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

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

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

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

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


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

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


Lewis Carroll AKA Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA The Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________

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

Bring Me the Snark of Alfredo Garcia

Great news! Jacques Derrida says that my GN version of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark is "super cool and fresh!" Meanwhile, the commentary continues …


Ladies and gentlemen, please gather around this small table which I just happen to have upon me, and pay attention, you might get lucky. The name of the game is Hunting the Snark and today we’ll try to find a Jubjub Bird, a beast just like the Snark but even better.

Finding one is child’s play, especially for a smart operator such as you. Simply lay your money down and watch the origami cranes closely, the clue you seek is beneath one of them. Pay no attention to the young gentleman with the fieldstone head and vacant expression, he’s a Polynesian exchange student studying mid-19th-century British abattoir practices and he has nothing to do with me, I assure you. The epithet of shill worries him not, it's idle speculation and his empty head is entirely innocent of such nefarious thing-um-a-jigs.

Using the Clochetic Rule of Three (known to polite society as the Logician’s Variation Upon Three Card Monte) the Butcher has already won a Jubjub Bird, the lucky guy! Alas, his fellow gamester, the plucky Beaver, has lost count. Last week’s byzantine labyrinth of puzzling quills and Poes and desks and birds has befuddled her pretty head; and she now is, as they say, a flummoxed castorian incapable of reckoning the amount of anything in this farrago of pictoversical sleights-of-hand.

She is, in popular parlance, a mark, and as such, quite appealing to homi-and-femicidal beasts such as Jubjub Birds! In fact, her dizzy-headed state of pixilation is the only correct strategy to defeat this nefarious, thimblerigged scheme! Dispossessed of all common sense, proudly ignorant of all logical acumen, she blithely chooses the closest origami crane — et voilà — all the fluttering, flying, flittering semioglyphs concealed therein are freed at last!

Yes, dear readers, it’s all rather zenlike, most confidence games are, you know. Truth and deception, sense and nonsense, all enfolded upon themselves into origamic puzzles which, when upended, release into the wild the crypto-Jubjubian fledgings of raw meaning.

And if all the above crosstalk wracks your poor brains, then beware the Jubjub, my son, and watch the telly instead, it do the Snark in different voices!

Snarked and Confused

You asked for it, you got it — a 3-plus year-long exegesis of my GN version of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark … here's today's episode …

Another crypto-scholastic cri de coeur from the Subtle Don, Lewis Carroll, cunningly palmed off by him as the Butcher’s usual Snark Hunting blather. For the benefit of readers who may have just emerged from the washroom and are discreetly eying the exit whilst wondering what all the ruckus is about, scholasticism was an insidious bit of Continental thinkery brought over to England in unlicensed bathing machines and then peddled discreetly in certain no-questions-asked academic circles frequented by the finest medieval chatteratti of the day.

It was advertised as strong medicine for all manner of mental boojums, in particular, the disconcerting lapse between how we think things should be and how we actually find them to be. Such lapses seemed to plague the rook racked and river-rounded purlieus of Oxford in particular, so much so that Gerard Manley Hopkins found it necessary to work his inimitable brand of poetical juju upon the place …

… these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;
Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller …

The unvaricose Oxonian unraveller that Hopkins is rhapsodizing is none other than Duns Scotus, the professional theologian and fiendish disputant of all things trinitarian. If his name is not one which is lightly bandied about your dinner table, fret not; his Warholian fifteen minutes will be over before you have even finished your dessert!

This will be a simple transmogrification. We liberally apply several gallons of india ink recycled from an obscure Surrealist travel poster atop the hapless Duns; then we accessorize him with an appropriate chapeau and finish by triumvirating him.

Gosh, dada was right, the hat does make the man! Our rather pasty-faced theologian is now become a strapping, young specimen of a Snark Hunter flexing his rhetorical muscles with a showstopping visual demonstration of the Clochetic Rule of Three!

Yes indeed, gentle readers, this successful demonstration of a tautological trinity of Jubjubs is proof positive that wishful thinking trumps logic as far as Snark Hunting goes. Henceforth, please keep your minds empty and your beliefs in an upright and locked position for the road to hell is paved with good intentions.*

The sound of one hand snarking

Many comix artists posting their work on-line like to liven things up for the kiddies with a bit of well-intended blather concerning Process. This particular stanzel, in which the Butcher logically proves the existence of the Jubjub through the application of the Clochetic Rule of Three, is chock full of the overflowing, down-home goodness of Process.

So, how did I draw it?

Simple! Take a fresh, full bottle of black ink and dilute it entirely with white paper. Or if you prefer, starting at the beginning of the drawing, continue until you see the end, then stop. Or, even better, just keep drawing until the picture in your head runs out of room and is forced to move onto the drawing board.

Proof complete, times three! Yeah, baby, gimme some of that hot Process!

Fit the Fifth, Page 34, Panel 1 … jubjubs for algernon

“Two added to one — if that could but be done,”
It said, “with one’s fingers and thumbs!”
Recollecting with tears how, in earlier years,
It had taken no pains with its sums.
“The thing can be done,” said the Butcher, “I think.
The thing must be done, I am sure.
The thing shall be done! Bring me paper and ink,
The best there is time to procure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NB. A very grateful tip of the ink-smeared tuque to Salgood Sam, who was gracious enough to include a sample of my Snark in the the first Special Print Edition of Sequential which he produced and distributed at the TCAF. It's available here for a free download and well worth a look, with a superb cover and lots of great art & articles from various Canadian comix wallahs! And while you're at it, bookmark Sequential for all the latest developments in the very happening Canadian comix scene and then take a look at Salgood's blog — how does he draw so much and so well?
____________________________

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

Fit the Fifth, Page 33, Panel 4 … quicker than a new york snark!

It felt that, in spite of all possible pains,
It had somehow contrived to lose count,
And the only thing now was to rack its poor brains
By reckoning up the amount.

Ladies and gentlemen, please gather around this small table which I just happen to have upon me, and pay attention, you might get lucky. The name of the game is Hunting the Snark and today we’ll try to find a Jubjub Bird, a beast just like the Snark but even better.

Finding one is child’s play, especially for a smart operator such as you. Simply lay your money down and watch the origami cranes closely, the clue you seek is beneath one of them. Pay no attention to the young gentleman with the fieldstone head and vacant expression, he’s a Polynesian exchange student studying mid-19th-century British abattoir practices and he has nothing to do with me, I assure you. The epithet of shill worries him not, it's idle speculation and his empty head is entirely innocent of such nefarious thing-um-a-jigs.

Using the Clochetic Rule of Three (known to polite society as the Logician’s Variation Upon Three Card Monte) the Butcher has already won a Jubjub Bird, the lucky guy! Alas, his fellow gamester, the plucky Beaver, has lost count. Last week’s byzantine labyrinth of puzzling quills and Poes and desks and birds has befuddled her pretty head; and she now is, as they say, a flummoxed castorian incapable of reckoning the amount of anything in this farrago of pictoversical sleights-of-hand.

She is, in popular parlance, a mark, and as such, quite appealing to homi-and-femicidal beasts such as Jubjub Birds! In fact, her dizzy-headed state of pixilation is the only correct strategy to defeat this nefarious, thimblerigged scheme! Dispossessed of all common sense, proudly ignorant of all logical acumen, she blithely chooses the closest origami crane — et voilà — all the fluttering, flying, flittering semioglyphs concealed therein are freed at last!

Yes, dear readers, it’s all rather zenlike, most confidence games are, you know. Truth and deception, sense and nonsense, all enfolded upon themselves into origamic puzzles which, when upended, release into the wild the crypto-Jubjubian fledgings of raw meaning.

And if all the above crosstalk wracks your poor brains, then beware the Jubjub, my son, and watch the telly instead, it do the Snark in different voices!

Fit the Fifth, Page 33, Panel 2 … truly my snark, thou art but a dunce

“’Tis the note of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat;
You will find I have told it you twice.
‘Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete,
If only I’ve stated it thrice.”

Another crypto-scholastic cri de coeur from the Subtle Don, Lewis Carroll, cunningly palmed off by him as the Butcher’s usual Snark Hunting blather. For the benefit of readers who may have just emerged from the washroom and are discreetly eying the exit whilst wondering what all the ruckus is about, scholasticism was an insidious bit of Continental thinkery brought over to England in unlicensed bathing machines and then peddled discreetly in certain no-questions-asked academic circles frequented by the finest medieval chatteratti of the day.

It was advertised as strong medicine for all manner of mental boojums, in particular, the disconcerting lapse between how we think things should be and how we actually find them to be. Such lapses seemed to plague the rook racked and river-rounded purlieus of Oxford in particular, so much so that Gerard Manley Hopkins found it necessary to work his inimitable brand of poetical juju upon the place …

… these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;
Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller …

The unvaricose Oxonian unraveller that Hopkins is rhapsodizing is none other than Duns Scotus, the professional theologian and fiendish disputant of all things trinitarian. If his name is not one which is lightly bandied about your dinner table, fret not; his Warholian fifteen minutes will be over before you have even finished your dessert!

This will be a simple transmogrification. We liberally apply several gallons of india ink recycled from an obscure Surrealist travel poster atop the hapless Duns; then we accessorize him with an appropriate chapeau and finish by triumvirating him.

Gosh, dada was right, the hat does make the man! Our rather pasty-faced theologian is now become a strapping, young specimen of a Snark Hunter flexing his rhetorical muscles with a showstopping visual demonstration of the Clochetic Rule of Three!

Yes indeed, gentle readers, this successful demonstration of a tautological trinity of Jubjubs is proof positive that wishful thinking trumps logic as far as Snark Hunting goes. Henceforth, please keep your minds empty and your beliefs in an upright and locked position for the road to hell is paved with good intentions.*

__________________

* Yes, yes, I know. And while we’re on the subject of the Great Cham, have you seen this?

NB. There is a live-action film version of the Snark which seems to be in post-production at UCLA, an MFA thesis film by Michael McNeff. A short video dwelling upon Mr. McNeff's project is here; a large gallery of stills posted by the makeup artist, Miriam Writer, is here. Head west, young Bellman, Hollywood-Babylon beckons!

Fit the Fourth, Page 24, Panel 1 … the Bellman never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the Baker

The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.
"If only you’d spoken before!
It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,
With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!
"We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,
If you never were met with again —
But surely, my man, when the voyage began,
You might have suggested it then?

I submit for your perusal the word uffish in the above lines. Lewis Carroll explained it thus: "it (uffish) seemed to suggest a state of mind when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish."

Yowsuh … I shall put it to you that all this Carrollian neologicomania was nothing more than a clever, crypto-linguistic metatheory (hatched, no doubt, in some "scenic" bathing machine) which attempts to explain the Origin of Language in the Human Species by means of the Clochetic Rule-of-Three!

Simply put, the learned Mister Carroll was pointing out, through repeated utterances of neologisms such as uffish and brillig and Boojum, 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, long ago, certain sounds became words through mere repetition. We might even say that sound becomes symbol through repetition, or even better, chaos becomes logic 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.

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 “someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”

To which we reply: What rubbish! Quelle bêtise! Was für ein Quatsch!
____________________

NB. Needless to say, our prelingual, Adamic ancestors did not read newspapers. They preferred perusing the above drawing and verses, which would have been engraved upon the walls of their semi-Platonic caves. Note carefully the plethora of doors delineated in both. These 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, we are the concealed infinity behind their doors?

Fit Two, Page 16, Panel 1 … most of life’s evils arise from man's inability to sit still in a bathing-machine

"The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes —
A sentiment open to doubt.

Given : Only with one’s bathing-machine can one bathe properly and thoroughly.
Given : The divinely-ordained, absolute and ineffable perfection of any place cannot be achieved without a bathing-machine.
Ergo : Cleanliness is next to godliness.

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 …

Given : The Snark’s sentimental attachment to bathing-machines does nothing to improve the beauty of scenes.
Given : The Snark’s sentiments are open to doubt.
Ergo : When in doubt, do nothing.

A Fabian approach to the hunting of Snarks but will the poilu tolerate it? History warns us otherwise! Je me souviens Cannae …

Given : The utility of a bathing-machine lies solely in its property of not allowing an observer to know what is inside it.
Given : The Snark’s chief happiness is the transportation of its bathing-machine from one place to another.
Ergo : Ignorance is bliss.

And there you have it, another Clochetic validation of the platitudinous proverbs with which we usually stave off our lexical and cognitive horror vacui. I have illustrated all of the above palaver with another infamous platitude, one of the Comte de Lautrémont’s most infamous bromides: the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. I think the bathing machine lends a certain banality to the whole thing, don’t you? Even surrealism (and especially protosurrealism) has its sentimental, even hackneyed picture-postcard moments!
________________________

NB. The Poetry Foundation was kind enough to ask me to illustrate an essay on the "World’s Longest Poem". Thanks to the auspicious medium of the Internet, you will find that my illustration, the informative and witty essay and the genuinely long poem all form a seamless and truthful whole, a sphere of infinite circumference whose center is everywhere. You won’t be disappointed!

Fit Two, Page 15, Panel 1 … let him that hath understanding count the number of the Snark

"We have sailed many weeks, we have sailed many days,
(Seven days to the week I allow),
But a Snark, on the which we might lovingly gaze,
We have never beheld till now!
"Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again
The five unmistakable marks
By which you may know, wheresoever you go,
The warranted genuine Snarks.

We have arrived now at the very omnium of Fit the Second, that critical portion of The Hunting of the Snark in which the author describes in detail the characteristics of the genus Snark. To explicate these crypto-stigmata, the Bellman has resorted to the very respectable Victorian expedient of the illustrated public lecture. His authoritarian nature naturally gravitates towards such methods of imparting knowledge to the working classes; he also favors the use of a magic lantern to illuminate the more difficult concepts of his lecture with the appropriate visual figures. These will become apparent in the following panels.

But we must turn now to a bit of textual analysis which will pique the interest of all Snarkologists. The Bellman’s preamble (which actually commenced in last week’s panel) mentions in passing three numbers. The numbers 7 and 5 appear on lines 54 and 58, which, in addition to his earlier mention of the number 4 on line 50 in the previous stanza, allows us (nay, compels us!) to perform the following simple Clochetic equation :

7x5x4=140

We now employ the number 42 (whose Snarkian significance needs no further explication to the illuminati who frequent these parts):

140/42=3.333 …

As predicted by the Clochetic Rule of Three, the entirety of the Bellman’s introductory remarks concerning the qualities of the Snark has also served as a cryptic verification of the truth value of 42 by multiplying that auspicious number precisely three times — in an infinite and irrational repetition, to boot! QED and bob’s your uncle.

In closing these remarks, I would like to thank Doug Howick and nnyhav, whose neologisms for a group of Snarks were, respectively : indefectability and exultation. I find both suggestions maddeningly perfect and thus, truly Snarkian.

Fit Two, Page 14, Panel 2 … for the Bellman is an honourable man;

He served out some grog with a liberal hand,
And bade them sit down on the beach:
And they could not but own that their Captain looked grand,
As he stood and delivered his speech.
"Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears!"
(They were all of them fond of quotations:
So they drank to his health, and they gave him three cheers,
While he served out additional rations).

The Shakespearean quotation will be familiar to all poetical and political earmongers. The Bellman has been depicted in the definitive Roman pose of imperial authority known as the adlocutio, which has been visually modified here to prove, amongst many other things, that everything old is new again.

Clothed in the rhetorical and semiotic crypto-imperial habiliments of Marxist-Leninism, the Bellman not only demands his auditors’ ears but even their arms so that he may throw them (their arms, not his audience) across the shoulders of the tottering capitalist-running-boojums and assist them into an early grave. This odd affinity (an unelective affinity?) towards Comrade Lenin is no accident, it allows us to make a second auricular reference to the rumored waxen ear which has replaced the genuine, damaged article on Lenin’s embalmed corpse.

The ear motif receives its third and final reiteration (thus fulfilling the Clochetic Rule of Three) in the somewhat maimed person of Vincent van Gogh, who stands behind Comrade Bellman (somewhat in the manner of the Laputian flappers, methinks) to encourage the enthusiasm of all concerned with his sinister aura … of menacing risibility.

Their audience, the proletarian hunters of the Snark, react to all this intellectual palaver as expected. Drinks all around and afterwards, dancing on the upper decks for the lower ranks! Huzzah for His Nibs the Bellman, huzzah for the Snark, huzzah for the revolution!
_______________________

NB. Heartfelt thanks to the LCSNA for their very kind mention of this never-ending Snark Hunt of mine in the latest issue of the Knight Letter. With forks and hope we ink onwards and upwards!

Fit Two, Page 12, Panel 2 … English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water ...

January 27th, 1832 is the birthday of Charles Dodgson, who passed away January 14th, 1898. The former preceded the latter, as befits an Eminent Victorian. Coincidentally, the English poet and author Lewis Carroll also died on the 14th, last Monday, 13 days before his birthday on the 27th, next Sunday.

As I have noted once before, this befits the author of The Hunting of the Snark, a poem whose composition was finished before it was begun.

Repeat the previous paragraph to fulfill the Clochetic Rule of Three and as a reward for your truthiness, you may have a slice of the birthday panel shown above. Delicious, eh? Some nice bits of Sir John Tenniel, a juicy morsel of Dora Maar (with a succulent Alfred Jarry center) and all of it garnished with the abraded glyphs of Oysters à la Alberto Savinio!

--------------------------------

NB. Congratulations to the LCSNA and Messers P.L. Heath, J. Dixon and L. Carroll on their well-done and informative publication of "La Guida di Bragia". This work has been obliquely referred to before in these pages, during a meandering blather on Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio. It seems that the heady scent of Anglo-Italian Railway-Surrealism is in the air … bravo!