Come gather round scholars wherever you roam, and admit that the academic waters around rock's most celebrated wordsmith have grown.
Pretty deep in some places, too, writes David Cohen, in the wake of Bob Dylan's endearingly mistitled new album, Modern Times, which has returned the 65-year-old songwriter to the top of the charts for the first time in a generation.
Thirty years on from the great gargler's last transatlantic smash, Desire, and 28 years after Betsy Bowden's Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan became the first of many scholarly dissertations on Dylan to make it to editorial process, the time has probably never been better for tenured Dylanologists to add to the Niagara of commentary frothing and churning online.
Uri Misgav, writing at Haaretz.com, says:
From the first time I heard Dylan, at the age of 17, he tore me apart. He built another floor in my brain, infiltrated my soul.
If Dylan is an ocean, Misgav says:
the internet is constructing numberless ports along its shores.
Misgav references
large numbers of fanatics of all genders and colors [who] offer their wares on the web, devotedly maintaining sites that illustrate the range of symptoms of the illness.
These fanatics include Olof Bjorner, from Sweden, who "manages a vast compendium of information about the history of Dylan's recordings and performances", to Bill Pagel, who tracks Dylan's 200 or so concerts a year.
According to Misgav, Pagel's tribute to Dylan has had more than 14 million visitors from more than 166 countries and territories since going online 11 years ago.
Still, if the reviewer from this newspaper was on the money in noting that the recent album also marked a competition among ordinary mortals "to see who can slather Bob Dylan's 32nd studio album with the most deranged praise known to man", then what's to be made of some of the more over-caffeinated general academic chatter in Dylan's honour these days?
Little matter. Harvard University's Richard Thomas, for instance, has recently discovered - from a New Zealand informant, of all sources - that some of Dylan's lines on the new recording were possibly filched from the Roman poet Ovid. The professor of Greek and Latin intends including the news in a book he is currently writing.
Meanwhile, from the Boston Globe comes word of editors at one university press gender neutering one of Dylan's best known introductory lines:
How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man
by replacing "man" with the more inclusive "individual". How uncool is that?
Definitely not a patch on law professor Alex B Long's The Uses and Misuses of Popular Music Lyrics in Legal Writing, which has just been published online in pdf format, in which the Oklahoma City University academic analyses the world's leading law journals to find the most-cited songwriters in legal jurisprudence.
Long's study of cites finds, perhaps not surprisingly, that Dylan didn't title his most under-rated album Street Legal for nothing - a scholarly discovery that spurred academic blogger PrawfsBlawg to hail the
Oklahoma researcher as:
the coolest professor in the legal academy
Which may or may not be correct - though let's not get into that - but still doesn't answer the more important question begged by the latest rash of academic comment:
Who, pray tell, is the greatest Dylanologist of them all?
