Lewis and Carroll’s excellent adventure

As you can see above, the Baker is not digging this particular part of our GN/BD (sounds kinky, eh?) version of Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. He’s not in the groove, he’s not with the program, he’s just not jiggy with it.

In short, the Baker’s being a bit of a wet blanket about this whole Boojum thing and frankly, it makes me sick.

Man up, Baker, stiff upper lip and all that. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, as Dr. Thompson once said. Whatever you do, don’t look inside the big dresser beside you, just focus on the blank, mushroomy eyes of your homunculi parents, clutch your fork tightly and refudiate your dread.

On a lighter note, last weekend’s meeting of the LCSNA in New York was the exact opposite direction of dreadful. The gracious and ever-resourceful Andrew Sellon was succeeded as LCSNA prez by Mark Burstein, who promised to take the society in a more Californian direction, cowabunga!

Adam Gopnik gave us a brief whirl around the Carrollian œuvre with some snappy and sharp insights into the difference between anglophone and francophone preferences in children’s literature. Jenny Woolf’s talk on C.L. Dodgson’s persona, both public and private, was unusually shrewd and penetrating; she described in detail how Dodgson’s childhood laid the foundation for Carroll’s public persona, a theme which she amplifies in her latest book, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll. Her recent piece in the Smithsonian is an excellent summation of current Carrollian thinking.

Cathy Rubin explained the intricate research and acquisitions process for her new book about Alice Liddell, The Real Alice in Wonderland, and Dr. Edward Guiliano explained to us why the NYIT had so much Carrolliana in its library holdings despite his students’ steadfast refusal to avail themselves of it.

But for we Snark Hunters, the appearance of Oleg Lipchenko was the main event! Oleg gave a talk on his in-progress version of THOTS and judging by the sample spreads he showed us, it’s going to be quite a splendid book.

I think it’s safe to say that we are officially in a Snarkian Renaissance at long last, with two film versions coming out, a revival of the Wesley-Smiths' Boojum! in Chicago (starts November 19th), my own Snark at Melville House, Oleg’s stunning version looming very large on the horizon and even a Japanese manga version circulating, replete with the obligatory googly-eyed teenaged girl brandishing a high-powered hunting rifle and short skirt. It is this, it is this that I dread!

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, Boojums transient

Fit the Sixth, Page 41, Panel 2 … the hills are alive with the sound of snark

The Witnesses proved, without error or flaw,
That the sty was deserted when found:
And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law
In a soft under-current of sound.

If you’ve been assiduously following our nonsensical res publica, The Hunting of the Snark, you might have noticed that there has been a steady accumulation of visual details as the story progresses. Such a gradual amplification of things is what the critics call fritter-my-wig or even what-you-may-call-um and believe me, it’s all the rage in the right sort of literary circles.

However, we ‘umble visual artists, (fixated as always on more alimentary matters) call such an accumulation of visual tchotchkes "chicken fat". The late, great Will Elder coined the term whilst inking a drowned fly into a late night rendering of Harvey Kurtzman’s matzoh-ball soup as a practical joke. After a bit of the usual overheated vaudeville cross-talk-cum-haberule®-brandishing and some soft-shoeing with the Pro-White on Elder’s part, the moniker stuck and generations of artists have been ladling the chicken fat (or even schmalz if it’s germane to the proceedings) into their more soup-like drawings ever since.

All of which is a very convoluted and uselessly byzantine way of saying that you should keep a close eye on the progression of our Snark Hunt for it’s growing ever richer in unsaturated animal lipids such as chicken fat and Martin Heidegger. Naturally, one wonders what Lewis Carroll would have made of all our messing about with his otherwise perfectly normal recipe for a bowl of soup … would he have smacked his lips appreciatively at the our addition of the accurately-besmocked and bestyed pigherder Witnesses demonstrating the swineless vacuity of this comic operetta of a legal farce? Would he have slurped greedily at the tasty bits of the timeless humour of Mister Piggy’s magnum opus hoisted aloft before the proceedings like some sort of philosophical pearls before swine?

Or would Mister Carroll have paused in mid-luncheon, his spoon poised at his lips, and angrily demanded this artist to explain post haste what this other bird, this nonchicken and perhaps even swan-like bird masquerading as a legal bagpipe is doing in our collation of a Snark Hunt?

Alas, for Mr. Carroll and his delicate Victorian sense and sensibilities! This unexpectedly swannish creature is probably the grotesque and unexpected consequence of this artist using second-grade-fresh chicken fat in his cheapster drawings, a fly-by-night chicken fat cunningly adulterated with etymological preservatives of unknown provenance.

Yes, dear reader, this sudden outbreak of swans and bagpipes is no accident, on the contrary, it is a Significant Detail! Curiously, the word "sound", deriving as it does from the Old English word "swan," (properly, the sounding bird) seems to provide a perfect excuse for this artist to wreak further havoc on the entire chicken fat paradigm and perhaps even clear the way for a future swan-fat thing-um-a-jig. Or something along these metaphorically miscegenated lines of reasoning which so bedevil this production of the Snark …

Without error or flaw indeed, eh?
______________

NB. The very talented Tatiana Ianovskaia has just made available on-line here her charming and graceful renditions of Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, they are really worth the price.

In addition, Oleg Lipchenko’s highly detailed and complex version of AIW is coming out shortly from Tundra Books; it is really superior work and also strongly recommended! The Slavic approach to Carroll is so vigorous and incisive; Tatiana and Oleg have approached the same texts with absolutely opposite strategies, and yet each one is accurate, aesthetically cohesive and emotionally satisfying. Perfect Christmas gifts!

… and the equally talented John Coulthart has just produced his 2010 Artist's Calendar, the theme is AIW! Calloo, callay, it's a '60s psychedelic trip and quite well done … he's intimating at the possibility of more Carrollian work, whether calendars or something more substantial remains to be seen.

Fit the Fourth and the LCSNA … we few, we happy few, we band of snark-hunters

The above page-spread serves as a perfect visual embellishment to my delightful experiences at the LCSNA meeting last Saturday! We see above, in order, a harmless theatrical pratfall, a gathering of urbane galants, a solipsistic-Carrollian-multiverse, some linguistic child’s play and finally, the Harmonious Genius of a SNARK-HUNTER Triumphant O’er the Unruly Debates of the Unenlightened.

A perfect visual allegory for the goings-on in NYC! And for all of this, I owe great thanks to Andrew Sellon and August and Clare Imholtz, for inviting me and giving me the chance to meet and listen to the following …

• Jon Scieszka, who’s done a new version of AIW, using the formerly unpublished comps of Mary Blair. The comps are quite good, better, in my opinion, than the finished backgrounds and characters that Disney used in the film, far more expressive and personal. Jon is also the U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, a noble cause for which he is perfectly suited. I cannot imagine a child exposed to Jon’s ebullient enthusiasm daring not to read!

• Nancy Willard, children’s author and educator. Nancy, who wrote the award-winning A Visit to William Blake's Inn, talked about the narrative techniques of Carroll and how he made children’s literature more intimate and realistic, both technically and emotionally.

• Peter Westergaard, who gave a detailed explanation of how he encoded Carrollian motifs into the structure of his latest opera, Alice in Wonderland. I really enjoyed his music and also the shoptalk, as it were, of a complex process which has so many parallels with what I’m trying to do with this Snark. I am unable to find any samples of this work on the web and if anyone does so, perhaps they could contact me?

I also must recommend the work of Oleg Lipchenko, who showed me a sample of his luscious AIW, and also allowed me to see a dummy of his Humpty Dumpty, which made me seethe a bit with goodnatured envy. I also met Tatiana Ianovskaia, who also is doing some really charming Alice work. Curious that all the illustrators present were Canadian …

In talking with the marvelous Scott Edelman, we both realized that we had been doing work for the same various publishers and magazines (Fantagraphics and Sovereign Media) since the mid 80s, which goes to show how small the publishing industry really is … yikes!

In truth, there was little Snarkian banter all-in-all but I did have the frisson of talking Snark with the poet Matt Demakos at lunch … oh, the decadent, nay, heady thrill of discussing Snarkian anapests, headless and headed, over a meal in Sin City itself!

I also met the genuinely learned Dave Haan, of Stochastic Bookmark, who very generously bestowed upon me several books of oulipian, ‘pataphysical and surrealist nature! The idea of an oulipian translation of Carroll has long intrigued me … Dave may have set in motion events which will irk future Carrollians for centuries to come!

And so, speaking of books, they are the genuine coin of our Snarkian realm. I met Monica Edinger, the educator and author, whose blog deals with the intellectual and emotional transactions between books and children. Although my Snark does jest and hoot and make rude noises at times, there is a serious purpose to all this tomfoolery : to intrigue people — young people especially — enough to further search out, on their own, the various spoors and traces that my Snark leaves behind as it evades its own Hunters!

Next Week : America Elects the Next Leader of the World’s Only Remaining Superduper Power … while I Make a Drawing of a Giant Snail Poised to Take Over and Annihilate Guildford, Surrey!