I was saying I didn't have any kind of feeling of wanting to know Bob Dylan personally. The Bob Dylan that matters to me comes through the art. That's the direct experience. No reason to want to go around that to get somewhere else when you're already here.

Well, I really like Professor Thomas and his Virgil-and-Ovid comparisons. I'm not going to criticize him. But seeing this article made me think the Nobel Prize is going to motivate and justify a lot of other teachers to build courses around Bob Dylan, to speak about him in lofty tones, and to impose him on the young. I'm picturing a lot of aging, self-indulgent professors devising their Bob Dylan courses....

You’ve been with the professors/And they’ve all liked your looks/With great lawyers you have/Discussed lepers and crooks/You’ve been through all of/F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books...

... and thinking that's not what Bob Dylan means.

ADDED: Here's Thomas's article "The Classical Dylan." Excerpt:

Like Dylan, Virgil was accused of plagiarism. There is an anecdote in Suetonius’ Life of Virgil 46 on the poet’s response to the critics’ charge of plagiarizing Homer: “Why don’t they try the same thefts? They’ll find out it’s easier to snatch Hercules’ club from him than a single line from Homer.” Dylan successfully stole three from Virgil, embracing T. S. Eliot’s maxim “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Poems that are layered with intertexts reveal depths of meaning through our recognition of those texts as we import other contexts that work together with new images, metaphors, and other poetic or musical effects. That is true of Virgil, Dante, Milton, and as we saw, it was true of “Lonesome Day Blues” and much else on Love and Theft. This way of writing indeed seems to be particularly a feature of the mature Dylan, starting with Time Out Of Mind. In his December 5th, 2004, 60 Minutes interview he says of “It’s Alright, Ma,” “I don’t know how I got to write those songs.” When asked if he can still write like that he replies that he cannot: “I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.”

"The headteacher of a Cambridge sixth form has defended an exam question which gave teenagers a raunchy description of sexual intercourse."

"Cambridge exam board OCR asked AS-level Latin candidates about Ovid’s Amores, in which the poet tells his mistress she can sleep with other men."

The students are 16 or 17 years old. Here's the controversial passage, translated:

“...slip off your chemise without a blush and let him get his thigh well over yours. And let him thrust his tongue as far as it will go into your coral mouth and let passion prompt you to all manner of pretty devices. Talk lovingly. Say all sorts of naughty things, and let the bed creak and groan as you writhe with pleasure. But as soon as you have got your things on again, look the nice demure little lady you ought to be, and let your modesty belie your wantonness. Bamboozle society, bamboozle me; but don’t let me know it, that’s all; and let me go on living in my fool’s paradise.”

Bamboozle, eh? Where was this translated? India? I'm just remembering the "Author's Note" to the novel "The Life of Pi":

When I told a friend who knew the country well of my travel plans, he said casually, "They speak funny English in India. They like words like bamboozle." I remembered his words as my plane started its descent towards Delhi, so the word bamboozle was my one preparation for the rich, noisy, functioning madness of India. I used the word on occasion, and truth be told, it served me well. To a clerk at a train station, I said, "I didn't think the fare would be so expensive. You're not trying to bamboozle me, are you?" He smiled and chanted, "No sir! There is no bamboozlement here. I have quoted you the correct fare."

The (unlinkable) OED on the etymology of "bamboozle":

Appears about 1700; mentioned in the Tatler No. 230 (on ‘the continual Corruption of our English Tongue’) among other slang terms (banter, put, kidney, sham, mob, bubble, bully, etc.) recently invented or brought into vogue. Probably therefore of cant origin; the statement that it is a Gipsy word wants proof.