tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72688136164562683512024-02-19T01:24:30.187-05:00the hunting of the snarkFitfully illustrating Lewis Carroll & other graphic agoniesMahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.comBlogger574125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-11132321163668236082020-05-18T05:00:00.000-04:002020-05-18T05:00:07.060-04:00Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Anapests Will Never Hurt Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikUZwvgQbDDA4c9Vgl3VcmE0-SnbSRypans-9Hi43iHy0P4pch7uEEp4mYS6OFdbeZGQ9WCFeHwOfP0U-m9jGQaBpPj6TLN9srykAWVB-HWCxW1fdLFwyu0PSPVtEEhyphenhyphenz-DTt_VjASs0er/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_45_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1294" data-original-width="877" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikUZwvgQbDDA4c9Vgl3VcmE0-SnbSRypans-9Hi43iHy0P4pch7uEEp4mYS6OFdbeZGQ9WCFeHwOfP0U-m9jGQaBpPj6TLN9srykAWVB-HWCxW1fdLFwyu0PSPVtEEhyphenhyphenz-DTt_VjASs0er/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_45_2.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">A reiteration of the </span><a href="http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/2008/07/fit-three-page-21-panel-1-and-did-those.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Snarkic Galdor</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> … a type of verse-charm first overheard by the poet Lewis Carroll whilst sipping his tea and mentally searching for rhymes in the commons room of Christ Church College in the depths of the latter half of the 19th century. No doubt Carroll was puzzled by this sudden outbreak of cryptoskáldic fervour in what was then a bastion of High Church Anglicanism but he was a discreet man and kept his thoughts to himself.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">However, I am congenitally incapable of keeping </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">any</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> thoughts to myself! At this very moment I am mentally whirling along transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention, as the infamous Hedly Lamar once pensed aloud to the uncomprehending Slim Pickens.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Unlike Slim Pickens, gentle reader, you will easily grasp the essence of my thoughts, which I’ve illustrated above. The Snarkic Galdor is baited, literally, with the tempting person of the Baker himself! Lured by his smile and a bar of soap, the unsuspecting Snark will venture underneath the requisite giant thimble to be trapped there by the quick action of the Baker’s Fellows!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Baker’s transient nodes of thought on the matter can only be guessed at. However, thanks to the learned </span><a href="http://europrogovision.blogspot.com/2008/11/hebrew-dutch-german-greek.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Adam Roberts’ ingeniously cosmic vapors of invention,</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="color: #0d0600;"> we now know that </span><a href="https://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/2020/04/language-language-we-dont-need-no.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">the Baker’s earlier polylingual attempts at communication with his fellow B-Boyz</span></a><span style="color: #0d0600;"> were simply an observation that </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Humanorum hetaeria es auto </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">(you are yourself the brotherhood of all men). His comrades have taken this generous, fraternal gesture of self-sacrifice on the Baker’s part as carte blanche to proffer him up as living Snark-Bait.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">This business of offering oneself up as a bait for Evil must inevitably occupy the whirling, transient thought-nodes of anyone enjoying his tiffin at the aptly-named </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Christ Church College.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> Perhaps, as Carroll munched his bread and butter sandwiches and plotted his anapests, he was entertaining first, second or even third thoughts about his own personal Boojums … or perhaps he was merely biding his time till the invention of the talking-type-wireless with which the ubiquitious </span><a href="http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2003/08/365-Days-Project-08-24-pickens-slim-the-gospel-according-to-john-1977.mp3" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Slim Pickens</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> would finally set all of his religious doubts to rest!</span><br />
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<b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14171a; display: inline; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 19.6875px; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;">Attention bibliophiles! Let publishers know that illustrated adult titles are not only a noble tradition dating back to ancient Egypt but also cool to look at … </span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14171a; display: inline; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 19.6875px; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;">learn more about or even join my (quixotic) campaign to revive the genre of </span></span><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 19.6875px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BooksWithPix?src=hashtag_click" role="link" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration: none; white-space: inherit; word-wrap: break-word;">#BooksWithPix</a><span style="color: #14171a;"> </span><a href="https://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_17.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">here.</span></a></span></b>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-82957523404547388702020-05-04T09:57:00.001-04:002020-05-04T09:57:50.803-04:00Thy Snark, Great Anarch!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib2ZhBpZZ4SJs3vYVzXp5KMCghdxM9Ydn2gjzR_doxfmbtNdr24kH6CdsBpvwH4DybaZI9U1Posd7UaGxRxFBE_FHp8fpBYuowSY6crpgTBkgSb9_cCyMgSfWOoj0PuXLhjrKOzVm5pxhv/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_45_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1285" data-original-width="870" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib2ZhBpZZ4SJs3vYVzXp5KMCghdxM9Ydn2gjzR_doxfmbtNdr24kH6CdsBpvwH4DybaZI9U1Posd7UaGxRxFBE_FHp8fpBYuowSY6crpgTBkgSb9_cCyMgSfWOoj0PuXLhjrKOzVm5pxhv/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_45_1.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">We have already nibbled upon — and spurned! — </span><a href="http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/2007/07/fit-one-page-four-panel-one-happy-snark.html" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">Beatrice Hatch’s assertion</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> that Lewis Carroll had told her that the word </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Snark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> was a portmanteau of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Snail</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Shark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">. The etymology of the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Snark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> is an entire Hunt unto itself</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> but it seems that we are running perilously low on bullets, tinned goods and scotch-soaked mosquito netting or so my faithful shikaris tell me … we had better return to civilization, such as it is, and seek our Snark indoors … such as these Snark Hunters pictured above are doing.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Please observe that these Hunters are relying solely upon their finely-tuned instincts to track down their perilous prey and as usual, everything’s become a hopeless jumble! The afore-mentioned Beatrice Hatch’s linguistic brain-crumbs have joined in an unholy alliance with the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Transfixed" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">semiographic cupcakes of the Belgian pâtissier (and chronophobe) René Magritte</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> to create a novel yet frothy confection! Of course, such half-baked baked-goods would be incomplete without some of that double-plus-good explanatory frosting which the Critics love so; I append an explanatory (and thoroughly plagiarized) morsel here:</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">"I decided to paint the image of a shark . . . In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery — the image of a snail — was joined."<br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Well, there you have it: an Indo-Germanic-Belgo-Anglo-Saxon layer cake of ink and words … I call it Beatrice’s Revenge, for it’s a rather heterogenous and unsettling dish best served cold, perhaps as an after-dinner dessert? Of course, </span><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Hatch%2C_Beatrice_%28Lewis_Carroll%2C_30.07.1873%29.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Lewis Carroll’s original photographic bonbon of Miss Hatch</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> was also a bit cloying but certain artists will always indulge their sweet-tooth!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-77903268591479891572020-04-27T10:42:00.000-04:002020-04-27T10:45:07.575-04:00Much Ado About Snark Hunting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl1-31iuKUJdjyiW0MCEps0hv4FNhDIK4th3mCgkWFdEauUNsn4VGzWRUEZ5KM7sAp8dmxrhCkwYkzZL3HW4wgLSwQYo5Pztn65FypN-qX57ZwXbiMMnHaIO69D_bQxYcZd8OCmWMdfDxm/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_44_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1084" data-original-width="1600" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl1-31iuKUJdjyiW0MCEps0hv4FNhDIK4th3mCgkWFdEauUNsn4VGzWRUEZ5KM7sAp8dmxrhCkwYkzZL3HW4wgLSwQYo5Pztn65FypN-qX57ZwXbiMMnHaIO69D_bQxYcZd8OCmWMdfDxm/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_44_3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , serif; line-height: 20.176px;">There comes a time when even poets such as the Talented Mister Carroll draw a blank, as the saying goes. Yet such deficiencies seem to have not bothered him for long; he simply brewed up a fresh pot of tea, chewed reflectively upon his quid of paan and sooner or later, he would come up with the requisite anapests to fend off the Boojums at his door.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , serif; line-height: 20.176px;">However, when an ink-slinging wretch such as I draws a blank, adverse professional consequences can result. Drawing a blank may be suitable behavior for those blessed artistes who frolic in the Elysian Fields of MOMA or </span><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue8/erasuregenteel.htm" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">the Tate</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> but for us illustrative hacks bent over our drawing boards in the sweaty back-forty of Dante’s Inferno (</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/gallery/1024.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #990000;">Circle 8, Subsection 5,</span></a><span style="color: #000066;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Barrators and Flatulants) such antics are the stuff of which bankruptcies are made of.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , serif; line-height: 20.176px;">When deadlines press and the ol’ brainbox is running on fumes, remember the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_art" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="color: #990000;">scuola metafisica’s</span></span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="color: #0d0600;"> dictum to draw only that which cannot be seen. The main thing is to keep one's pen busy, just bash on regardless and find something unseen to draw … or at least </span><a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/giorgio-de-chirico/ettore-ed-andromaca-hector-et-andromaque-SWrHrulJDjjDh9ht1URLnA2" target="_blank"><span style="color: #990000;">unseen by the average reader.</span></a></span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-76114326067445006082020-04-13T10:36:00.001-04:002020-04-13T10:36:37.211-04:00Language? Language? We Don't Need No Stinking Language!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtCNU39tEIgOZ-TQw4qlewkRq7rMMYVhbbm460UQzrjj0c_4dGdlvKtWuOz-oDvIWHUuMiiPzQThLIbPo4X_Pkn3a-gKzNa6krFbY63I0XsxPFQTIDprmJYCE6zH2qYScNakycffXQQloA/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_44_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="732" data-original-width="1600" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtCNU39tEIgOZ-TQw4qlewkRq7rMMYVhbbm460UQzrjj0c_4dGdlvKtWuOz-oDvIWHUuMiiPzQThLIbPo4X_Pkn3a-gKzNa6krFbY63I0XsxPFQTIDprmJYCE6zH2qYScNakycffXQQloA/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_44_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">These headless anapests of Lewis Carroll rollick onwards in their frolicksome procession and who are we to deny their sonic allure? Of course, the essence of an anapest is the idea of a reversal and what better expresses that idea than the sudden realization that one is speaking in a language that no one understands? The unfortunate Baker is literally going backwards as the sense of what he says is instantly translated into nonsense by his puzzled auditors.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Snarkologists call this sort of thing the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Snarkosocratic Method,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> a kind of dialectic in which a question is responded to as though it were absolute nonsense. This in turn forces the questioner to endlessly repeat himself until his baffled auditors lose interest and finally go away.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Left alone in his splendidly impenetrable semiolinguistic Fortress of Solitude, the Baker is now free to concentrate his intellectual powers upon himself. Toying with the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000;">building-blocks</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> of language and meaning, he will arrive at some sort of Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in It … or perhaps not, there's no difference, really.</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-90078587376914276982020-04-06T11:24:00.002-04:002020-04-06T11:24:58.821-04:00One Hundred Years of Snarkitude<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdplNFM7riGzP-wP94OAylF_oBuw6vjc3N_znhbI7pitwb05DrE0tjMKQP8t18luLWlpn9rfKU1DqF3Jttvbk64Ot1lJrjZr5wThyphenhyphenWHBjCMRw9IPZ4pbhlk3rwGJTRFinAZuV4MRTKfuPA/s1600/hunting-of-the-snark_44.1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="550" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdplNFM7riGzP-wP94OAylF_oBuw6vjc3N_znhbI7pitwb05DrE0tjMKQP8t18luLWlpn9rfKU1DqF3Jttvbk64Ot1lJrjZr5wThyphenhyphenWHBjCMRw9IPZ4pbhlk3rwGJTRFinAZuV4MRTKfuPA/s320/hunting-of-the-snark_44.1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">False pretenses are the bane of modern life or so I’m told. Although Lewis Carroll seems to have composed an entire poem devolving entirely from the concept of false pretenses and all the semiotic and logical heartache they can inflict upon humanity, in our more <i>louche</i> age the concept of false pretenses has inspired instead a steady diet of </span><i style="color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">policiers</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">, bodice-ripping Mills & Boons and true-life confessional serial-killer-self-help-vademeca.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Very well, let the masses have their sensationalist Lewis Carroll, their police gazette </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Hunting of the Snark! </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">If it’s murder and false pretenses they want, let ‘em have it!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The heart of the problem, as I saw it, was to produce a drawing with a maximum of false pretensions and a minimum of actual labor. My eyes fell upon a tattered copy of a magazine, a well-known NYC magazine whose pages lauded a certain artist specialized in the art of portraiture, whose devotion to their </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">practice </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">(are they also dentists?)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> was such that they could not bear to paint more than one face, over and over, varying only the sitter’s name but never the actual picture. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Gosh! Throwing caution to the winds, I brushed aside my idly gyrating Assamese nautch girl, recklessly purchased an entire sheet of second-grade-fresh drafting vellum and pushed another quarter into the meter of my steam-driven pen! Working without respite, I labored to flesh out the Baker’s criminal pretense, multiplying his crypto-Carrollian visage seven-fold!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Huzzah for the critics! Huzzah for every artist who labors more over their bar tab than their drawing board! In a world of false pretenses, who is </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menaced_Assassin" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #990000;">the menaced assassin</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> and who is the menacing victim now? Look out, New York art-wallahs, here comes a real </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">maverick!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-54860374852482363272020-03-23T13:05:00.002-04:002020-03-23T13:05:39.655-04:00Keep Calm and Carry On Snark Hunting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEpX4EKEURjioGT0dDQbkYb5amIxGxECm41hjtLEogubw8WLXOgTYVZgJGc0nQ4CvkArQgMdL2KqBqoZtVBrOW4WLrUPpLAaAeuIltjH4XO4dBKgFMRDBlhNcOhMscjUuOKSN9qqGsL9aS/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-43_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="800" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEpX4EKEURjioGT0dDQbkYb5amIxGxECm41hjtLEogubw8WLXOgTYVZgJGc0nQ4CvkArQgMdL2KqBqoZtVBrOW4WLrUPpLAaAeuIltjH4XO4dBKgFMRDBlhNcOhMscjUuOKSN9qqGsL9aS/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-43_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">It's been a bit of a hiatus since my last posting, but in light of the current situation, I think it's time to resume my commentary upon my GN version of <i>The Hunting of the Snark </i>(available from Melville House, click on cover icon to the right) …<i> </i>when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, as both Hunter Thompson and Lewis Carroll knew all too well!</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">A strange brew: a pastoral melancholy of the gods resurgent, a fête galant of the ancien regime, the reveries of Lewis Carroll and an obscure illustrator.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Fellowship of the Snark has succumbed to the most delicious ennui, the most languid douceur possible … it is impossible, amidst the heady scent of perfumed bowers and amorous glances, to even speak that hateful word Boojum … far easier for the Boots to nibble on </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Embarkation_for_Cythera" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">his ladylove’s niobic neck,</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> far easier for the Butcher to lead the gallant company of </span><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.176px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Embarkation_for_Cythera" target="_blank">andromachean mannequins</a></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Embarkation_for_Cythera" target="_blank"> and embryonic homunculi</a> down the verdant lawn towards the wondrous, gilded barge whose pilot, the Bellman, will steer them to the </span><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/The_Embarktion_for_Cythera.jpg" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">sanctuary of Cythera,</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> that </span><a href="http://www.artinvest2000.com/alberto_savinio-charmes.html" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">isle of enchantment</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> where all things distasteful softly and suddenly abrade away into their constituent semioglyphs …</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-14652296613129232152019-02-04T09:49:00.000-05:002019-02-04T09:49:05.903-05:00Put a sock in it, Wittgenstein, we're talking snark here!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinfF5Nicq2TgNYAzZqd-P7VNNPtWxNxToQHqlEUzCvxBVHikl4ztWmrbmAdZ4NltK713aNIBhFgOcskUK8Ik9o8pyUrmuxEfn6ySFrlR5TjRQO6yitTb3cNqzra2RuUl2iAmIpQL4EaIVR/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_43_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1237" data-original-width="1600" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinfF5Nicq2TgNYAzZqd-P7VNNPtWxNxToQHqlEUzCvxBVHikl4ztWmrbmAdZ4NltK713aNIBhFgOcskUK8Ik9o8pyUrmuxEfn6ySFrlR5TjRQO6yitTb3cNqzra2RuUl2iAmIpQL4EaIVR/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_43_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">I submit for your perusal the word uffish in the above lines. Lewis Carroll explained it thus: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">"it (uffish) seemed to suggest a state of mind when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="color: #0d0600;">This is nothing more than a clever plan (hatched, no doubt, in some "scenic" bathing machine) to explain the Origin of Language in the Human Species by means of the </span><a href="http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/2010/01/bellman-always-rings-thrice.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Clochetic Rule-of-Three!</span></a></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Simply put, the learned Mister Carroll was pointing out that whatever we tell one another three times eventually does become true, that is to say, we need look no further for any linguistic First Cause than the simple observation that long ago, certain sounds became words through mere repetition. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">We might even say that sound becomes symbol through repetition, or even better, chaos becomes order through repetition. So much for the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything in It! Mister Carroll seems to have whittled it all down to a proper size, easily digestible and suitable for the masses.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Of course, there are always certain idle loafers lounging in every philosophical woodpile, hairshirt-wallahs such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who dismissed the linguistic and logical implications of Carroll’s Clochetic Rule-of-Three by sniffing (in German, no less) that it was as if </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">“someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">To which we reply: What rubbish! Quelle bêtise! Was für ein Quatsch!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">____________________</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">NB. The plethora of doors in the above <i>stanzel</i> are the doors of perception, which, if cleansed, would allow everything to appear to the Snark concealed behind each of ‘em as it truly is — infinite! You do realize, don't you, that to these concealed Snarks, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">we</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> are the concealed infinity behind </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">their</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> doors?</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-10963313204601931272019-01-14T09:45:00.002-05:002019-01-14T09:45:53.218-05:00Night of the Snark Hunter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinBbp_JOdqslBm2jLpVjAhMozoe86TsUH6vRndl4ALk8QeDTxyrm2EHnuYNgH0I9_mP2IeSG2do9Ynqor4ds_yuYq-vD3OAkFu-UMPHc00a8dVUmacZcvhoplSpRRWZKWQWzKDD9G-q3_8/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_41.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1370" data-original-width="850" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinBbp_JOdqslBm2jLpVjAhMozoe86TsUH6vRndl4ALk8QeDTxyrm2EHnuYNgH0I9_mP2IeSG2do9Ynqor4ds_yuYq-vD3OAkFu-UMPHc00a8dVUmacZcvhoplSpRRWZKWQWzKDD9G-q3_8/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_41.jpg" width="198" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">After a successful hunting, one is always left with the remains of the dead, even in Lewis Carroll’s genteel, literary world. In this, the frontispiece to Fit the Fourth, we see the remains of a particularly jolly hunting, stuffed and mounted upon the wall of a certain someone’s hunting lodge. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Bellman looks particularly splendid and lifelike and for those of you who keep track of such matters, the Snark-is-Eye Leitmotif can be discerned through the looking glass.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Look, look there, at that uppermost head in the middle … why, it’s </span><a href="http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/2007/06/fit-first-page-three-panel-one.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">the Boots-cum-Charles-Darwin</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> … what grotesque sense of humor put him there? Was it one of those </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Darwinism" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Literary Darwinists?</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> — they’re all the rage now! Lurking behind every poem and novel and feuilleton, we find them ascribing the most salacious evolutionary motives to every author — and yes, every reader! Oh the times, oh, the customs, when the reader is being read, the author is being authored, and yes … the hunter is being hunted!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">I could go on like this for some time now but all this thinking is a bit taxing; I‘d rather be outside in the fresh winter air, grouse-hunting from a helicopter or seal-clubbing till midnight or whatever it is that we must do for sport in these oddly unimaginative antinomian times.</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-69419983809845872592019-01-07T09:30:00.000-05:002019-01-07T09:30:22.866-05:00The Snark in the High Castle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIQLkwQCS0ApajTpcp6_yvDROwAxfNtAklKB5QVBRGjZyFo2nr6YYcFX_t2-ibj5r-rnotCiZ9Vn57heXKgpRLzQfF3ne2L7H1TmopTU8krLUvQMlRFJbc8D26Mb1_v9ensexXGoxS2JQB/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="800" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIQLkwQCS0ApajTpcp6_yvDROwAxfNtAklKB5QVBRGjZyFo2nr6YYcFX_t2-ibj5r-rnotCiZ9Vn57heXKgpRLzQfF3ne2L7H1TmopTU8krLUvQMlRFJbc8D26Mb1_v9ensexXGoxS2JQB/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The last, fateful words of the Baker-AKA-Lewis-Carroll before he is obliterated by the icy glare of the Snark-As-Eye lurking in the wardrobe.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">This whole Boojum business is what literary wallahs like to call a Catharsis, a purging and expelling of unsettling emotions, resulting in a post-Boojum state of relaxation, gleaming white teeth and little or no underarm perspiration. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">In this state of enlightenment all of one’s troubles softly and suddenly vanish away and one is left with only the minty fresh after-taste of … </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Boojum-Orientalism!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Boojum-Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Boojum because the Boojum is weaker than the Baker, a doctrine which elides the Boojum’s difference with its weakness. . . . as a cultural apparatus Boojum-Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge … the whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Boojumistic essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Yes, dear reader, aided only by my trusty power-packed pen and buckets of second-grade-fresh ink, I have created a Boojum-ridden Baker </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">casting aside the dehumanizing gaze of the oppressive Victorian Boojum</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> … </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">(pauses for breath)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> …</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">… and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">a resurgent postcolonial Boojum reasserting his Snarkitude by rejecting the anapestic snares of the oppressive Victorian Snark Hunter </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">… </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">(dabs brow with gin-soaked compresses)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> …</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">… ergo, hurrah for the disappearance of the Author-Function! Hurrah for the justified tyranny of the Reader-Boojum! Hurrah for everybody! … <i>(fans gyrating nautch girl with freshly minted rupees earned from Snark royalties).</i></span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-27774111660462357192018-11-19T10:46:00.001-05:002018-11-19T10:46:08.894-05:00Work is the Curse of the Inking Classes!<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<b>Perfect Christmas or Unbirthday Gift <br />for the </b><b>Carrollian Nutter in Every Family—</b><b><i>Original Snark Art! </i></b></h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixIN72g2ZNTx0CAXyzlYUvwQn9mOzv0WLc_am9mrUlAiaBxCnKHi5vphhiOMujkxuojm-FPVFGn74SKD0NkxFCoSicSxc5n-APLvqxV2vZ5K20IxA7xB_PTwlpuCNCckfRPaBkzqMiUN9l/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_77.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1083" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixIN72g2ZNTx0CAXyzlYUvwQn9mOzv0WLc_am9mrUlAiaBxCnKHi5vphhiOMujkxuojm-FPVFGn74SKD0NkxFCoSicSxc5n-APLvqxV2vZ5K20IxA7xB_PTwlpuCNCckfRPaBkzqMiUN9l/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_77.jpg" width="216" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTm06mXuESsgdpOIlPJYj51vb2Mtjf28pQciOVQoqc84e00d-E3FUKoLmyQNzJxlbSPfw_y0B7TJn-CGFBNwaz5CIYGN4Lj9qN4OgyEkmzOs7zU-EcHQuSboBWfzLJdFvQ77QJDkQCekxa/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_26.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1083" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTm06mXuESsgdpOIlPJYj51vb2Mtjf28pQciOVQoqc84e00d-E3FUKoLmyQNzJxlbSPfw_y0B7TJn-CGFBNwaz5CIYGN4Lj9qN4OgyEkmzOs7zU-EcHQuSboBWfzLJdFvQ77QJDkQCekxa/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_26.jpg" width="216" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvEL97OzFM8wYTI3BbkXtSNqc75emhbfhj5-RGQ5zgzItNOLOgjN0-w22OQQ9rvdG6aFeQvE2dpWgIqMKU7v1Czrwp9u_N5d2QCVvbbva9sgrU5GVT6ZYwv4DyabSEtr_-ZII5iVeix-J8/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_46.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1083" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvEL97OzFM8wYTI3BbkXtSNqc75emhbfhj5-RGQ5zgzItNOLOgjN0-w22OQQ9rvdG6aFeQvE2dpWgIqMKU7v1Czrwp9u_N5d2QCVvbbva9sgrU5GVT6ZYwv4DyabSEtr_-ZII5iVeix-J8/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_46.jpg" width="216" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTm06mXuESsgdpOIlPJYj51vb2Mtjf28pQciOVQoqc84e00d-E3FUKoLmyQNzJxlbSPfw_y0B7TJn-CGFBNwaz5CIYGN4Lj9qN4OgyEkmzOs7zU-EcHQuSboBWfzLJdFvQ77QJDkQCekxa/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_26.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
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Original art from my <i>Hunting of the Snark </i>Graphic Novel (Melville House) for sale, 8”x13”, pen & ink on Denril (synthetic vellum) drawings of the finest Nonsense money can buy. DM me for prices and art list.</h3>
Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-18152567201377516932018-11-12T11:20:00.001-05:002018-11-12T11:20:06.866-05:00Foucault's Snarkulum<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG5SueJs3I60nr9c-9PojskoRmJg7T0JWpWJneReNEf5LOmgx7UnA8x_kT_4LSb1GjI856WDAQAJ7NnllQxXpR7llmajLusn2OEJ9J_FNGBv63SXDHHXYKrm0z1PcoLv6W6y53h2g2uI83/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="800" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG5SueJs3I60nr9c-9PojskoRmJg7T0JWpWJneReNEf5LOmgx7UnA8x_kT_4LSb1GjI856WDAQAJ7NnllQxXpR7llmajLusn2OEJ9J_FNGBv63SXDHHXYKrm0z1PcoLv6W6y53h2g2uI83/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The last, fateful words of the Baker-AKA-Lewis-Carroll before he is smothered by the inky depths of the night, suffocated by the relentless Amorous Gigantism of Inanimate Things, transfixed by the icy glare of the Snark-Is-Eye lurking in the wardrobe — obliterated, in short, by his memories of the future!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">This whole Boojum business is what literary types like to call Catharsis, a purging and expelling of unsettling emotions, a process which results in a post-Boojum state of relaxation, mental ease, gleaming white teeth and little or no underarm perspiration. In this state of enlightenment all of one’s troubles softly and suddenly vanish away and one is left with only the minty fresh after-taste of … </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Boojum-Orientalism!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Boojum-Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Boojum because the Boojum is weaker than the Baker, a doctrine which elides the Boojum’s difference with its weakness. . . . as a cultural apparatus Boojum-Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge … the whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Boojumistic essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">All hail the post-truth Second-Grade-Fresh-New-World-Order! Aided only by my trusty giant power-packed pen and buckets of thick, reheated cafeteria-style ink, I have deconstructed a Boojum-ridden, prostrate Baker into a resurgent postcolonial Boojum reasserting his alienated Snarkhood and casting aside the dehumanizing typology of the oppressive Victorian bourgeois Snark Hunter … </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">(pauses for breath)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">… until that time when that fickle Wheel of Fate turns again and allows a resurgent postcolonial Baker to reassert his alienated manhood and cast aside the dehumanizing typology of the oppressive Victorian bourgeois Boojum … </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">(dabs brow with gin-soaked compresses)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">… hurrah for the disappearance of the Author-Function! Hurrah for the justified tyranny of the Reader-Boojum! Hurrah for everybody!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-70995238384327722062018-11-05T09:40:00.001-05:002018-11-05T09:40:20.839-05:00Snark Pictures at an Exhibition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifC8HxMJSWLbZ9GnxSGp4QKgMNk3b0bqJ_-0u95sfDheQulRSIg-6UFUDFKdVwNtICHfq1CWkuOR0bmbPUTuTyYqZPJrHiQcgdpFyRT1s6pf39UNZ9RTWie2pXQFosNn2BciFicszj4hQm/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="854" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifC8HxMJSWLbZ9GnxSGp4QKgMNk3b0bqJ_-0u95sfDheQulRSIg-6UFUDFKdVwNtICHfq1CWkuOR0bmbPUTuTyYqZPJrHiQcgdpFyRT1s6pf39UNZ9RTWie2pXQFosNn2BciFicszj4hQm/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_2.jpg" width="187" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> How well Lewis Carroll understood the human condition! The difference between nonsense and tragedy is slim at best. Observe the above pictolinguistic <i>Snarkglyph</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">A certain baker, a maker of cakes and pastries, suffers from nightmares — probably the result of over-eating baked goods — which he combats with healthful salads and the nocturnal illumination of phosphorus matches. So far, so good, an eminently plausible scenario without the least taste of Nonsense about it. In fact, it is a commendably sober and salubrious cautionary verse upon the dangers of gluttony!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">And yet …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">These nocturnal adversaries of which our pistorian hero complains so mightily, these </span><a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nightmare" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">things that go bump in the night,</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> these </span><a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=incubus" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">incubi</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">, night hags and other </span><a href="http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/01/mara.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">mares</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> that sit upon one’s chest and pose so stylishly for certain other artists, well, that’s all very well for the likes of the </span><span style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Talented Mister Fuseli,</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">but here at Chez Snark we have simpler tastes — economy is our watchword! Even nightmares cost time and money! Let Messers </span><a href="http://www.original-grafik.de/AusstellungErnstFrank02/ernstGeruest0.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Ernst</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lewis_Carroll_-_Henry_Holiday_-_Hunting_of_the_Snark_-_Plate_1.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Holiday</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> squander jeroboams of ink and hogsheads of paper upon their champagne-soaked renditions of the Baker’s </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Dream of the Snark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> — I cannot!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">With a meager drop or two of ink (2nd-grade-fresh, which makes my throat hurt so) and a few scraps of pentimenti (still reeking of garlic) I lie upon my tatty charpoy, with both pen and Assamese nautch-girl in my feeble hand and draw, as best as I can, the simple rudiments of the Baker’s Nightmare, that grim Adversary with which he struggles night after night.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">I ink a hard-won fork here, pencil in a desperately-needed matchstick there … the simple yet telling domestic detail of the wardrobe drawing nearer … render the Baker’s tear-stained, tattered leaf of Boston lettuce with which he keeps at bay the nocturnal chill … perhaps I even shed a tear into my tumbler of single-malt as I labor but no matter (no one can hear you weep in a modern, soundproofed garret anyway) … for that is the task I have taken upon myself, to draw things just as I see ‘em … and that is the nature of real Tragedy! — to engage with the Snark, every night and every day — </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">on an illustrator's wages!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-54636564283804134762018-10-22T11:20:00.002-04:002018-10-22T11:20:53.702-04:00One Day in the Life of Lewis Carroll<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_uiwQZT7dcK61qE7Lz25yadf2innjRz2zF72EPAfiA248T5E7tZDNDWQRvmUZjTbGDQhZQ1vZpwz5UR1_eGjReLuz6ZLdTEUXKHxdIBTB1oEPR7c-pJk5oFe-m8q9CH1J6JfNZWrmQaHp/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="888" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_uiwQZT7dcK61qE7Lz25yadf2innjRz2zF72EPAfiA248T5E7tZDNDWQRvmUZjTbGDQhZQ1vZpwz5UR1_eGjReLuz6ZLdTEUXKHxdIBTB1oEPR7c-pJk5oFe-m8q9CH1J6JfNZWrmQaHp/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-39_1.jpg" width="180" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Gosh! This Baker/Lewis-Carroll-wallah* really does go on and on about Boojums. Of course, we all know how unwelcome they are and what havoc they can wreak on priceless family heirlooms like forks and hope, but methinks the Baker doth protest too much!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Yes, yes, yes, we’ve heard all of this before, a Boojum is a dreadful thing to contemplate, a Boojum fluoridated my drinking water and a Boojum tampered with my automobile’s brakes … but has the Baker ever gone </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">mano a mano</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"> with </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">a </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Francisco_de_Goya,_Saturno_devorando_a_su_hijo_(1819-1823).jpg" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">teenager</span></a>?</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;">Has the Baker any idea what it is to roll up one’s sleeves and </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">decervellage</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> an </span><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/they-dont-make-atheists-like-they-used-to/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">American atheist?</span></a><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/they-dont-make-atheists-like-they-used-to/" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> </a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Has the Baker never crossed swords with </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiWJWLCoH2M&feature=related" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">a </a><span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.176px;">sharp-witted Englishman forced to squander his life and considerable talents as a mere maths tutor whilst blathering absolute nonsense to his young, boojum-like charges?</span></span></span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">As for me, pshaw to all that! Yeah, mister, I’m a tough guy! I snap my inky fingers at ‘em, these pesky Boojums, they are but a trifle compared to coming up with some nice, snappy artwork for each and every line of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">The Hunting of the Snark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> … week after week … year after year … stanza after stanza … panel after panel … oh, god, it is this, it is this that I dread!</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">______________</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">*</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Baker, whom we have conclusively demonstrated to be a doppelganger of Lewis Carroll, has spent several <i>stanzels</i> wringing his hands in a semi-subjunctive funk over the menace of Boojums. He sees Boojums in his salad, he sees Boojums in his railway carriage, he sees ‘em in his soap dish and he sees ‘em in his sewing kit. Oddly enough, the one place where the Baker never sees Boojums is in the here and now and it is this very suspense which oppresses our souls! Suspense and paranoia, the perfect Victorian bogeymen, nay, Boojums! It was Lewis Carroll’s master stroke to introduce paranoia, dread, fear and loathing into English nonsense verse, into the very inner sanctum of Jolly Olde Escapism, rather like Brexit or Teresa May dancing to ABBA but more so.</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-31220985781196265352018-10-15T09:59:00.003-04:002018-10-15T09:59:50.656-04:00Immigrant snarks and their foreign nonsense!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw08tmg5d7blU5Mf5N5dv3BbGHrJU7UzXMtN9LCu6Ewf3H5azrddd00L3rdo5BLztwJIhMiRzni7wt15F2kRah8tN4-RZuFzX1RD8-OeHNpb6c0vPE5G0elnB0VrScEiUB6OhFFAcRsSw1/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-38_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="775" data-original-width="800" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw08tmg5d7blU5Mf5N5dv3BbGHrJU7UzXMtN9LCu6Ewf3H5azrddd00L3rdo5BLztwJIhMiRzni7wt15F2kRah8tN4-RZuFzX1RD8-OeHNpb6c0vPE5G0elnB0VrScEiUB6OhFFAcRsSw1/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-38_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The crossing of international frontiers whilst engaged in the hot pursuit of a Snark is no excuse for scofflawyery or other antisocialism. We see here a young Surrey <i>fellaheen</i>, a Baker-disguised-as-Lewis-Carroll by trade, who is preparing his claim for refugee status on the grounds of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Boojum persecution.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Rendered supine by his well-documented apprehension of meeting a Boojum through no fault of his own, he remains a-bed to conserve precious forensic evidence, ie., involuntary dairy-product substitution of a major organ. His parents bid him a tearful, wooden goodbye. His uncle, a Major General doubling in the role of psychopomp-cum-<i>coyote</i> (thus saving this artist considerable labor), carefully peruses a Customs and Border Protection Declaration Form …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">1. Declare all fetishes, such as smiles, soap, forks, etc., that you might have on your person for the purpose of hunting Snarks. Please have them unpacked and ready for inspection upon your arrival. </span><a href="http://www.manray.net/observatory-time-the-lovers.jsp" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">The </a><a href="http://www.manray.net/observatory-time-the-lovers.jsp" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">time for observation</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> is limited and we mustn’t hold up others!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">2. Notify the authorities if you are approached by anyone offering to distort the relative proportions of your surroundings. Any illicit trafficking in the amorous gigantism of the inanimate world, whether </span><a href="https://www.renemagritte.org/personal-values.jsp" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">voluntary</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> or </span><a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/tenniel/alice/4.1.html" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">not,</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> may cause permanent semiotic confusion.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">3. Please stay in line. Running into another line, or </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enjambment" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">enjambment</span></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enjambment" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">,</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> might cause injury, disfigurement or even loss of life and limb. All lines should be end-stopped and masculine rhymed as befits true English nonsense.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">And to where is our Baker emigrating, you might ask? Perhaps, like the late, great Hedly Lamarr, he is fleeing this poem for another, hailing a hansom cab (with ugly driver) and demanding to be taken out of this picture to a less paranoid page … where your wretched refuseniks of tired masses huddle to be free, tally ho!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-81155738734222431902018-10-08T11:25:00.000-04:002018-10-08T11:25:10.225-04:00Carrollian Snark ISO Boojum, No Epyllions, Please<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjONgjFpP11Id2CKLiH3oVf-6pzAlFTUa3E8dweCCj__u1SnW2hZgJZj3dMk4g8uuXXpSUFH2HHQRp58z63KLVJkj9Z_cMbMLAgsU-5ywY7Tp_QLF7VEtcJ5DzjPPavY_MVzEUPnyMMo4fR/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-38_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="800" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjONgjFpP11Id2CKLiH3oVf-6pzAlFTUa3E8dweCCj__u1SnW2hZgJZj3dMk4g8uuXXpSUFH2HHQRp58z63KLVJkj9Z_cMbMLAgsU-5ywY7Tp_QLF7VEtcJ5DzjPPavY_MVzEUPnyMMo4fR/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-38_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Oh, you silly, mad, impetuous boy of a Bellman, of course you’ve heard it before! Your sense of exactitude may be lacking but as we shall demonstrate, that is mere subterfuge! In fact, our Bellman has a cunning plan … designed to cloak the manicheaen dichotomy of his cryptognostic brainbox with something completely different!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Bellman’s memory of the Baker’s Snark-Hunting Method (see last week’s verse) has been divided, like William Pitt or George Bush, into two portions to conceal his heretical, dare we say, even paganistic proclivities …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The more orthodox memory is derived from childhood memories of Sunday morning sermonizing at the ol’ Dodgson vicarage, to wit, Hebrews 12 : 17 …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">"For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">However, there is another, more pertinent memory lurking in the wings, a happier memory of family sing-alongs around the parlour piano, to wit, some verses from that favorite Victorian ballad, </span><a href="http://www.users.dialstart.net/~2metres/poetry/mistletoebough/mistletoebough.htm" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">The Mistletoe Bough</span></a><a href="http://www.users.dialstart.net/~2metres/poetry/mistletoebough/mistletoebough.htm" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> …</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">They sought her that night, they sought her next day,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">They sought her in vain when a week passed away.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Nothing much to see here*, folks — until one remembers that the mistletoe is </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe#In_culture_and_mythology" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">an ancient element of that paganism</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> which was uprooted entirely by the orthodox Christianity which the Bellman </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">supposedly </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">espouses with his first, Abrahamic memory!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Say it ain’t so, Bellman! Deny, if you can, that what we have here, in this Snark Hunters’ recipe of "seeking-thimbles-care-forks-hope-railway-share-smiles-soap" is nothing less than a Celtic pagan’s verse charm, an Old English </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galdr" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">galdor</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> in fact, cleverly concealed behind some monotheistic prattle! But he cannot deny, he cannot say it ain’t so, he stands silent.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">And so we must unmask the Bellman to show him as he really is — an unrepentant </span><a href="http://europrogovision.blogspot.com/2008/07/monotheism.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">henotheist</span></a><a href="http://europrogovision.blogspot.com/2008/07/monotheism.html" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">!</a> <span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">All this versified fancypants talk of seeking Snarks is just old-fashioned pagan charm-making — by jove, it’s plain witchcraft! Deny it all you can, Bellman, but shame on you, the fictional creation of a clergyman’s son, for your heathen ways. You and your cabal of backsliding, snark-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon cryptoskálds are found out at last! Go now, skulk in your sordid oak groves … </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;"><br /><br />… How on earth did they find me out, you wonder, from whence comes this prosecutorial zeal? By Belenos, what is this, the Spanish Inquisition?</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;"><a href="https://youtu.be/7WJXHY2OXGE?t=36s" style="color: #000066; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> </a><a href="https://youtu.be/7WJXHY2OXGE?t=36s" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">— ha, ha — nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!</span></a><br /><br /><span style="color: #0d0600;">________________________</span><br /><br /><span style="color: #0d0600;">* There are those quibblers who will insist upon "The Mistletoe Bough's" publication date of 1884 rendering null and void all manner of thoughts concerning the influence of Old English poetry upon Lewis Carroll, and in particular, the general, pre-Christian, Northern European penchant for conflating linguistic structure with cosmological structure. I do not know whether the ballad has an older antecedent (I suspect it does, simply because I wish it so) but I do know that Carroll's fascination with linguistic world-play is undeniable and has deep roots in English culture.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: #0d0600;">There are also those inquisitorial types who will point out that the premise of all of the above theorizing is the precise opposite of last week's theorizing upon the same critical Eighth Stanza. To them I must reply, with all the hauteur and superciliousness I can muster at such short notice — belgium, man, belgium!</span></span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-39623788759048306572018-10-01T11:03:00.004-04:002018-10-01T11:03:31.012-04:00A Gentle Snark was pricking on the plaine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAkZp8uHzs5_pyXlGobiin1m35z4JG5yfSSP5sj1p973TT-Ze3v6OyujfDxMU7D-3rysOGmVxcrZy-2xZO63Dh8Y5HOuBe_CIFde4yMwGEqTUN6qnucH9aRRv3fLfrVwgK9LbGZCYlOOWp/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-37_22.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="800" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAkZp8uHzs5_pyXlGobiin1m35z4JG5yfSSP5sj1p973TT-Ze3v6OyujfDxMU7D-3rysOGmVxcrZy-2xZO63Dh8Y5HOuBe_CIFde4yMwGEqTUN6qnucH9aRRv3fLfrVwgK9LbGZCYlOOWp/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-37_22.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Do not mistake this infamous stanza as a magical refrain or prescription designed by Lewis Carroll to assist the B-Boyz in their Snark hunt, nothing could be further from the truth. Such misthinking is a mythic bogeyman put forth by certain philosophers of the Sir James Frazer ilk, Cheapside tailors peddling "ready-made suits" for their naked and the dead.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Consider instead the internal Mind of this poem (yes, there are such boojums), which lives a life independent of its creator, its inhabitants & even its readers. All works of art have these primeval Minds, each according to its national character. The Mind of this poem, being English, roams the midsummer nights daubed in woad, speaks in runes at high tea, shares small beer with the Mind of the </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Domesday Book</span></a></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: #0d0600;">and </span></span><a href="https://youtu.be/46SmncwWVM0" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="color: red;">Prospero’s Books</span></span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> in the Mermaid Tavern, and dosses behind hedges with the Mind of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradshaw%27s_Guide" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="color: red;">Bradshaw’s Railway Guide,</span></span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> a direct descendent of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_of_Achilles" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Achilles’ Shield</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> presently down on her luck.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Before you can voice your objections, I must tell you: be unperplexed, dear reader! — the Snark and the Mind of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">The Hunting of the Snark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> are not the same beast. The latter is a deliberate fiction bandied about by Lewis Carroll. The former is the Art behind the fiction —</span><a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/theodorado212638.html" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> </a><a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/theodorado212638.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">a magic which the Muses have excused from the lie of being truthful. </span></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Oh, ye of too much faith! Can’t you see that all your seeking and hunting and threatening and charming, that all of your sacrifices are meant for you, you alone, that they serve only to distract you from the truth? We heap up our sacrificial relics at the feet of the Mind of the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Snark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">: the thimbles, the cares, the forks and hope, the railway shares, the smiles and soap, all that Victorian bourgeois clutter mouldering in our mental attic — for ourselves only!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Pack up your smiles and soap, abandon all forks and hope, Snark Hunters! Repent and understand at last that the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Hunting of the Snark </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">is a </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinsonade" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">robinsonade</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> (the mysterious island from whence </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">all</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> Nonsense springs) and that the Mind of the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Snark</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> is its </span>pagan <span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">at whose feet we pile gifts useful to no one but ourselves.</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-71723418705823391812018-09-24T09:50:00.002-04:002018-09-24T09:50:24.227-04:00Fry My Snark!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVyzFCxfWcbwuIU5vQJP5yL3hbDrI9abaDQF5SgMUJJuOGCKDWPLdPGjW3ctJQ2b_vdSs8w4xe4fXV9WnizXdjADALzqmCriAl-RqGOq7xSvu4Fk0aYhPYaHKbjN48PuLmYy9zpk3auH74/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-37+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1193" data-original-width="1600" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVyzFCxfWcbwuIU5vQJP5yL3hbDrI9abaDQF5SgMUJJuOGCKDWPLdPGjW3ctJQ2b_vdSs8w4xe4fXV9WnizXdjADALzqmCriAl-RqGOq7xSvu4Fk0aYhPYaHKbjN48PuLmYy9zpk3auH74/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-37+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The flavor of Snark, being animal, vegetable and mineral all at once, lends itself to all manner of cookery and here at Chez Snark, we dine on snark in every season and think nothing of it — it is the original slow-food and since the Snark is a beast easily found everywhere, its carbon foot print is the lightest imaginable! The following recipe perfectly captures the flavor and ambience of freshly-caught snark in its South Asian incarnation — you won’t be disappointed!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">South Indian Snark Fry</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">• Fetch to home by any means possible (palanquin, scooter-rickshaw, forkéd stick) approx. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">2 lbs. Snark fillets</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">. If your fishmonger has no Snark, use any skinless, boneless, firm-fleshed fish fillets such as </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">tilapia, cod, catfish. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Perfectly fresh </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">soft-shell crabs </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">are widely considered to be the best approximation of Snark.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">• 2 tablespoons of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">ground coriander</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">, 1 teaspoon of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">salt</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">, 1 teaspoon of ground </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">black pepper</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> and as much </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">ground red chili (cayenne)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> as you care for</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">• A half-cup of grated </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">onion</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">• 3 cloves of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">garlic</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">, grated</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">• Two tablespoons of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">vegetable oil</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">• Sufficient flour to dredge the fillets, a mixture of one-half </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">all-purpose plain flour,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> one-half corn meal</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Combine the spices, grated onion, grated garlic and oil in a non-reactive bowl, then place the snark fillets inside the bowl, making sure that the fillets become thoroughly coated with the mixture. Let stand (refrigerated) for at least an hour or two. When ready to cook, gently dredge the coated fillets in the cornmeal-flour mix, taking care that the onion & spice mix remains on the fillets. Fry them in a pan with sufficient oil at high heat. The crust should be golden brown and not at all greasy. Serve immediately.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">You may indeed serve it with greens such as a simple garden salad. You may also fetch it home in the company of a thoroughly chilled crisp India pale ale. You may even use it for striking a light along with some lime pickle. But if your Snark fry be a Boojum, then just softly and suddenly vanish away … and let that Boojum do the washing-up for a change!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Onward, with forks and hope — to the table!</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">NB. Readers may also find my recipe for</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> </span><a href="http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/2008/03/fit-two-page-15-panel-2-weep-on-and-as.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Assamese Snark Curry</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> of interest. True Carrollians love their curry!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-33630480127676037242018-09-10T10:51:00.001-04:002018-09-10T10:51:04.223-04:00If necessity is the mother of invention, then snark hunting is its uncle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfYn97oVUk_QUHRwuA1h_bP7tA7xVabz7k_xfbH5AxwOAYMGunx-U8lcfAjds0AIGPCBs1PNLYW2tPc2t1_khW12IGv3Wq1zNqSVCtxHpGBgDawjMJQnpaoFgcLCGcfFR-ZHxEgQJhGpJa/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-36_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="675" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfYn97oVUk_QUHRwuA1h_bP7tA7xVabz7k_xfbH5AxwOAYMGunx-U8lcfAjds0AIGPCBs1PNLYW2tPc2t1_khW12IGv3Wq1zNqSVCtxHpGBgDawjMJQnpaoFgcLCGcfFR-ZHxEgQJhGpJa/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-36_3.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Yes, that’s all very well, dear reader, aren’t you clever to have remembered that Lewis Carroll’s doppelgänger, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was named after his dear uncle, Robert Wilfred Skeffington (gesundheit) Lutwidge.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">I also know that you made arrangements to force your attentions upon some local chorus girls and impress upon them the coincidence of the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Snark’s</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> origins; how Lewis Carroll commenced that poem’s composition in the town of Guildford on July 18, 1874 — the precise time and place where Dodgson himself was playing the role of "dear uncle" whilst nursing a terminally ill, tubercular nephew.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">But there’s more. While going through an old dustbin the lid flew off and you emerged clutching the proof positive of an avuncular trifecta : a dog-eared </span><a href="http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/library/torrey01.html" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">account</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> of dear uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge being fatally wounded by a lunatic armed with a large rusty nail, the point of which had been recently sharpened in anticipation of its lethal purpose. (When the English go nuts, they stay really focussed, eh?)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Enough of these dear uncles and these dear readers! It's this defective pen of mine, it will not draw uncles properly — curse these cut-rate penmongers! This hand-me-down drawing of a telegram of a newspaper clipping of a photograph of a simulated second-hand uncle will have to do for now … at least until that time when </span>all our dear uncles, like laughter, are doomed to disappear<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">.</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-79934950793622797492018-09-03T10:13:00.000-04:002018-09-03T10:13:14.954-04:00Watch out where the Boojums go and don't you eat the yellow snow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaaxwZLVApm-UeDhUVYA7rfkLTbIRedMSMItPmeopOEMlEfyGW5rbL85SvpAol0mU7ZiP58DQWjOADJuqlCo9xnr5Ps4v0fNDdFH3t1wpV3AEOYFPt2GmCJOMwouBQLU5-ctl2p303mJfV/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-36_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="850" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaaxwZLVApm-UeDhUVYA7rfkLTbIRedMSMItPmeopOEMlEfyGW5rbL85SvpAol0mU7ZiP58DQWjOADJuqlCo9xnr5Ps4v0fNDdFH3t1wpV3AEOYFPt2GmCJOMwouBQLU5-ctl2p303mJfV/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-36_2.jpg" width="170" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20.176px;">The story so far … there once was a Snark … but it will be a Boojum, alas!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Baker is suffering from what we now know to be angst. Once upon a time we would have pinned the label of big fat crybaby upon him but these are dangerous times for thought-criminals. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Boojum-angst was first used as a legal defense by the Baker’s legal counsel, the Barrister, AKA Martin Heidegger, in his seminal brief (naughty boy!): </span><i>Sein und Zeit.</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> He excused the Baker’s regression into a second childhood with the then-novel defense of angst, which he explained as an objectless and generalized dread occasioned by the growing presence of Nothing. The boojum, a nonexistent being, fit this description nicely and the Barrister won an acquital for his client on the grounds that he was an idiot anyway. We shall see more of the Barrister’s weasel-skills in Fit the Sixth.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">From whence comes this fashion to label all things boojum in the German language? Angst, schadenfreude, strafe (straffen), weltschmertz — all of ‘em teutonic and hardly a laugh in the lot. May we quote the poet Heinrich Heine </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">on this subject :</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">"… the Germans have the curious custom of always attaching a thought to whatever they do.”</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Schnitzel for thought, indeed! All it needs is this mustard-like condiment, from the cupboard of the American illustrator, </span>Edward Gorey :<br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">"I have a dumb theory that a creative piece of art is only interesting if it purports to be about something and is really about something else."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Milord, the defense rests in its usual, pretzel-like position. Like the Baker, at play in the ontic fields of the lord, to all the above charges of unlawful boojumizing and multiple neologizing we shall plead : ignorance, madam,</span><a href="http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/316/7130/0/i" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">pure ignorance.</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> Or in the very best Clochetic-cum-Orwellian manner : </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">ignorance, madam, double-plus pure ignorance.</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-82271494886792906432018-07-30T10:42:00.001-04:002018-07-30T10:42:45.712-04:00My Life in the Bush of Snarks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEqM8Xl9hl-BFWpxK2RVKMCo6FF6DD_ax3BeHn-Jxo2E-9depksoUX-PgpzjCkZfFxjjrYpoDdj2knB3jyO0-JMjTRDwnxaW2iV5oG9cxzb5_Izq6DIHeNW0k48Y1T-LoE0nKxCS7e2fUg/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior-36_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="517" data-original-width="800" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEqM8Xl9hl-BFWpxK2RVKMCo6FF6DD_ax3BeHn-Jxo2E-9depksoUX-PgpzjCkZfFxjjrYpoDdj2knB3jyO0-JMjTRDwnxaW2iV5oG9cxzb5_Izq6DIHeNW0k48Y1T-LoE0nKxCS7e2fUg/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior-36_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Achtung snark hunters! Avoid any authors unwilling to suffer their own characters’ fate. Eschew the likes of Samuel Beckett and whomever was behind the Book of Job, spurn the fictions of Dante and the Marquis de Sade, and turn instead to more generous raconteurs such as Lewis Carroll. Carroll’s sudden referral to childhood in this stanza provides some therapeutic respite to the Baker’s boojum-anxiety complex.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Baker has responded positively to this authorial auto-suggestion and has infantilized both himself and his parents into an easily digestible and perfectly oedipal size, as we can see above in this fine drawing. I will not tell you which of the several nursery room objects are the Baker’s parents, I’ll leave that to you to work out! Just place one after another into your mouth whilst cooing and gurgling.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The more indolent reader might be wondering how this authorial auto-suggestion works. In short, the Baker "hears" his author’s narration and description, etc., as</span><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5346930.stm" style="background-color: white; color: #999999; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> </a><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5346930.stm" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">a voice inside his head.</span></a><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5346930.stm" style="background-color: white; color: #999999; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> </a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Naturally, he has told no one else of this phenomenon. Please note that I have chosen to provide the Baker with </span><a href="http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/carroll_lewis/images/carroll_lewis1_med.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">the physiognomy of Lewis Carroll himself</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> and thus created an epistomological escape hatch (or trap door) of sorts for the Baker, bless his farinaceous heart.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">With all this in mind, the Baker is enjoying a rich and satisfying internal life these days. He goes through the motions of a Snark hunt with his fellows whilst simultaneously believing himself to be a 42-year old Oxford mathematics don plotting the destiny of a hermetic and even pseudo-gnostic Snarkian Multiverse (similar in nature though larger in scope to </span><a href="http://manocorto.free.fr/garage.htm" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="color: red;">The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius</span></span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">) which revolves and devolves and evolves solely and utterly upon a nonexistent entity which only he can comprehend — and which only he, the Baker, will apprehend!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; line-height: 20.176px;">The infinite melancholy of a long-ago summer’s day in Guildford, compressed into the infantile desire to say-that-which-is-not and </span>to-read-the-thing-that-is-not <span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; line-height: 20.176px;">… this Snark could be bounded in a nutshell and still count himself king of infinite space! It’s all child’s play for the talented Mr. Carroll.</span></span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-24658902967767547972018-07-23T10:04:00.001-04:002018-07-23T10:04:09.177-04:00I'm a Man of Constant Snark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm8Aox3tTZOBIyWgqA0cedZ61i3sZNf1Q4o883amry_UI3Md5wT1V9BcVA1ci2khXM5VXTW3xmVsHSgFkzJkzBzUL1TS7xN_GwwttBejmoqAwZyfGFhN9jzvd2OyT6HxJbgX7Ry-Ubd6p_/s1600/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_35_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1451" data-original-width="1600" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm8Aox3tTZOBIyWgqA0cedZ61i3sZNf1Q4o883amry_UI3Md5wT1V9BcVA1ci2khXM5VXTW3xmVsHSgFkzJkzBzUL1TS7xN_GwwttBejmoqAwZyfGFhN9jzvd2OyT6HxJbgX7Ry-Ubd6p_/s320/Hunting_Snark_interior_Page_35_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Martin Gardner, in his indispensible </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Annotated Snark,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> cites Eric Partridge’s assertion that the Baker’s use of antediluvian is "one of those rare instances in which Carroll uses a standard word in a completely whimsical sense". Gardner also notes the opposing theory of antediluvian being used as a foreshadowing of the Baker’s tears-to-come.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">However, you and I know that he’s speaking </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamic" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;">Adamic</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> the universal language spoken before the Flood and the dispersal of tongues at the Tower of Babel. This antediluvian language, designed to facilitate Edenic communication between discreet data points in a secure and lossless environment (think FORTRAN or KVIKKALKUL), remains the Baker’s preferred flavor of postlapsarian blarney*. If we waxed poetic, we might even say it’s the angelic language in which animals dream and children babble when the adults are gone to bed.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">But we’ll wax not, as yet, for deep, deep, deep underneath the surface, the Baker’s very shallow. Bless his simple Adamic soul but he’s just an idiot-savant suffering from untreated postdiluvian stress syndrome. He sees </span><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/1717/1584/1600/204272/Zodiac%20Duo.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">the sun going down</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_book#/media/File:Wither_-_Emblem_Wisdom.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">the world spinning round</span></a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_book#/media/File:Wither_-_Emblem_Wisdom.jpg" style="background-color: white; color: #000066; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> </a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">and he </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">macadamizes</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> a postmodern, postlapsarian, postdiluvian and postbabelian </span><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Grunewald_-_christ.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">man of sorrows on the comeback trail.</span></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">As for the Baker’s curious epithet of Ho; it is a typical bit of Snarkolinguistic bandinage, an orientalist snarkwallah’s reference to the </span><a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/langhotspots/Ho/facts.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">eponymous language</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> spoken in eastern India and Bangladesh, a language whose word for man is ho.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">The word, the language, the man — all together now — tally ho! </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">___________________________________</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">* The reconstruction of the Adamic language is a wholesome pastime for the protosurrealist insomniac. Its a priori ontological perfection requires a vocabulary in which every word is a homophone of all the others. All conjugations in the infinitive, all declensions nominative, no prepositions needed since every speaker is every thing and thus consubstantial, no interrogatives since they imply a lack of faith, etc. Might we conjecture that Adamic survives today as the uneasy silence between phonemes? Or does it all sound like French? I dunno …</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-87931497413978933972018-07-09T12:07:00.001-04:002018-07-09T12:07:22.945-04:00My Big Fat Greek Wedding Snark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzj5MJaCc8-NoK0_0AzjORi_Pc80J8Ngy6jSoyeeimHWYCAdmK_m8wcF77V23I8K7vgvEtkkPkReoznv8jHW5Ky4lCShLj81xjvzOop51M-sg5wDxlJmqUKeeV46VBeA6vkAqhUTiXBOat/s1600/snark08_panel-art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="762" data-original-width="1035" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzj5MJaCc8-NoK0_0AzjORi_Pc80J8Ngy6jSoyeeimHWYCAdmK_m8wcF77V23I8K7vgvEtkkPkReoznv8jHW5Ky4lCShLj81xjvzOop51M-sg5wDxlJmqUKeeV46VBeA6vkAqhUTiXBOat/s320/snark08_panel-art.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="color: #0d0600;">The very mention of that hateful word Boojum had sent our Baker into a swoon and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana%C3%AB_(Titian_series)" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">he now reclines artfully upon his hot-buttered-charpoy.</span></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> His duenna, a woman whose</span><span style="color: red;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:My_Wife_and_My_Mother-In-Law_%28Hill%29.png" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">two-faced duplicity</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">beggars the imagination, intercepts the stimulating nourishment which rains upon him like pennies from heaven. The ice, greens, jams and muffins, all of ‘em will vanish into her outstretched apron to reappear in a day-old half-baked no-goods shop she runs on the side. The Baker is left with only a conundrum to guess. Naturally, the conundrum is to guess what the conundrum is.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Oh, these Boojums! Is there no deviltry that they will not stoop to? Great god, save the earth from ever bearing such monsters! No history has proved that there were any such. Through the efforts of the authorities, no one will be exposed to them any longer.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">To-say-the-thing-which–is-not and to-draw-the-thing-which-is-not is the Way of the Boojum! That way leads to the Dark Side! Fortunately, our Baker is a simpleton and his foolish mind is the hobgoblin of more consistent ones. Like those buxom Greek girls locked up in bronze towers by their upset daddies, he has no need for conundrums, he just wants to have fun!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-52666510666642469312018-06-18T11:22:00.000-04:002018-06-18T11:22:25.114-04:00Snark à la mode <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxQkpYunws7NbhV9aPMMO7rqiw6qXeMzsuAT-z329IynT499Q2Oyhyphenhyphen-rrnRXFkmrlD715BC6JJMrCVmKstCPBUl67NYA8YdxiNR7T-rjnu4apcsQb_4a2ejzbGIt7xfiaWrVXPQTVW0S9y/s1600/31_Hunting_Snark_interior31.4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="800" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxQkpYunws7NbhV9aPMMO7rqiw6qXeMzsuAT-z329IynT499Q2Oyhyphenhyphen-rrnRXFkmrlD715BC6JJMrCVmKstCPBUl67NYA8YdxiNR7T-rjnu4apcsQb_4a2ejzbGIt7xfiaWrVXPQTVW0S9y/s320/31_Hunting_Snark_interior31.4.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Utter </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:William_Hogarth_-_A_Rake%27s_Progress_-_Plate_8_-_In_The_Madhouse.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">bedlam</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> has broken out amongst the B-Boyz at the mention of the B-Word! The Baker, mortally wounded by the tusks of the dreaded Boojum, languishes in the arms of the cytherean Beaver, who tenderly nibbles the ear of her farinaceous Adonis. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Billiard-Marker, wracked by hunger pangs, is searching for the hidden compartment within the Baker with which he transforms stones into bread for the crew’s sustenance. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Banker is auctioning off the Baker’s personal effects to pay off his creditors; he is demonstrating a telescope made of copal to the Bonnet-Maker, who ignores him entirely, the latter is measuring himself for a strait-jacket. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Boots’s evolutionary solipsism has taken a turn for the worse, the frightened Butcher wrings his hands in despair at his monarchical frenzy. In the lunatic sky of the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Desierto Pintado</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">, startled </span><a href="https://utopiadystopiawwi.wordpress.com/dada/jean-hans-arp/birds-in-an-aquarium/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">doves</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> take flight, fleeing the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Beauty" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">preternaturally sinuous lineaments</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> of the bioglyph upon which the Bellman’s magic lantern rests.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Only the Bellman retains his wits! He has seen this before, this nesting of parody within parody, reference within reference, this </span><span style="color: red;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hogarth" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">rake’s progress</span></a> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">towards the inevitable </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycx7CAe6t_Y" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">bankruptcy auction</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> of all one’s semiotic inheritance and then — off to bedlam! Oh, shun this Boojum of Infinitely Regressive Reference, this </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rake%27s_Progress" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Snark’s Progress</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> to protosurrealist ruin!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-28094844904956698722018-06-11T09:40:00.001-04:002018-06-11T09:40:55.949-04:00If the Snark Fits, Wear It<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYEH-VPrmZZHGQH3FJk-UMRRfar_kWUGM42HAUcQJSXGxYdVLb5-J3fQziCPOb7FD5r-1YMdY8JMZhdcDvbxIuMNMB_W0P2jAWe14yTzW7_DCX-K5Zty7HFge8bzn6IHxmIvUCPOacoMj9/s1600/Snark_31.2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="954" data-original-width="468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYEH-VPrmZZHGQH3FJk-UMRRfar_kWUGM42HAUcQJSXGxYdVLb5-J3fQziCPOb7FD5r-1YMdY8JMZhdcDvbxIuMNMB_W0P2jAWe14yTzW7_DCX-K5Zty7HFge8bzn6IHxmIvUCPOacoMj9/s320/Snark_31.2.jpg" width="156" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">The Bellman continues his Indictment with the accusation of Ambition, tempered by the observation that all Snarks, like the intestines or the Carolinas, are further divided into two parts*.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">First, you have your biting Snarks, those goody-two-shoes who brush their teeth every night and limit their ambitions to lime jello with their salisbury steak dinner. Their bite is as gentle as the nibblements of curious goldfish upon a giggling baby’s bum, a mere trifle. They are the best of Snarks, the heppiest of Snarks, no ill wind will ever ruffle these </span><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=460&tabview=image" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">li’l ainjils’ feathers. </span></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Then there are those other scratching Snarks, addicted to back-room jobbery in used woolen underwear and race-track skullduggeries. They are Snarks fallen from grace, who loathe hairnets, electrolysis and the consumption of soup and cotton candy. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">We see an example of this latter Snark in the above illustration. He is lost in his own private pandemonium, shuffling to a distant armegeddon in his mismatched, </span><a href="http://www.zazie.at/SpecialEditions/JeanBenoit/00_Images/HomageToSergentBertrand2.jpg" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">postlapsarian slippers,</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> forkéd tail and second-hand wings. He has been consumed entirely by the itch of Ambition, an old itch for an </span><a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Scratch" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Old Scratch! </span></a><span style="color: red;"><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">____________________________</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">*An odd inconsistency which seems to have escaped most Snarkologists. The Bellman commences his Indictment by specifically stating that there are 5 Snarkian qualities The feathered-whiskered speciation that follows the 5th Indictment is obviously another distinct, yet unannounced 6th Indictment. In light of the Bellman’s demonstrated inability to enunciate the number 6, might we conjecture that</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;"> the number of this particular beast is 6? O</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">ne's pursuers certainly cannot hunt what they cannot count, or so goes the Snark's reasoning. Using the Clochetic Rule-of-Three, we might even bandy about the number 666, a number of apocalyptic import which might well presage <a href="http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/romanticism/images/WilliamBlake-Satan-in-his-Original-Glory-c1805.jpg" style="color: #000066; text-decoration: none;">the lethal approach of the dreaded Boojum!</a></span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7268813616456268351.post-56216336366817765782018-05-21T09:39:00.003-04:002018-05-21T09:39:56.466-04:00The Infernal Bathing Machines of Dr Hoffmann<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjapcevIq0gc3TslHd7fd1-HAmDkArForqbCx4s1AovF4iHhr0GkTl6d5q9_kE0tN8u8QSI6o-Io818p4SRpoKCONzr2KZLUaXCkd6gsFlQCcVx2pLw-Mey0NTZfp_qJ9KS5s91iWWN3b6l/s1600/31_1_Hunting_Snarkx.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="864" data-original-width="603" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjapcevIq0gc3TslHd7fd1-HAmDkArForqbCx4s1AovF4iHhr0GkTl6d5q9_kE0tN8u8QSI6o-Io818p4SRpoKCONzr2KZLUaXCkd6gsFlQCcVx2pLw-Mey0NTZfp_qJ9KS5s91iWWN3b6l/s320/31_1_Hunting_Snarkx.jpg" width="223" /></a></div>
<br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="color: #0d0600;">Given : Only with one’s</span><span style="color: red;"> </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathing_machine" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">bathing-machine</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"><span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: #0d0600;">can one bathe properly and thoroughly.</span></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Given : The divinely-ordained, absolute and ineffable perfection of any place cannot be achieved without a bathing-machine.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Ergo : Cleanliness is next to godliness.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Not a surprising sentiment coming from the pen of an English clergyman’s son but it is an accurate depiction of the Snark’s true character and motives? Read on, MacDuff …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Given : The Snark’s sentimental attachment to bathing-machines does nothing to improve the beauty of scenes.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Given : The Snark’s sentiments are open to doubt.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Ergo : When in doubt, do nothing. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">A Fabian approach to the hunting of Snarks but will the <i>poilu</i> tolerate it? History warns us otherwise! </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Je me souviens Cannae …</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Given : The utility of a bathing-machine lies solely in its property of not allowing an observer to know what is inside it.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">Given : The Snark’s chief happiness is the transportation of its bathing-machine from one place to another.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">Ergo : Ignorance is bliss.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;">And there you have it, another Clochetic validation of the platitudinous proverbs with which we usually stave off our lexical and cognitive </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">horror vacui.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> I have illustrated all of the above palaver with another infamous platitude, one of the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_de_Lautreamont" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Comte de Lautrémont’s</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> most infamous bromides: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> I think the bathing machine lends a certain banality to the whole thing, don’t you? Even surrealism (and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 20.176px;">especially</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0600; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20.176px;"> protosurrealism) has its sentimental, even hackneyed picture-postcard moments!</span>Mahendra Singhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15308770582240496910noreply@blogger.com0