Straight after his visit to the Revelatorium tomorrow, Neil Gaiman will be wielding one of his fabled magic pens and signing copies of The Graveyard Book at Eason’s on O’Connell Street at 7pm.

The venerable Angus Cargill has a blog up and running to mark the publication of Faber’s Hang The DJ.

Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton and author of The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief, lecturing on The Book of Revelation last March.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Bob Dylan
Tell Tale Signs – The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Rare And Unreleased Recordings
(Columbia)

We’ll never solve the mystery of why Bob Dylan has continually omitted some of the best songs he’s ever written from his official album releases. Maybe he’s just an incurable existentialist who doesn’t care for preserving his work in terms of the Definitive Recorded Statement. Maybe he fancies himself the archetypal man in motion (“Ain’t talkin’/Just walkin’” as he puts it in on one of this album’s finest cuts, a throbbing out-take from Modern Times that sounds about two thousand years old), more concerned with life as lived in the transfigurative moment than petrified behind the stained glass of posterity.

Either ways, these Bootleg Series albums go a long way towards salving the frustration of never having heard ‘Series Of Dreams’ open Oh Mercy for the first time, or ‘Blind Willie McTell’ as the final dissolve on Infidels. Nowadays such concerns might be a moot point: you can sequence the records to your own digital specs if you choose, but that doesn’t change the fact that Dylan has consistently queered the notion of any new album being heralded the equal of his mid-60s triptych by removing the centrepiece song. Maybe it’s his perverse version of the intentional flaw in the prayer mat, or Cohen’s crack that lets the light in.

Not every selection on Tell Tale Signs is indispensable, but most are capable of silencing a crowded room (including a lovely slow blues take on ‘Mississippi’ and an inspired revisiting of that masterpiece of heartache and regret, ‘Most Of The Time’, delivered here in a more robust harp-harness-and-guitar mode). In fact, at least half of the material on this double set can stand beside Dylan’s finest work. That much of it has been culled from his driest songwriting season (most of the 90s) as well as the millennial revivalist period, gives further cause for pause.

The brace of albums (Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong) on which he went back to the sacred texts of pre-war gospel, blues and folk standards not only allowed him to re-find his voice, but also a new (or rather, ancient) vocabulary and subject matter. Not just songs like ‘Red River Shore’ (a glorious out-take from the Time Out Of Mind sessions), or a chillingly committed rendition of Robert Johnson’s brutal ‘32-20 Blues’, or an unreleased beauty from December 2005 called ‘Can’t Escape From You’. There are also bristling, tough-skinned live versions of ‘High Water’ (Song For Charley Patton)’ and ‘Lonesome Day Blues’, plus a handful of superlative old-timey soundtrack tunes (‘Huck’s Tune’, ‘Tell Ol’ Bill’, the Civil War hymnal ‘’Cross The Green Mountain’).

And the difference between ‘Born In Time’, ‘Someday Baby’ and ‘Can’t Wait’ here and on their previously released incarnations is so marked, they could be different songs (the latter is a revelatory portrait of Dylan as a communicator of raw blues). Such apparently ad-hoc and on-the-spot recalibrations remind us that Dylan’s takes differ so radically from one to the next, it was but a wink in time that kept ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ from being released – or maybe even binned – as a woozy player-piano saloon waltz.

So, here’s to another fascinating glimpse at Bob’s secret histories. This one will keep us quiet until Christmas.

The new Lucinda Williams record Little Honey will break your heart and straighten your back. Here she is from ten years ago doing the sublime ‘Drunken Angel’.

Friar Murphy was on The View panel last night discussing A Film With Me In It, Richard Rodney Bennett’s gothic opera The Mines Of Sulphur, Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day In Blackrock, and the John Shinnors exhibition Back to the Lighthouse. The show is now online at www.rte.ie/tv/theview

When I was but a cub writer contributing a series of autobiographical shaggy dog rock ‘n’ roll tales to Hot Press in the late 90s, I’d the honour of having those pieces illustrated by Ray Lowry, the cartoonist most famous for designing the cover of The Clash’s London Calling. Ray also contributed to Punch, The Guardian, Private Eye and the NME, and it’s one of his panels that kickstarts Greil Marcus’s epic punk treatise Lipstick Traces.
Ray and I spoke a few times on the phone to discuss work in progress, and he was kind enough to send me contacts of his illustrations. He passed away earlier this week at the age of 64. In the words of Bob, “He sure was funny and he sure told the truth and he knew what he was talkin’ about.”

“As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligentia fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia). Perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and comprehends all things, but when he does not understand he makes things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.”

Giambattista Vico, Principles of New Science, lifted from the epigraph of No Go the Bogeyman by Marina Warner.

Buffalo Bill’s

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death