This puzzle is an homage to the 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Hibbing, Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan. (Bob Dylan has used the pseudonym Jack Frost since the 1990s as a record producer.)
Each “journal article” title is a snippet of a lyric from a Dylan song, roughly transmogrified into some nonsensical academic-ish jargon. The years listed are when the song first appeared on a Dylan record, and they are presented in chronological order (songs from the same album are listed in the order they appear on the album).
The series, volume, and number values are used as three indices into the title of the corresponding song. The three letters selected by these indices form a trigram:
Trigram | Song Title | S | V | N | Article Title | Lyric Fragment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
NEL | Blowin’ in the Wind | 6 | 11 | 2 | An Inquiry Into the Number of Pelagic Excursions by Albino Columbiformes Leading to Periods of Repose in Arenaceous Regions | How many seas must a white dove sail / Before she sleeps in the sand? |
LLA | A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall | 19 | 20 | 1 | Observed Lingual Fractures Among Orators: A 10K Study | I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken. |
AME | My Back Pages | 4 | 1 | 10 | An Oneirological Interpretation of Dumas Père’s Swordsmen Concerning Their Amorous Statistics | . . . I dreamed / Romantic facts of musketeers |
SAK | Subterranean Homesick Blues | 1 | 8 | 20 | Early East Germanic Tribesmen and Their Culpability in the Disabling of Water Distribution Machinery | The pump don’t work / ’Cause the vandals took the handles. |
VIL | Love Minus Zero/No Limit | 3 | 6 | 1 | A Survey of Financiers’ Relations and Their Quest for the Ideal: Presumptions of Receiving Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh | Bankers’ nieces seek perfection / Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring |
NAM | Mr. Tambourine Man | 11 | 4 | 1 | Celestial Hexoctahedral Carbon and its Influence on Monomanual Oscillatory Terpsichorean Activity | . . . to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free |
LAN | It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue | 5 | 4 | 11 | Universal Natal Homing Among Militant Herds of Rangifer tarandus | All your reindeer armies, are all going home |
ILL | Like a Rolling Stone | 2 | 8 | 9 | Extreme Low Ocular Pressure and its Effect on the Homeless and their Propensity to Barter | . . . mystery tramp, but now you realize / He’s not selling any alibis / As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes / And ask him do you want to make a deal? |
ESA | Desolation Row | 2 | 3 | 6 | Designing a Wearable Cardiac Infarction Device Powered by Liquid Long-chain Hydrocarbon Fuel | Where the heart-attack machine / Is strapped across their shoulders / And then the kerosene |
LLE | Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues | 5 | 19 | 21 | On Physicians Who Withhold Diagnoses from Asthenic Alcoholics | I don’t have the strength / To get up and take another shot / And my best friend, my doctor / Won’t even say what it is I’ve got |
EVI | Highway 61 Revisited | 11 | 12 | 13 | The French Monarchy and Its Relation to the Disposal of Malfunctioning Communications Equipment | . . . said to Louie the King / I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings / And a thousand telephones that don’t ring / Do you know where I can get rid of these things? |
AKE | Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again | 39 | 5 | 11 | Palpebral Combustion by Fumacious Vampiric Trainmasters | . . . all the railroad men / Just drink up your blood like wine / . . . there’s only one I’ve met / An’ he just smoked my eyelids. . . |
MES | Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) | 13 | 9 | 10 | Observations on Inuit-inspired Ecstatic Saltation by Maritime Construction Workers | Ev’rybody’s building the big ships and the boats / . . . / But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here / Ev’rybody’s gonna jump for joy |
ANE | You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere | 4 | 6 | 16 | On the Incidence of Insomnia Among Royalty in the Mongol Empire | Genghis Khan / He could not keep / All his kings / Supplied with sleep |
KEV | Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door | 1 | 11 | 13 | A Longitudinal Study of The Effects of Airborne Carbon Particulates on Ballistics, Both Pre- And Post-Interment | Mama, put my guns in the ground / I can’t shoot them anymore / That long black cloud is comin’ down |
ELL | Tangled Up in Blue | 6 | 5 | 13 | Results of a Cross-Generational Observation of Noncorporeal Professionals: From Archimedes to Mary Magdalene (presumed) | All the people we used to know / They’re an illusion to me now / Some are mathematicians / Some are carpenters’ wives |
This set of trigrams can be ordered in a unique way so that each one overlaps the next by two letters; this yields the clue phrase NAMESAKE VILLANELLE.
While Bob Dylan (né Zimmerman) may or may not have taken his stage name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Thomas’s famous villanelle (and certainly the most famous villanelle in the English language) is DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT, the solution to this puzzle.