What if Dylan tweeted?

Poking around National Book Store near the UP campus the other day, imagine my surprise at finding this nifty little rarity: Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, a book of nearly indecipherable prose first published in 1971.

While we all sit patiently waiting for Dylan to offer up part two of his fascinatingly nonlinear Chronicles, this dip back into the shimmery past is a more than serviceable artifact of the ‘60s. Dashed off in amphetamine spurts on his typewriter — almost like tweets in an as-yet-unknown language) during the middle of that decade, it first surfaced in “bootleg” copies here and there before Dylan consented to publish it in ’71.

Its brown-black poetry-type binding makes you think Mr. Dylan was trying to find a place for himself on the shelf of Beat poets like Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti; but in truth, this is a very different creature altogether.

Frankly, it’s off-putting at first. Tangled paragraphs with little chance for the scissor’s blade to even get ahold and start cutting, it’s best read in short, open-minded attacks. It begins, significantly, with a nod to the Queen of Soul:

aretha/crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him diffused in drunk transfusion wound would heed sweet soundwave crippled and cry salute to oh great particular el dorado reel & ye battered personal god but she cannot she the leader of whom when ye follow, she cannot she has no back she cannot… aretha with no goals, eternally single & one step soft of heaven/ let it be understood that she owns this melody along with her emotional diplomats & her earths & her musical secrets…

And it just goes on and on like this, with occasional punctuation and an occasional burst of brilliance. Aretha Franklin is a recurring motif, sort of Dylan’s Virgil, guiding him through the concentric circles of his hellish prose. Perhaps, amid all the wreckage and static of the ‘60s, he saw a calm siren in Aretha’s soulful croon. Most of Tarantula is broken up with frequent epistolary bits, chunks of letters inserted from fictional writers such as “Willy Purple,” “Lazy Henry” and “Truman Peyote” that serve as comic relief along the variegated word paths. It’s only if you’ve listened to what Dylan’s been saying for as long as fans have that you begin to discern patterns — like the frequent Aretha interludes — which help to make any kind of sense out of Tarantula.

My personal theory is that amphetamines wrote Tarantula, or at least used Dylan as a conduit to write it. It has that meth-mania sprawl to it, a gnarled web of words that never stops to figure out if it’s still following the same thought or not for very long. A systematic “derangement of the senses” à la Rimbaud? Maybe. Undisciplined? Sure. An uncanny representation of Mr. Dylan’s mental state in 1966 when he finished the manuscript? Most definitely.

It’s easier to think of Dylan’s attempts at free prose not as a continuation of the Surrealists or Burroughs or Kerouac, but as an extension of his artistic self: from that perspective, Tarantula sits nicely alongside his paintings, his hard-to-sit-still-for Renaldo and Clara and even his lengthy, surreal liner notes for classic albums like “Bringing It All Back Home.” No matter where he is, or what he does, it’s unmistakably Dylan.

There’s also the possibility that Dylan felt challenged into doing a book because of John Lennon’s success with his 1964 prose collection, In His Own Write. (Or perhaps by poet friend Ginsberg’s constant goading.) If Dylan was lured to rock ‘n’ roll by the Beatles, it’s not such a stretch to think that he was lured to publishing fame by Lennon’s example.

On the other hand, Dylan of late has been painted with another brush: plagiarist. Whether it’s his lifting of phrases from old Italian poetry, “borrowing” images from older paintings or lifting song structures from folk blues of the 1940s, the latest Dylan critics seem determined to string ol’ Bob up from the literary rafters. (Strangely, the “theft” charge never gets applied to rappers when they sample the shit out of Sting or Stevie Wonder songs and make a brand new “hit” out of it. Oh, well.)

The truth is, Dylan comes from American traditions — folk and blues — that have always freely “borrowed” materials from past songs to create new messages. But this tendency is stuck in an era when song lineage — and more importantly, song royalties — were not as hotly debated a subject. Now everyone’s got a microscope out, looking for clues and potential lawsuits.

This doesn’t seem to be a problem for Tarantula, which looks neither borrowed from any discernible past nor like something anyone would ever want to borrow from. As prose, it’s a frustrating mix of inspired juxtapositions and first draft typing that nobody had the balls to edit. (Hell, even Burroughs went over his feverish first drafts with a red pen.)

But it’s sometimes eerily entertaining, with vivid phrases and imagery and — when you read between the packed lines — a few true telegraphic emanations from a time when Bob Dylan was the cultural lightning rod.