I am an Invisible Snark

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and explained here, page by page, panel by panel, squiggle by squiggle … right now we're in Fit the Seventh … the Banker, played by Karl Marx, is going blackface …

 In an earlier stanzel we subjected The Banker/Karl Marx to the indignities of vamping as a perfumed houri in the lascivious environs of a Turkish harem but that is nothing to his current employment in a Carrollian minstrel show.

Yes, the Bandersnatch has worked its magic at last, the hypnotic spell of the Orient has done its groovy hypno thing and both reader and Snarquista stand amazed at this climactic thing-um-a-bob at the heart of Fit the Seventh.

Reflexive readers will grasp that there is a bit of artistic commentary going on here, most of it focussed upon Victorian British attitudes towards their Indian subjects but lighter-hearted readers can just go ahead and spit up their mulligatawny soup whilst sitting in their bungalow, enjoying their calico pajamas and taking a good dekko at this latest instalment of The Hunting of the Snark.

And why not? It's all Nonsense and has hardly any bearing on anything at all except whatever I've surreptitiously meant it to have, ie. it's a wonderful thing to be seen!
Clear as rain, I should think.

NB. My memory is its usual swiss cheese holey thing but I remember reading somewhere of a minstrel show version of the Snark performed in the USA shortly after its publication … perhaps one of Doug Howick's more startling discoveries?

 The ultimate Christmas gift for the Adventure Time fan …

… my original art for the cover/interiors of the NYT-best selling Adventure Time Encyclopaedia (2013, Abrams) … on sale at The Beguiling. This original art is unlike any other contemporary inking you’ll see: resembles copper-plate engraving on Japanese rice paper … extremely tight and delicate line-work floating above a translucent matrix … crosshatched like a dollar bill but TIGHTER, RETINA-CRUSHINGLY-TIGHT … no pro-white, no scraping. Just pure “mathematical”, psychotropically linear eye-candy. There's more description at The Beguiling's blog …

Fit 8, pg. 80/2 … If a snark could talk, we could not understand him

The story so far: The Rev. CL Dodgson, disguised as Lewis Carroll, has insinuated himself atop a crag whilst playing at being a Baker in an anapaestic search of a snark. His demise looms large …

Readers who have been following along at home will probably recognize the setting of this stanzel for it's the very same setting in which our snark hunt began, way back in the paleographic pages of Fit the First. Less memorable readers will have to make do with this pithy observation: that Lewis Carroll gets away with murder!

Gosh, how many poets could pass muster in any modern MBA writing program spouting off verse in which a hero clearly named as "The Baker" is then immediately re-branded as a "hero unnamed?"

Or is Lewis Carroll insinuating that one's function cannot serve as one's name? Lesser minds might dismiss all of this as overly hirsute hair-splitting of the highest order but that's the beauty of Snarkology, don't you see? It's a Big Mind/Big Beard thing … and even if you don't, you will have to admit that an Anglican deacon moonlighting as a logician whilst writing anapaestic verse devolving upon the theoretical demise of his own fictional doppelganger, it's a debauched semiotician's fantasy come true — hubba hubba!

All of which is a ghastly sort of slovenly guttersnipe's shorthand for saying that our poet's refusal to allow practical function to cohabitate with symbolic function is quite cheeky indeed! Why, it undermines the very basis of language and symbolic logic itself, it's an underminery of the very same sort as, say, an Anglican deacon-cum-logician devoting his life to the promulgation of utter Nonsense.

Form and function, the desperate wags of the Carrollian Multiverse!

Fit 8, pg. 79/2 … The Snark, O Muse, inform, that many a way wound with his wisdom to his wished stay

Our Snark hunt has entered the ultimate phase of its prosodic peristalsis, the infamous Fit the Eight, the Vanishing.

Big paradox, huh? The final product of the greatest Nonsense Epic Ever Written will be the Nothingness of being Vanished Away. That's pretty Heavy, so Heavy that it's plunged all the way to Light 'n Trivial.

Which brings us to another textual dilemma: from whence comes this sudden penchant for capitalizing things? Is it a suppressed orthographic memory of this artist's oddly Teutonic heritage? A sticky caps key? Or is it just another haphazard attempt at maintaining the pretense of Deep Meaning without actually doing anything about it?

Smarty-pants readers will sneer at this back-handed attempt at defining Carrollian Nonsense, they will scoff derisively at all this muddling of Form and Meaning. Less intelligently clothed readers can gape, slack jawed, at the above drawing which illustrates a band of Snarquistadores wandering through a room which is lavishly adorned with portraits of their communal Creator, the Admirable Carroll — and their soon-to-be-vanished colleague, the Baker!

Muddling through a hagiographic tribute to one's creator (a self-generating universal mono-iconostasis if you're a particularly old-fashioned Hindu) is pretty much shorthand for life itself if one happens to be religious. The frisson of it all is made even more frissony by the fact that this particular creator, the Rev. C.L. Dodgson, was a genuinely religious man who puttered around his own creator's world in the mad gardener's guise of Lewis Carroll.

It all means something and I'm sure it's pretty amazing and really cool if I could only think of what to call it* … which is, of course, the Illustrator's Primal Dilemma: I cannot say it, I can only draw it. Like the Beaver, I keep bounding along on the tip of my tale, at a loss for words but well-stocked with pictures.

NB. I'll be appearing at the Poetry and Visual Arts Roundtable, February 17, 2012, 2 - 4 p.m. at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, NYC. This will provide a rare opportunity for myself to publicly rant about comix and poetry with other ranters in a location that is nominally warmer than the one I rant in now … featured poets will also include Sommer Browning, Matthea Harvey, Mark Leidner, Bianca Stone, and Paul Tunis. More info here …
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*Recursive ontological solipsism with a pictorial side-order of temporal glaciation? Lost in the fun-house? Total perspective vortex?

Fit 8, pg. 77 … is that a snark in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

Parental Warning: This week's Snark posting contains scenes of paranoiac-critical crosshatching and surrealist innuendo that may not be suitable for younger readers.

Devoted readers will know that I've made the frontispiece of each Fit of this Snark into a visual pun of some feeble sort. They will also know that the Snark itself is concealed in each frontispiece, vamping it up in the cunning disguise of an Unsleeping Eye, ie., what is the Snark? — it is Eye!

Undevoted or even flagrantly promiscuous readers will wonder what all the fuss is about. Are they being thickies or is there no discernable pun in this, the very last frontispiece of the very last Fit (or Fitt in the traditional Anglo-Saxon) of our GN?

Well, it all depends upon your definition of what a pun is, or even, as a certain American libertine once noted, upon your definition of what "is" is. For what we have here is not a literal Vanishing but a visual Vanishing, a Vanishing away of the poet Lewis Carroll (upon whom the soon-to-be-Vanished Baker is modeled), out of the 19th-century British Raj and into the natty decor of a 1930s Upper West Side apartment furnished by none other than Salvador "Avida Dollars" Dali.


Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment by Salvador Dali (1935)

We've already had a go at Dali and his paranoiac-critical method, an addictive type of eye-candy which can lead to dilated pupils, loss of motor coordination and workplace giggles (better known as Gateway Surrealism Syndrome), but I think we've successfully plumbed new depths here by insinuating the Admirable Carroll into the private residence of the legendary Mae West, a woman of genuine capabilities. Hubba hubba, as they say here in Montreal (although it's a silent "h", bien sûr).


Lewis Carroll AKA Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA The Baker

More sober-minded readers will ponder the fact that the portrait of Carroll used as reference by this artist was made by Oscar Rejlander, a talented photographer whose work will be cropping up again on page 81, thanks mainly to his public domain status, the poor dope.

My drunken, slobbering, tie-askew, pants-disheveled readers can skip all that and go ahead and google ( a portmanteau of "go ogle") Mae West, a woman who carnalized the Bellman's Clochetic Rule of Three into a handy dictum which fits discreetly into any young lady's purse, viz. “I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”

NB. The Boot's well-turned ankling is no accident, it is — the shape of things to come!

Fit 7, pg. 71/2 … Snark-Train Spotting

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and explained here, page by page, panel by panel, squiggle by squiggle … right now we're in Fit the Seventh … the Banker, played by Karl Marx, will soon discover that a certain pesky specter haunting Europe is none other than the dreaded Hindustani Bandersnatch! …

Attentive readers (shut-ins, penitentiary inmates, nursing home loafers, etc.) will have noticed by now that these last four panels share a common motif: a miniature train packed to bursting with all 1o of our Snark Hunting B-Boyz.

This is not an accident, this is what literary critics call a TRANSITIONAL MOTIF. You see, this illustrator needed to solve the problem of bridging two entirely different Fits; Fit the Sixth, which was set in a vaguely Gilbert & Sullivanesque inflected version of Pepperland and Fit the Seventh, which will eventually disembark into the British Raj of the Old Delhi Railway Station.

Lesser illustrators would have simply hired a charabanc or a palanquin or even a scooter rickshaw to schlepp their characters from one scene to another but this illustrator is made of sterner (and cheaper) stuff. In fact, if there's anything which makes this illustrator wax extra-wroth, it's the all-too-common phenomenon of artists choosing vague or irrelevant symbology to bind their pictures to their words. Just as the punishment must fit the crime, so must the conveyance fit the time!

Well-oiled Carrollians will sigh with appreciation at all of the above, for they are well aware that the Great One, Lewis Carroll, was fond of playing at trains in his youth, so much so that his undeservedly obscure puppet play, La Guida di Bragia, is set in a train station and features two station masters whose resemblance in manner & bearing to Vladimir and Estragon cannot be coincidental …

But more to the point, the very first time that the name of Lewis Carroll ever appeared in print was in a magazine entitled The Train. It was with that small poem, "Solitude", that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (prompted by the editor Edmund Yates) hit upon the happy device of latinizing his name into Lewis Carroll. The year was 1853 and curiously enough, (1+8+5)x3=42 … and as all Carrollians know, the number 42 is the cabalistic key to the entire Snarkian Multiverse. And you thought I was making it all up as I went along, didn't you, admit it! Ha!

Of course, there are some other, equally pesky readers who are asking: from whence come these urbanite, minaret-and-souk-bedecked camels seen in the above picture? Is this another example of the dreaded Orientalism run amuck?

Perhaps it is, but I must also draw such readers' attention to the fact that from the Oriental point of view of the unseen inhabitants of these Camel-Cities, a point of view blighted by the sudden appearance of a steam-locomotive with various Victorian gentlemen aboard it, it's a case of the dreaded Occidentalism run amuck.

Occidentalism is the persistent belief shared by many Orientals that the West is crammed to the gills with purring, blonde sex kittens, gun-wielding Christian mullahs and shamelessly easy credit.

If only, huh?

Next week: More of the same with winds light to variable.

The snarking of the hunt

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and here explained page by page, panel by panel. Today's panel is part of page 59, the final page of Fit the Fifth …

The attentive reader will notice that in this panel, as in the last two panels, we have been undergoing what specialists in this sort of thing call a Transition. Beginning with an ur-schoolroom redolent of the worst Boschian horrors that any academia could have on tap, we shifted into a theatrical backdrop, then flitted through a hasty visual flashback of various preceding Fits and now find ourselves in a pastoral sort of setting, evocative of an English garden party frequented by exactly the sort of Carrollian riffraff one always finds lurking about at such affairs.

Gosh! This Transformation business is mickle hard to pull off, it’s certainly easier for the likes of poets such as Lewis Carroll to shift quarters if they wish, it’s merely a question of them upending a spare thesaurus and rummaging about with a few new adjectives and suitable prepositions. For us picture-wallahs, it’s a whole different story! The extras have to be chosen and then costumed, the appropriate locales have to be researched and then reproduced at considerable expense, then there’s lighting and makeup, why, the catering alone is an logistical boojum!

In this case, we’ve arranged for some currently unemployed peons from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to serve drinks and snacks whilst the Fellowship of the Snark mill around in period costumes with various Protosurrealist floozies glued to their arms, all of ‘em muttering rhubarb-rhubarb-custard-custard to give it all that air of Carrollian verisimilitude.

Of course, in the Good Old Days they didn’t call it a Transition, it was a Metamorphosis back then and it was all the rage in pre-Christian circles. You couldn’t go outside for the morning paper without bumping into someone’s teenaged daughter bursting into foliage or regressing into a giant spider; such goings-on were pure catnip for the poets of that time and I think it’s safe to say that the advent of monotheism put the kibosh on a considerable source of innocent merriment for both gods and mortals.

All of which brings us to the semi-belated point that in some subliminal manner, Lewis Carroll’s High Anglican penchant for Nonsense verse is really the sneaky pagan’s taste for Metamorphosis resurgent in the usually sacrosanct domain of Logic and Semiotics! As always, I’ll eschew further elaboration of this particular observation out of respect for the sausage-stuffing-phobia of any decent reader towards such crypto-Bismarckian literary goings-ons.

I shall confine myself to remarking that Metamorphosis is a fine thing, a double-plus-fine thing to liven up any bit of illustration or verse you might have handy; perhaps the Beaver and Butcher’s unexpected metamorphosis into the very best of friends is just the sort of versification needed to bring back the salad days of wine, women and Pagan Nonsense …

Zoot Snark Allures

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and here explained page by page, panel by panel. Today's panel is page 59, nearing the end of Fit the Fifth …

May we conjecture that in this melodramatic passage of verse (redolent of Tennyson’s more sentimental confections) the poet Lewis Carroll is performing some sort of prosodic sleight-of-hand meant to encapsulate into a very nutshell, as it were, the entire gamut of stormy passions and turgid pleasures which we lesser folk call Married Life?

The fool-suckling and small-beer-chronicling of married life was unknown to Carroll personally. However his friend C.L. Dodgson seems to have known something about the Vast Mystery of Connubial and Familial Bliss in a second-hand sort of manner and probably let Carroll in on the joke, so to speak.

The true-life confessions of the Beaver are spicy stuff indeed, by Victorian standards! Her bitter observation that looks are always more eloquent even than tears is a clear reference to the Eternal Dilemma of the weeping, middle-aged woman confronting the illicitly toothsome paramour of her caddishly retro-adolescent-spouse.

The Bellman’s fleeting emasculation is a proto-Freudian dig (or even a snigger, I’m not quite sure) at thing-um-a-jig and perhaps even what-you-may-call-um, pretty strong stuff indeed for a commoner’s garden variety Snark Hunt and better left to the plain-brown-wrapper crowd who frequent the less-reputable purlieus of English verse!

There’s also some versical bits and pieces hinting at the Disconsolation of Books, the Inevitable Patching It Up for the Sake of the Kids and even a bit of emotional doubletalk on the Bellman’s part, solely for the purposes of smoothing things over for his pal the Butcher, who remains conveniently silent throughout this whole cringe-inducing, Mills & Boon production.

All in all, it’s a pretty sordid low point in this Snark and perhaps even in this artist’s ongoing commentary upon the same. Sure, I’ve dressed it all up with a nice picture and some fancy music-hall-type crosstalk of a pseudo-intellectual bent but deep underneath it all, it’s all really quite shallow. Wearisome days, indeed, eh?

I saw the best snarks of my generation destroyed by madness

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about my previous rant concerning cross-hatching. I plan more rants as soon as my medication runs low again. It's somewhat ironic because my GN version of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (which we are explicating here, panel by panel) is mostly hatching, not cross hatching. More on that later …

Please note that I'm posting every third day (occasionally skipping weekends) for there's a lot on my drawing board … some neat Alician stuff for Byron Sewell and Michael Everson, more Satanica, some steampunk, some Candide, some Shakuntala (the latter is especially cool but really time-consuming) …

… in the meantime, here's a clever bit of Snarkplication, Fit the Fifth, page 58, panel 1, in which the Butcher and the Beaver are hatching a friendship …

Friendship is, of course, a double-edged sort of business, the very sort of tricksy fritter-my-wig-thingum-a-jig that Messers Lewis Carroll and C.L. Dodgson must have pondered over quite a bit in the course of their own long and fruitful association.

The attentive reader (is there any other?) will remember my own reasons for emasculating the Beaver, and I think that this very stanzel is proof positive of the aesthetic rightness (or is it righteousness?) of that long-ago, fateful decision on my part.

And so, we see here the Beaver and Butcher heaving into view with their freshly-minted friendship in tow. Needless to say, the friendship of the Butcher will prove a heavy burden for the luckless Beaver. The former’s penchant for looking the part of an incredible dunce, as evidenced in his just-concluded, semi-interminable monologue upon all things Jubjub, will weigh heavily upon the Beaver’s sensitive soul.

May we conjecture that Carroll might have had the same private misgivings concerning his rather leechlike pal, Dodgson? The basic principles of Prosodic Forensics may apply here, my dear Watson, when one bears in mind that once one has removed the impossible from whatever verse one is studying, whatever one is left with, however improbably, is the logical solution.

The Butcher’s poetic modus operandi is painfully obvious: dunderheaded obliviousness to all things outside his realm of expertise, a compulsion to lecture strangers ad infinitum, etc. Such a description is, as some of us are painfully aware, the very epitome of the college lecturer, of which C.L. Dodgson was a prime example.

The Beaver’s versical activities in the last Five Fits have been limited solely to making lace and saving the entire crew from wreck. The former activity is utterly frivolous, as is versifying in general, and the latter activity is nothing less than an oblique reference to her skill in composing galdors, those Celtic verse charms used in pagan times to protect the common folk from evil through the application of some mysterious, verbal magic unknown to the layman!

The attentive reader should promptly compare the above description to Lewis Carroll, and finding that it’s a perfect match, brandish their regulation Scotland Yard handcuffs, then secure the guilty party and march him off to the station to take his statement, the villain!

And while you’re at it, Sergeant, cuff that Dodgson wallah, he was probably in on it with Carroll, the two of ‘em are inseparable friends, don’t you know. We’ll soon have at least one of ‘em singing like a canary, probably till the next day, I’m afraid.

The Snark Whisperer

This explication of my GN version of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark resumes its Jubjubian subplot for yet another stanzel … we are in the midst of Fit the Fifth and discussing the ways of the Jubjub Bird …

Lewis Carroll regales us here with a spirited description of a Jubjub being tortured by a variety of methods whose diabolical ingenuity and inventive discomfort seem uncomfortably redolent of an impromptu herd of schoolboys possessing the usual cretinous surplus of high spirits and moral pygmyism.

Carroll’s closest associate, C.L. Dodgson, would have been quite familiar with such goings-on, both as grim memories of his own public-schooling at Rugby and more to the point, as part of his quotidian duties as a maths tutor at Christ Church, where we can have little doubt that the vast majority of his students possessed a similar burning enthusiasm to make things hot for all creatures great and small.

This implicit connection twixt torture and mathematics must have troubled Dodgson’s gentle soul; no doubt he shared his unease with the more worldly Carroll, who then incorporated all of the above into this snappy bit of verse which we are chewing over right now.

In his Annotated Snark, Martin Gardner briefly discussed Prof. John Leech’s observations upon the mathematical implications of this stanza. Leech noted that by substituting locuses (or loci) for locusts, and tape measure for tape, one is then provided with the rudimentary instructions for the sawing and gluing together of the various wooden rods necessary for the skeletal framework of a regular polyhedron.

One can have little doubt that these instructions for the construction of a geometric solid would have provided Dodgson’s students with some considerable discomfort! From their 19th-century British discomfort they would have slipped, inevitably, into the very graphic slough of a fullblown 16th-century German melancholia, with all its attendant polyhedronal tortures!

Huzzah for the symmetrical mathematical-moral shape of things in our cozy world of boiled and salted Jubjubs-cum-schoolboys, ‘tis all very well thought out, Messers Carroll and Dodgson! The morally high-minded reader can chuckle appreciatively at all this, the rest of you just rattle your jewelry in a passing gust of old-fashioned schadenfreude.

NB. I must draw your attention, my dear Watson, to the curious incident of the dog barking at the moon. It is a Catalonian, 20th-century dog prone to bouts of selenic melancolia originating from its anachronistic exile to Nuremberg.

how hollow heart and full of snark thou art

We're explaining this GN version of Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark, every panel and page. We're in the midst of Fit the Fifth, the so-called Antonine Fit of which the scribbler Gibbons made so much of. Harrumph … anyway, today I present you with two entirely different interpretations of the above stanzel (stanza+panel) …

Explanation Number 1:

We are very pleased to bring you this startling mental picture of a Jubjub, fleshed out, as it were, from the grease-stained and tattered blueprints provided to us by the engineering firm of Dodgson, Carroll & Associates. This once reputable British firm of snarkwrights, headquartered in Guildford, Surrey, had utterly cornered both the domestic and export trade in British Nonsense by the end of the 19th century.

Their patented Jubjub Bird, shown above, started out as a commoner’s garden-variety hoopoe-cum-popinjay but Carroll, a mad and impulsive boy at heart, kept adding on a bit here and bit there until he had invented what came to be known as "the bird of perpetual passion". Too spicy for staid British tastes, it enjoyed a certain vogue in France until the advent of lurid mass-produced, paperback novels rendered it obsolete.

This particular example is a fine example of the classic Victorian penchant for thick-ankled avians swaddled in the finest watered gutta-percha silk. It was discovered by this artist, roosting in the most meager, luxury suite of the Ritz-Carleton, subsisting on a paltry diet of sugar daddies and hot buttered toffs until it was lovingly restored to its original bird-brained splendor by a poultice of blank checks and a strict regimen of breakfast at Tiffanys.

I think it would look rather fetching hanging on your arm, whenever you appear at the Drones Club or wherever it is that you roost at night.

Explanation Number 2:

The other explanation is pretty good but this one is better because it's shorter.

Principia Snarkiana

Here's what a certain illustrator had to say about this particular panel of my GN version of Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark … please note the cryptic tone of voice, the snide insinuations of mental superiority, the blatant appeal to the reader's sense of megalomania … aren't you lucky that I've let you in on this insufferably haughty literary-cum-illustrative joke we call Snark Hunting?

This is not a medically approved mathematical operation …

This is not an insight into the Essence of the Number Three …

This is not the Royal Road to 19840 …

This is not a comment upon the intractable unreality of all Numbers …

This is not a jaded Christ Church don’s comment upon the futility of impressing the intractable unreality of all Numbers upon his all-too-real thickheaded students …

This is not a jaded Montreal illustrator’s comment upon the futility of impressing his long-suffering wife with yet another impecunious display of his useless facility* in mimicking the Victorian wood engraving style …

This is not an image of an image which is not what it seems to be …

This is not the sort of thing which the general public has come to expect, thank god …

This is not the unexpected work of a far better artist …

This is not a clue to the fabled and elusive meaning of The Hunting of the Snark, for this is not really clairvoyance.

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* Nor is this a pathetic attempt to gain the attentions of a publisher willing to finance my surrealist-cum-baroque, illustrated translation of Jean de la Fontaine's Fables choisies … nor my ongoing rendition of Kalidasa's Shakuntala into skaldic chant-meter.

Last Snark at Marienbad (The Snark of Dr. Morel)

One can say what one likes about Lewis Carroll, one can say what one likes about The Hunting of the Snark, one might even cast aspersions at Carroll’s secretive doppelgänger, C.L. Dodgson, but one cannot say that any of the above ever ignored the intellectual and literary ramifications of what we now call common, garden-variety Stupidity.

The above stanzel is proof positive of all of the above blather, 100-proof positive, I should think, with all its various pictolinguistic bits and pieces denoting a thorough inability on the part of its protagonists to perform even the simplest of arithmetical tasks.

We know that C.L. Dodgson, in his capacity as a maths tutor at Christ Church, had many opportunities to complain to his associate Carroll of the genuine dunderheadedness of most of his pupils. Many of these young scholars, being scions of the British upper classes, abjured all abstract thought whatsoever and devoted themselves instead to the less mentally taxing pastimes of drinking, gambling — and yes! — hunting!

Can we venture to guess that Carroll, sympathizing with and perhaps even assisted by the unlucky Dodgson, undertook an elaborate scheme of passive-aggressive revenge, composing a cunning lampoon which in its essence is nothing more than a verse epic dedicated to the Stupidity of the Hunting Classes, a Victorian Dunciad, so to speak?

We know that the entire Hunting of the Snark is predicated mostly upon the Clochetic Rule-of-Three, a shining example of logical inanity. We know that this poem’s very title admits of two, very opposite meanings: either a hunting for a snark, or rather, a hunting undertaken by a snark! In either case, a nitwittery is produced since the Snark is unreal and thus unavailable for hunting in any sense of the word.

Furthermore, Dodgson’s fellow Oxonian, the inestimable Dr. Johnson, himself noted that no man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money*, a pertinent observation in light of the fact that Carroll wrote all his literary works solely for his and his child-friends’ pleasure.

And so, in the most approved clochetic manner, we will triangulate from all of the above and arrive at the inescapable conclusion that the very Genius of Stupidity thoroughly permeates every phoneme of the Snark! We’ll then fritter all of the above’s wig by quickly dredging it in Jules Renan’s oh-so-Gallic remark that he never understood the concept of infinity until he contemplated the stupidity of the human race, in particular, the blockheaded stubbornness of those sportsmen who persist in chasing an infinitely receding prey!

The result is a infinitely-toasted-cheese sort of thing of utterly mixed metaphors which lets you, dear reader, off a certain hook entirely, for the fact that you have followed this ungainly argument so far is double-plus-proof-positive that you’re a Genuine Smartie and no Thickie at all! Huzzah for good breeding and the finest education that Mummy and Daddy’s pelf can buy, eh?

Now, join with Messers Carroll, Dodgson and myself in a spot of jolly good schadenfreude as we observe the Beaver and Butcher chase after those mysterious semioglyphs of numbers and language which puzzle them so. Ignore their tears, please, pay them no heed for they are but the tears of a clown!

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*A statement itself proved true by the Clochetic Rule of Three in light of its triple-negative syntax! Darn these pesky liberals and their sin tax!

Snark fishing in America

We continue our GN version of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark thusly …

When Lewis Carroll sat down at his writing desk to compose his masterpiece of passive-aggressive nonsense, The Hunting of the Snark, he often chewed reflexively upon his quill pen as he pondered what effect his words might have upon future readers.

Words, words, words! They have naughty bits which we cover up in polite company, they have sad bits to make the grownups cry, and sometimes, if you push ‘em together just so, their silly bits will make the kiddies giggle!

Of course, every word needs a voice and the above stanzel’s assemblage of words, birds, quills, desks and notes is stuffed with ‘em. Alas, poor Beaver, chronically outgrabed and all those voices in your head to boot! One of them, sounding suspiciously like the Mad Hatter, is wondering why a raven is like a writing-desk? Another (rather familiar) voice is telling her that this is so "because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front". Yet another voice (craftily mimicking Sam Lyod) is telling her that the correct answer is simply that Poe wrote on both. There’s even a voice chiming in about them both having quills dipped in ink.

These words are all meant to answer those other arrangements of words which more evolved thinkers call riddles, that is to say, an augural flock of words meant to signify something despite themselves. Replete with all the requisite overtones of linguistic juju, riddles were once all the rage in the Good Old Days. They served as social icebreakers for all manner of homicidal and imaginary beasts such as sphinxes, trolls, dragons and even — yes! — Jubjub Birds!

I shall cue the evil laughter now for our jolly little metafictional cabal stands revealed at last! Outgrabe all you like, Miss Beaver, but the bird you are really riddling here is no mere raven, it is the Urschreckvogel, the dreaded Jubjub itself!

And so, dear reader, can you enlighten the Beaver as to why a Jubjub is like a writing desk? Simple, you reply — because none has an o in it (pace Huxley). Then run as fast as you can before all these birds wreak their Hitchcockian vengeance upon your person!

Amazing snark

There are times when I find myself truly nonplussed at the thought of explicating yet another stanzel of this Hunting of the Snark. Some of you might think that the author and Eminent Victorian, Lewis Carroll, had a rough job of it, coming up with anapaest after anapaest, all of ‘em having to do with Snarkery and all of ‘em in the finest High Anglican-cum-Nonsense bon style. However, this pate-addling task of devising pictures for verse upon which one then devises prose easily beggars any of the rather picayune literary horrors that Mr. Carroll might have endured.

Perhaps you think that I have taken the elementary precaution of creating some sort of "plan", a detailed system of references and motifs aligned with the development of the entire poem, a conceptual blueprint with which I could then research, prepare and execute each and every one of these drawings. Armed with such a plan, it would be child’s play to whip up a bit of commentary for each stanzel after the fact.

Such however, is not the case. In fact, it is the exact opposite of the truth. I am utterly unprepared and thoroughly disorganized, quite honestly, I am making it all up as I go along and I can’t help myself for I have no plan nor strategy nor even a sense of direction about any of this Snark stuff.

What brings all of this inner turmoil to mind is the illustration shown above of the Beaver and Butcher lost in an immense maze. They are cold, they are hungry, they are nervous and upset with one another. And why is that?

The Beaver will tell you, very indignantly, that it is because the Butcher won’t stop and ask for directions. But how can he when I have never bothered to make any!

Yes, dear ladies, gentlemen and any other sort of readers, the masculine sense of direction is marvelously blank. There's no need to ask for directions when we know that all roads lead to Boojum!

Purple Snark

NB. Will Schofield's blog, A Journey Round My Skull, is migrating to a new site/layout, 50 Watts. Go! Look! Think … then look some more. It's the best book illustration blog I know of and frankly, it's an essential for professionals and enthused amateurs. Your eyes will thank you.

Yet another visual metaphor rears up on its hind legs to frighten the kiddies wandering in our labyrinthine GN version of The Hunting of the Snark. The Beaver and Butcher’s above-mentioned debilitating monocurricular monomania has put them entirely in my ink-stained hands and I have swiftly reduced them to metallic tokens in a children’s board-game.

Of course, my more logomaniacal readers are fully aware that monomania is the obscure yet potent Ursprung (gesundheit) of that dreaded literary boojum, the cliché, the lexical product of any monomania multiplied by any number of literate chatterboxes. These readers are also aware that the cliché is the final evolutionary goal of all literature, seeing as how all words are essentially clichés designating common experiences and thoughts.

Luckily for us (and Lewis Carroll), the Beaver and Butcher do not read much. Nor do they need to, when one remembers that their Snarkomaniacal minds are furnished with an infinite babelian library of literary clichés to pass the time away with. Which is why, whenever they look about themselves in perplexity, they invariably remark to one another that they are trapped in a Borgesian* labyrinth.

Armed with such potent clichés they can safely wander Mister Carroll’s Snark-Ridden Garden of Forking Paths at all hours of the night. The Boojums of English Nonsense Verse trouble them not, their lack of reality is palpable! Yes, the Beaver and the Butcher can rely upon the succinct verdict of Mr. J.L. Borges upon all such Anglo-Saxon fictioneering, when he cooly remarked of Carroll’s taciturn literary compatriot, the Tlönist Herbert Ashe, that "in (his) life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen".

Yes, indeed, Mister Borges, everything is going our way!
____________________________

* A clichéd epithet which renders any labyrinth instantly inert, lifeless and suitable only for undergraduate textual lobotomies or cannabis-scented dormitory bull sessions. Postgraduate scholars say pshaw to all of the above, they smugly pat themselves on their back for knowing all along that this entire business of words, clichés and texts (ie., Cosa Nostra Literato) is a cunning dodge perpetrated by certain nefaristas to sell ‘em something, such as soap or forks or smiles! The inevitable commodification of literature and language is a subject which makes me yawn politely. Frankly, if you wordsmiths can’t de-mammonify the tools of your trade, that’s your own lookout. I draw pretty pictures for an increasingly penurious and untenable living, and frankly, nothing has changed in that department since Lascaux.

Spare a copper, if you can, guv’nor, for those proto-bohemian artists who labored away in their dank garret-caves, wretchedly coughing like prognathous consumptives while they daubed away at the world’s very first illustrated Hunting of the Snark. They knew naught of hourly rates nor had they agents to negotiate with the homicidal cave-bears which regularly feasted upon them. Their sole tools were ochre and brush and with these ever so ‘umble means they sketched out the chthonic beginnings, the very aleph as it were, of the mighty labyrinth within which we are still wandering at this very moment …

Principia Snarkiana

Another trifecta of similarities which our Hunters of the Snark, in the persons of the Beaver and the Butcher, have just bagged …

1. the same plan
2. the same place
3. the same look of disgust

Of course, it will have already occurred to you that the Hunting of the Snark is essentially a thermolinguodynamic crusade against the Forces of Entropy which are such a blight upon our otherwise happening cosmic scene, a quixotic crusade which takes as its goal the discovery and capture of that counteracting force of vigorous chaos, scientifically known as Maxwell’s Demon but which answers here to the name of Snark, possibly subspecies Boojum.

That being the case, all such reiterations as described above are rather counterproductive, expressing as they do patterns of orderly repetition conducive to further entropy, if not outright boredom and a comfy postprandial nap (on company time, naturally).

Every verse, every strophe and trope and kenning and galdor of our Snark Hunt is taking us only further and further away from our prey — every word we read and write plunges us deeper into a world not even of our own making!

And so, as the young Tolstoy once asked his demimondaine, what is to be done?

To which I reply: we must be silent. We must remain mute and dumb. We must not speak nor read … we must … look! And what do we see when we look at one another? We see ourselves as we really are, as inanimate tokens in the Snark’s childish game, as the helpless objects of his middle-aged gaze! Disgusting!

Full fathom five thy snark lies

NB. Before we get snarking, I urge you to read Tom Spurgeon's interview with Alexander Theroux, whose book, The Strange World of Edward Gorey is being re-issued by Fantagraphics.

Needless to say, I'm a Gorey-maniac and the interview is worth reading, especially for any one contemplating a life in the world of book illustration. At one point Tom asks Alexander why Gorey was (and is) so neglected by comix fans … I think I'll raise my inky hand and answer that one: because too many comix readers are visually infantilized from childhood by a relentless barrage of visual crap … the depth and complexity of good cross-hatching overwhelms their medulla oblongatas. Just a thought.

Meanwhile, back on Snark Island …

The Butcher’s ingenious plan is accomplished, as we see above, by first opening one of the doors of perception that are so handily scattered about my GN version of The Hunting of the Snark. Beyond this door lies a dismal and desolate valley where he can sally to his heart’s content, undisturbed by his too-frequent fellow man.

These sort of desolate Valleys of the Shadows of Various Deaths weighed heavily upon Victorian sensibilities, lurking as they did amidst the poetry of Lewis Carroll, Kings David-and-James and Lord Tennyson alike. Vast armies of betanomic chasseurs, semi-anointed sinners and gin-pickled light-cavalrymen were regularly herded into their several depths, there to endure the shot and shell of secular and sacred verse competing mano a mano, or to be more exact, pied à pied. Strong stuff but the Butcher seems up for it, he fears no evil nor anapests at all — what ho for the crystalline noggin of feckless youth!

If all this sounds a bit too allusive for you, why, there’s another picture done by another artist, a long time ago, of another inquisitive Carrollian protagonist bent upon making her own separate sally. It’s a very good drawing and I have half-a-mind to snatch it away from its rightful owner and carry it off to some desolate spot unfrequented by man where I can copy it to my heart’s content, by printing it in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen … an infinite plenum of poetical kings, lords, dons and even nudists charging forth from this very door, all of 'em dragooned into our Snark Hunt!
__________

NB. Those are snarks that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer an inky-change

The amazing Mister Carroll

We've reached the end of Fit the Fourth and before Fit the Fifth, the so-called Pons Asinorum of The Hunting of the Snark, we must stop and ask ourselves …

Just who was Lewis Carroll (seen above)?

Was he a fun kind of guy with a penchant for Nonsense?

Was he the Eminent Victorian who penned The Hunting of the Snark and thus put a full stop to the western tradition of epic poetry?

Was he a dab hand at photography?

Did he put the proto in Protosurrealism?




Or … was he the stooge of a certain maths tutor at Christ Church, the Rev. C.L. Dodgson (seen above), who let Carroll do all the creative work whilst he cashed the rather substantial royalty checks?

Who was Lewis Carroll?

He was just this guy, you know?

Snarkshow!

More recycling, alas …

The alert reader will notice that I’ve taken the liberty of transporting Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark into a tautological circus ring, replete with circus wagons, circus folk and their circus things and even an audience of the requisite Chiricoid and Savinionesque mannequins and homunculi (for the latter proletariat of the surrealist hierarchy, this show, nay, any show at all, is indeed the Greatest Show on Earth!).

The more alert reader will observe that the Baker, played here by Lewis Carroll himself, is engaged in a classic bit of Victorian slapstick, involving a beard and a fork and the dust accumulated in his coat after decades of teaching Christ Church undergraduates. Although Carroll appears clean-shaven for most of this Snark Hunt, it is a little known but useful fact that this is how he looked when he was lecturing: hirsute and rather discombobulated. Any scoffers or killjoys need only refer to the Great One’s own self-portrait.

The most alert reader will immediately spot the utter absurdity of the Banker (played here by Karl Marx) endorsing a blank check and then crossing it, a bit of complex British financial skulduggery involving a stale and phlegmish sight gag redolent of the vaudevillian buffoonery of those other, less hirsute Marxists : Messers Harpo, Chico, Groucho and Zeppo.

But of course, you knew that all along, didn’t you?
_________

NB. If you're at loose ends this Friday, January 28th, 7 p.m., and the conditions of your parole allow you to go down to the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, you might enjoy the steam-powered magic lantern show I plan to expose to the public. I'll be signing books and discussing the post-Nonsensical dichotomies of Victorian hermeneutics whilst you wallow in a tawdry poutine or two …

Love, Actually

We already had a rousing go at Dante Alighieri a while back, using good ol’ Witold Gombrowicz in his customary role as the curmudgeonly cudgel of Modernism:

"Dante was reciting his epoch, but the epoch was also reciting, and the poem is, so to speak, a double platitude, the poet simply recited what was already being recited. Something like those Sunday discussions of soccer by people gathered in bars and coffee houses. Do they really care about soccer? Not in the least. … Humanity glides along the worn ruts of articulation. An empty poem, which exists in defiance of reality and almost as if to spite it!"

Although Carroll loathed sports, both Dante and he did share a similar modus operandi; constructing vastly complex and ultimately nonsensical multiverses with Trinitarian proclivities …

The Inferno goes along nicely with The Hunting of the Snark, the Purgatorio makes a handy accessory to Through the Looking Glass and the Paradiso looks so much better with Alice in Wonderland rakishly topping it off.

A mighty prosodic fortress indeed, and all of it, Dantean and Carrollian alike, firmly centered upon the secret axis mundi and prosodic omphalos of all great poetry, love.