Once in a while, you can cross a street, walking down the backward abysm of time, and hear the sounds of early Byrds, Meet the Beatles, Bringing It All Back Home. Today, after having seen the succession of Dylan's new faces on Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning, you might again feel the mystery of time's reversing warp as the beautiful, and androgynous, light-dark 1966 Dylan face stares in bookstores out through the cover of his five-year-old Tarantula….

It's difficult to know how Tarantula would have read five years ago. The relationship between cultural disintegration and its literary exemplification in Tarantula might have been considered very far out at the time. Today, Tarantula's close to 50 schismatic and disjointed "fables," "poems," "scenes," "hallucinations," whatever, suggest only an imitative fallacy, for they are literally about too much of nothing….

Suppose, as one anti-formalist critic does, that "art is simply...