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.
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