Everything blended when she rode the trains, it was all torn away

I am tired enough that each sentence I write wants to turn into another. The soundtrack in my head is Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," but what I am actually hearing is Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which I am taping downstairs.

It has been made quite plain by reviews, interviews, and the filmmakers themselves that I'm Not There (2007), which I saw tonight with ericmvan and bobcolby, is not a biography of Bob Dylan. If anything, it's a biography of the mythologies, anecdotes, and apocrypha about Dylan, probably as scripted by Bertolt Brecht. Cate Blanchett is an eerie, irritable dead ringer for Dylan on tour in the U.K. in 1966, but if the wild-haired Jude Quinn's interviews are word for word, the character also manifests out of a cloud of smoke with the Beatles; an earlier incarnation, a rail-riding eleven-year-old who styles himself Woody Guthrie and doesn't seem to have caught up with the fact that it's 1959, carries his guitar in a case labeled THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS, but the instruments that come out for "Maggie's Farm" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival are tommy guns. The soundtrack is impeccable; I had never heard the title song, but I need a recording now. I do not think it's a conscious intertext that Christian Bale looks a lot more like Phil Ochs.

My favorite novel of 2007 arrived in my mailbox yesterday: Simon Logan's Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void. I first read this book in draft form two years ago and I cannot recommended the finished version highly enough; its components include Camille Claudel, suicide bombers, punk and videocassettes and Sylvia Plath, and the sideways retro-future of Logan's industrial world. Seriously, pick up a copy. It's beautifully written, intensely interested in patterns of behavior, unlike the inside of anyone else's head. I can't wait for his next.