by Larry Fyffe
Maldoror
The exciting adventures of the Tarantula Tales continue:
(Y)ou look like james arness? - i am writing to you to say that you are my son's idol (Bob Dylan: Tarantula)
Auto/biographical in that singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan is said by a number of “Dylanologists” to take his “stage name” from Marshal Matt Dillon of Dodge City, Kansas.
Played on TV’s “Gunsmoke” by James Arness.
Poet Dylan Thomas, a more likely candidate as indicated in the following song lyrics:
The cloak and dagger dangles Madams light the candles (Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)
Words that remind of those below:
(T)he goat and daisy dingles Nap happy and lazy (Dylan Thomas: Under The Milk Wood)
Another literary source is indicated beneath, a clear one this time:
& Lord Randall playing with a quart of beer (Bob Dylan: Tarantula)
Reflected in the following song lyrics:
Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son Oh where have you been, my darling young one (Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall)
As in:
Oh where have ye been, Lord Randall, my son Oh where have ye been, my handsome young man (Lord Randall ~ traditional)
There be outlaws, gun-slinging cowboys, bank and train robbers, all from the Old American West, positioned here, there, and everywhere.
A member of the James /Younger Gang, a former Confederate guerrilla, then a bank robber, later a Christian:
"(I)'m cole younger, gave my horse to the pony express - other'n than that, i'm just like you" (Bob Dylan: Tarantula)
The symbolic Tarantula, for the prose/poet below anyway, is not at all sympathetic to any claim that there’s a brighter world to come, where everyone’s equal; rather eternally surrounded we all are by a vampiric nightmare:
Night was beginning to spread over nature The blackness of her veil (Lucien Ducasse: The Songs Of Maldoror ~ translated)
John Keats no longer accused of being a nightingale too happy in its happiness:
Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain ... I just don't see why I should even care It's not dark yet, but it's getting there (Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)
The Good World
& he's eating a picture of jean paul belmondo (Bob Dylan: Tarantula)
In a neoNoir movie, Jean-Paul Belmondo, a handsome French actor plays a small-time hood who’s searching for the good life.
The Existentialist-oriented film is titled “Breathless”, a ‘New Wave’ film that features “jump cuts”, and ambiguous dialogue.
In the movie, the fleeing anti-hero shoots a policeman; he ends up betrayed by his American girlfriend, and is shot to death.
In the song lyrics below, albeit at a slower pace of breathing than before, the Poe-like narrator manages to retain a living breath ~ at least for the time being:
Forgetful heart We loved with all the love that life can give What can I say Without you it's so hard to live Can't take much more Why can't we love like we did before (Bob Dylan: Forgetful Heart ~ Dylan/Hunter)
As previously noted, Euro-centric ‘Dylanologists’ tend to forget, or else ignore, the strong influence that the Gothic writings of Edgar Allen Poe have on many of the song lyrics written (some assisted) by Bob Dylan.
Words count:
But we loved with a love that was more than love I and my Annabel Lee ... And so all the night-tide, I Iie down by her side Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea (Edgar Poe: Annabel Lee)
Annabel’s “highborn kinsmen” take her body away.
Now-a-days, asserted it is by a number of doomsday writers, official bureaucracies control most everyone’s life, their dreams, and even their deaths:
(W)here the bureaucrats - the dreamy Huxley hanger oners (Bob Dylan: Tarantula)
These bureaucrats, warns Britisher Aldous Huxley (in “Brave New World”), are always getting new and more efficient means to maintain social control:
Oh wonder How many goodly creatures are there here How beauteous mankind is O brave new world (William Shakespeare: The Tempest, Act V, sc. i)
Those means of control can include musicians, and songsters to entertain; and drugs to placate:
The watchman he lay dreaming As the ballroom dancers twirled He dreamed the Titanic was sinking Into the underworld (Bob Dylan: Tempest)
- 1: Tarantula
- 2: The Tarantula Crawls Across The Circus Floor and 3: Arachnida Is Dead
- 4: The Bride and 5: The Return of Tarantula
- 6: Everybody loves a critic and 7: Hopalong Bob
- 8: Mad, Bad, And A Stranger To Know and 9: Miss Lucy And Mr. Jinx
- 10: A Madder Piece From Ginsberg Street and 11: The Long Dark Stranger
- 12: More Mixed Up Confusion and 13: Oval Faubus
- 14: A tattletale Heart; and 15: Tarzantula
- 16: Tarantula: “Shake that Spear” and 17: “Hopalong Bob”
- 18: The Tale Of Dale And Debbie and 19: The Golden Gate
- 20: Your Harmless Fate and 21: Thelonius
- 22: the Egotist and 23: The Lord of the Spiders
- 24: Cream Cheese and 25 Davy Crocker
- 26: The Lumberjacks Are Coming
- 27: Lem the Clam; 28: An Untold Production: Tyrantula, The Motion Picture
- 29: The Tarantula Files continued
- Tarantula 30: Oh Pancho Oh Cisco
- 31 & 32 “Too hot to handle” and “Lucien’s Tarantula”
- 33: The ‘Untold’ Movie Musical Extravaganza “Tarantula” (with liner notes)
- Tarantulazarus and Clytia (Tarantula 34 & 35)
- Nadine and the Censor (Tarantula 36 & 37)
- Claudette and Peoria: The Tarantula Files (38 & 39)
- Oedipus and Agnes (40 & 41)
- Zevon and Rip van Winkle (42 & 43)
- Tom Tom & Phaedra (The Tarantula Files 44 & 45)