catastrophe

Tarantula is an experimental novel by Bob Dylan, written between 
1965 and 1966. It employs stream of consciousness writing, 
somewhat in the style of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and 
Allen Ginsberg. One section of the book parodies the Leadbelly 
song "Black Betty". Reviews of the book liken it to his self-
penned liner notes to two of his albums recorded around the same 
time, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.


Dylan would later cite Tarantula as a book he had never fully 
signed up to write: "Things were running wild at that point. It 
never was my intention to write a book." He went on to equate the 
book to John Lennon's nonsensical work In His Own Write, and 
implied that his former manager Albert Grossman signed up Dylan 
to write the novel without the singer's full consent.


Although it was to be edited by Dylan and published in 1966, his 
motorcycle accident in July '66 prevented this. The first 50 
copies were printed on A4 paper by the Albion underground press 
of San Francisco in mid-1965. The type-written pages were bound 
in yellow paper with a large red Tarantula pictured on the 
front. Numerous bootleg versions of the book were available on
the black market through 1971, when it was officially published 
to critical scorn. In 2003 Spin magazine did an article called 
the "Top Five Unintelligible Sentences From Books Written by Rock 
Stars." Dylan came in first place with this line from Tarantula, 
"Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump 
on the garbage clowns." In the early 21st century, Tarantula was 
re-released in English and translated into French, perhaps to 
cash in on the success of Dylan's much more highly praised second 
book Chronicles: Volume One.




saw this in a thrift store last week but didnt buy it because i had no cash on me.
i'm going back tomorrow and i really hope it will still be there.