[24.10.06] Bob

I've been listening to an unhealthy amount of Dylan of late - so much so that my hair is becoming unkempt and I'm tempted to drink wine on the bus on the way to work. The man puts bad ideas into your head: I fantiscise of being in the back of some dive on Hindley Street scrawling lyrics onto a toilet door, or climbing up a creeping vine to gain access to some secret party. (Actually, both those fanatasies sound more like the stuff of Tom Waits on a good night, but no matter.) The dilemma is that I haven't written any decent songs for eons and I am once again attepting to source the codes from The Great Deceiver. I've been reading plenty of books on him as well - collections of essays, interviews, impressions and his own memior Chronicles, which was published last year. These seems to help as little as much as the albums, which I've been listening to in a scattershot chronology; Street Legal (1978) [the much maligned psuedo-Boz Scaggs one], Freewheelin' (1962) [the first decent one], Oh Mercy (1989) [the comeback album], Desire (1976) [the gypsy one], Time Out Of Mind (1997) [the one about death] and Modern Times (2006) [sketches of the weird America.] The resources tell you all you would possibly want to digest about Dylan without running the risk of intigestion or heartburn, they work perfectly as a foil for crafting songs - anything beyond that is an imitation.

I'm not exactly sure what this post is about, but perhaps it sums up my current position, which is that of confusion. I don't really know what or whom I'm writing for.

Because something is happening here and you don't know what is ....