You know something is happening here, but you don't know what it is

While mowing the lawn this afternoon, I ran across a toad. Not literally, I am pleased to report, but it was a close thing: the toad seemed to think that if it flattened itself down into the grass, this would somehow make it invisible to the lawnmower, and unfortunately this tactic almost worked on me. But I picked up the toad, which was the usual brown-and-olive camouflage that turns up in backyards around here, and carried to safety; admired it for a few moments, and went back to the lawn. And less than a minute later, I had Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" stuck in my head, where it is still in residence.

I had nothing better to do with my brain while finishing the lawn, other than periodically checking to make sure the toad hadn't thrown itself in front of the mower again (it remained sedately under the rhododendrons), so I marked down the chain of associations. It started with Hans Christian Andersen's "The Marsh King's Daughter," which I have been wanting to work into a poem or a story for some time now—it's perhaps my favorite of his tales, and full of eerie echoes.* And went from there.

In the day she was as beautiful as any fairy, but she had a bad wicked temper; at night on the other hand she became a hideous toad, quiet and pathetic with sad mournful eyes. There were two natures in her both in soul and body continually shifting . . . by day had her mother's form and her father's evil nature; but at night her kinship with him appeared in her outward form, and her mother's sweet nature and gentle spirit beamed out of the misshapen monster.
—Hans Christian Andersen, "The Marsh King's Daughter"

Faced with her future in the form of a toad, she bargained badly: she exchanged her childhood for me.
—Patricia McKillip, "Toad"

Lay me in the milk-bath, oh my mother—
I will turn the frogs to roses.
—Catherynne M. Valente, "Still Life with Wicked Stepmother"

the failed movie director with eyes like Gatsby's
green light . . .
—Catherynne M. Valente, "Freaks"

Gatsby was amazing. He even managed to see to it that the book about him was regarded as a novel, fiction, as though he didn't exist. Even Fitzgerald, by the time he was through writing it, believed he'd made the whole thing up.
—The J. Peterman Company, "Gatsby Shirt"

You're reading Fitzgerald, you're reading Hemingway
They're both super smart and drinking in the cafés
—Regina Spektor, "Poor Little Rich Boy"

You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well-read
It's well known
—Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man"

If I count all the Valente poems as one step (her poem "The Frog-Wife" may be considered as a side-shoot from the initial Andersen, as well as a passage from Laurence Yep's Dragon of the Lost Sea where the character Civet recalls how she was drowned as a sacrifice-bride to the King Within the River), it's like six degrees of Bob Dylan. This is how my brain works. My synapses are permanently set to "quotation."

Look, it works for me . . .

*Even when I take into consideration the weird emphasis on Christianity in the second half of the story, "The Marsh King's Daughter" still has too much shape-changing, time that runs differently in different worlds, and katabasis for me not to love it. This passage in particular terrified and haunted me as a child: "I seemed to be again in the vast Egyptian Pyramid; but still before me stood the moving alder stump which had frightened me on the surface of the bog. I gazed at the fissures of the bark and they shone out in bright colors and turned to hieroglyphs; it was the mummy's wrappings I was looking at. The coverings burst asunder and out of them walked the mummy king of a thousand years ago, black as pitch, black as the shining wood-snail or the slimy mud of the swamp. Whether it were the Mummy King or the Marsh King I knew not. He threw his arms around me and I felt that I must die." I have never read the original Danish; that translation was done in 1946. But those are still images that I wish I could write.