Word: tarantula
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...reappeared his life was less troubled, his music quieter and more benign. When some friends from the folk music magazine Sing Out! managed to sit him down for a talk in 1968, they asked him, among other things, about a book he was said to have written, called Tarantula. "It wasn't a book," Dylan replied,"It was just a nuisance. It didn't have any structure at all." The book got to the page-proof stage, and then was abandoned after the accident, presumably because it represented a part of Dylan's life that...
Dead End. Dylan fans wouldn't let him. For the past year or so, photocopies of Tarantula's galleys have been sold throughout the rock underground. Dylan, 29, perhaps reasoning that he might just as well share in some of the profits from his own work, finally allowed the book to be launched officially (Macmillan; $3.95). The result is neither novel nor poem, but a series of free-association images that succeed, at best, in creating a freaky fresco of hell. The book has the feel and sound of such nightmare Dylan lyrics as Desolation Row and Memphis...
Moments of effective, surrealistic satire (there is a fine description, for instance, of a man whose house is entirely covered by advertising posters) do not keep Tarantula from being a despairing dead end. In perspective, the book-already a bestseller-should stand less as aesthetic achievement than as a record of a painful time in an artist's life that fortunately has passed. When Bob Dylan wrote Tarantula, he was 23 years...
...campaign has been a study of contrasting styles. The bespectacled Taft has a patrician manner, is cool and distant; he eschews personal contact, approaching a handshake as if it were a tarantula. After a recent factory speech, Taft started to leave and a foreman had to remind him to "shake hands with some of the employees, Bob." Rhodes, the burly and gregarious son of a coal miner, is a charming, indefatigable backslapper and campaigner...
...forest now and moving down, swinging in great ares along the desert steep sides of the mountains, Merilee's self is a windshield wiper screeching on dry glass. A tarantula fuzzy black with age scurries out of her way and stuffs himself almost all back into his hole. Spider at least has a home to go to. Sun burning and no moisture anywhere but the sticky-salty tastes from Merilee's eyes. GIRL! she is calling...