Bob Dylan's "Tarantula"
 

Has anyone read this? I'm looking for some thoughts on it. I just got it, I haven't read enough so far to have much of an opinion. Its a lot like the notes on the back of his "Bringing it all back home" and "highway 61" albums. At first glance it seems like a bunch of random words. Even if that is the case, I can only wonder how someone can think of this ****. He must have been doing a lot of LSD when he wrote it. But I think what I've read so far is some pretty good poetry.

Any opinions?

This review does a good job of explaining the book, which can be hard to understand.

http://www.bobdylan.com/news/new-take-tarantula

I`ve read a few challenging books in my time, but gave up on Tarantula pretty quickly, as all those ampersands wore me down after a few pages. But I was interested to read your post, blastingas, as well as the review you attached, and would like to volunteer a comment on both :-

Firstly, you`re quite right about drug-inspired nature of the writing, though in fact Dylan wrote the book at a time when he was supposedly taking methaphetamine, which is more of a performance-enhancing drug than a hallucinagenic - in fact one of its first uses was to improve the endurance of USA fighter pilots in the Second World War. Known as Bennies, Speed and Crystal Meth in its recreational forms, it usually has the effect of making people talk fast and at length, which I guess suited Dylan well when he found himself boxed into a corner and obliged to write a book. He was, after all, only following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac who used the same drug when he famously inserted a continuous 120-ft roll of paper into his typewriter and wrote On The Road in three weeks. What makes Kerouac`s book altogether more readable, though, is that he was just typing up a story that he had been working on beforehand for about three years; he had notebooks replete with characters, incidents and plot, all of which Dylan was hoping to get by without.

TBH I wasn`t really impressed with the Mark Spitzer review. Did you notice how a lot of his article is spent boasting about his superiority to other readers and reviewers, but he doesn`t say much to justify his conclusion that "there`s an undiscovered continent of sense to be made from the seemingly nonsensical pages" ? Instead of doing all the usual "historical precedent" research into Rimbaud and Lautremont, I think Spitzer could have learnt more by reading that well-known children`s fable, The Emperor`s New Clothes, or by paying more attention to Bob`s own appraisal of Tarantula, which he made a mere two years after finishing the book:-

So, who am I to dispute Bob`s opinion ? It`s nonsense and makes for a very unsatisfactory read.