BOOKS STRIKE LIKE PRINTED LIGHTNING AS 'IMAGINATION PEOPLES THE AIR'

'We are born, and we crawl like caterpillars, but within us, we carry the ability to fly. Great literature is about this very metamorphosis, about the wings that we all have, even if we no longer know we have them.'

- IGAN D'BAYAN

Bob Dylan…yeah. The air was thick with rumors that Bob Dylan was at the recent Frankfurter Buchmesse (FBM) in Messe Frankfurt. (Well, "Bob Dylan" himself did tweet about it.) The man was in town for his "Rough and Rowdy Ways" tour across Europe and the UK during the book fair, and he reportedly wanted to thank Crystal Lake Publishing, which specializes in dark fiction and horror book titles, for publishing Arthur Madden's cult classic, The Great God Pan. So, where was Bob? Was he as incognito as Mr. Jones in a fake beard or blonde (on blonde) wig, roaming the Festhalle and Torhaus, getting a bretzel (in lieu of Dunkin' donuts) from a stand in the agora, asking for directions like a complete unknown, tangled up in books, wanting to pitch a satchel of stories? We may have even crossed paths with him, past the Thames & Hudson booth, the Random House bookstands, or the cocoon-like Frankfurt Pavilion without an iota of a clue. Salman Rushdie…a double yeah. He is another writer in dire need of disguises, albeit for very different reasons. We heard his FBM Literaturgala talk last year at the Congress Center. Rushdie said that the function of literature is more or less the same at any time: "It's, first of all, to create beauty. And it's maybe even more important to create beauty in a time of ugliness. And it's a place where people can go for beauty, and for joy, and for love, and for many things which wartime obliterates."