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!

The Master and Snarkarita

If you've arrived here from Feral Press or Facebook, searching for the Martin Olson's Encyclopaedia of Hell poster seen above, you can order it here from CafePress. More details about the book & ordering information are available on my AVAILABLE FROM THE ARTIST page on the upper right.

All profits from the sale of this poster will be applied towards the exorcism of my drawing board and a much-needed moistening of my temples with a poultice of twenty-dollar bills soaked in gin and Rose's Lime Juice … any Shabana Azmi look-alikes are encouraged to apply for the position …



And if you've arrived here looking for some more sedate action from my GN version of The Hunting of the Snark … why, here it is also …

Strange, creepy creatures are the bane of modern life and both Lewis Carroll and myself have seen fit to embellish this crucial stanzel of The Hunting of the Snark with a surfeit of ‘em. Suitably alarmed, the Butcher has darted into a convenient telephone booth and re-emerged in the guise of St. Anthony, the father of Christian monasticism and more to our purposes, a veritable bit of human fly-paper for all manner of hallucinatory things that go bump in the night.

The attentive reader will remember that the very first stanzel of this Snark involved a direct quotation from Mathias Grünewald’s version of St. Anthony, a quotation which involved a fair bit of mirror-work and the cramming of a very hirsute and oddly fey Saint into the sturdy 19th-century country-squire’s boots of the Boots, AKA Charles Darwin. This saint-bashing mania of mine is shared with many other artists; throughout the ages, we picture-folk (or Bildervolk, gesundheit) have mass-produced St. Anthonys by the bucketful. Even Henry Holiday joined in the fun, establishing an Antonine precedent for Fit the Fifth which even the religiously fastidious Lewis Carroll approved!

From whence comes this Antiantonimania? Are Salvador Dali (the Norman Rockwell of Surrealism), Hieronymus Bosch, Feliciens Rops and Gustave Flaubert all victims of a sudden outbreak of religious fervor? Or is it all just an excuse to draw legions of naked women and creepy circus sideshow freaks mobbing a defenseless old man in a desert?

To be sure, there is a certain visual, even Luis Buñuel kind of appeal to such a proposition but nonetheless, dear reader, it’s just not very sporting, is it? The genuinely Christian thing to do is to insist that all these unreal phenomena besetting a very real person are promptly replaced with a new and improved denful of very real phenomena besetting a patently unreal person! The latter personage would be, of course, our Snark, and I’m certain that you, the readers and thus the ultimate — and only! — reality of this poem, will do a splendid job of standing in as the former.

So, that’s all settled, is it? I’ll go and have a nice lie-down while you slip into your new Snark-baiting role. Just study the above drawing very carefully and do whatever Mister Bosch says. He does have an active imagination and if anyone asks you why this is so, hint vaguely that it’s just that Hieronymo's mad againe.

The Joy of Snarking

Anyone interested in the official explanation of the above stanzel is urged to consult an earlier posting of mine, Tiffin at Breakfasties …

Those readers who are too slothful to do so will have to make do with the following, hastily concocted tissue of lies, half-truths and evasions : I couldn’t help myself.

How much of modern art springs from artists’ lethargy? When Salvador « Avida Dollars » Dalí left his watch outside in the torrid Catalonian sun to melt into a gelatinous bolus, was he really trying to express the existential despair of pre-war Surrealism or was he just being lazy?

Only Missus Dalí knows for sure and like the creator of the Snark, Lewis Carroll, she’s no longer talking to reporters. I have several other really clever thoughts upon the entire subject of Snarks and Sloth but I think I’ll just go back inside for tiffin and a long nap.

A Boojum upon my forehead …

This week’s episode of The Hunting of the Snark is pleased to present you with Contestant Number Six, the Billiard-Marker!

When the Billiard-Marker is not busying himself keeping score in Victorian pool-halls, he’s available for cameo, walk-on roles in such popular thrillers as Conan Doyle’s "The Greek Interpreter ", where he appeared as an extra in a scene involving Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes and the Boots (duly noted by Martin Gardner, the Herodotus of Snarkology).

Keen-eyed Snark watchers will also remember his scene-stealing appearance in Fit the Fourth of the Hunting of the Snark, where he chalked the tip of the Bonnet’s nose, with hilariously predictable results as we can see in the illustration above.

In his spare time, the Billiard-Marker enjoys gardening, cooking, reading the novels of Pierre Loti and attending Carrollian events dressed up as Raymond Roussel, the French novelist and poet whom Louis Aragon dubbed "the president of the republic of dreams." The Billard-Marker has garnered numerous awards and citations for his pitch-perfect, Rousselian rendition of le non-sens haut …

"I shall reach the heights; I was born for dazzling glory. It may be long in coming, but I shall have greater glory than that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon … This glory will reflect on all my works without exception; it will cast itself on all the events of my life … no author has been or can be superior to me … as the poet said, you feel a burning sensation at your brow. I felt once that there was a star at my brow and I shall never forget it."



The Billiard-Marker has been known to finish up his Rousselian "performances" by placing a hot casserole dish upon his head and then mailing electric heaters to any friends desiring souvenirs of tropical India, all whilst employing detective agencies to search out and hire suitable illustrators for an alexandrine, protohypertextual epic endowed with a crushing five-fold level of nesting texts.

We’ll be right back with our first question for the Billiard-Marker, after this important message …

Fit the Fifth, Page 34, Panel 2 … put the banana peels on ice, my good snark, tonight’s the tony awards!

The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens,
And ink in unfailing supplies:
While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens,
And watched them with wondering eyes.

Strange, creepy creatures are the bane of modern life and both Lewis Carroll and myself have seen fit to embellish this crucial stanzel of The Hunting of the Snark with a surfeit of ‘em. Suitably alarmed, the Butcher has darted into a convenient telephone booth and re-emerged in the guise of St. Anthony, the father of Christian monasticism and more to our purposes, a veritable bit of human fly-paper for all manner of hallucinatory things that go bump in the night.

The attentive reader will remember that the very first stanzel of this Snark involved a direct quotation from Mathias Grünewald’s version of St. Anthony, a quotation which involved a fair bit of mirror-work and the cramming of a very hirsute and oddly fey Saint into the sturdy 19th-century country-squire’s boots of the Boots, AKA Charles Darwin. This saint-bashing mania of mine is shared with many other artists; throughout the ages, we picture-folk (or Bildervolk, gesundheit) have mass-produced St. Anthonys by the bucketful. Even Henry Holiday joined in the fun, establishing an Antonine precedent for Fit the Fifth which even the religiously fastidious Lewis Carroll approved!

From whence comes this Antiantonimania? Are Salvador Dali (the Norman Rockwell of Surrealism), Hieronymus Bosch, Feliciens Rops and Gustave Flaubert all victims of a sudden outbreak of religious fervor? Or is it all just an excuse to draw legions of naked women and creepy circus sideshow freaks mobbing a defenseless old man in a desert?

To be sure, there is a certain visual, even Luis Buñuel kind of appeal to such a proposition but nonetheless, dear reader, it’s just not very sporting, is it? The genuinely Christian thing to do is to insist that all these unreal phenomena besetting a very real person are promptly replaced with a new and improved denful of very real phenomena besetting a patently unreal person! The latter personage would be, of course, our Snark, and I’m certain that you, the readers and thus the ultimate — and only! — reality of this poem, will do a splendid job of standing in as the former.

So, that’s all settled, is it? I’ll go and have a nice lie-down while you slip into your new Snark-baiting role. Just study the above drawing very carefully and do whatever Mister Bosch says. He does have an active imagination and if anyone asks you why this is so, hint vaguely that it’s just that Hieronymo's mad againe.

Fit Two, Page 15, Panel 3 … tiffin at breakfasties

"Its habit of getting up late you'll agree
That it carries too far, when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea,
And dines on the following day.

The Bellman continues his Exposition of the Snark with a second accusation — Sloth!* We illustrate his text with this shameless, paranoiac-critical crib of Salvador "Avida Dollars" Dali. Dali’s paranoiac-critical method of picture-making (essentially a groovy sort of free-association delirium) is itself a shameless crib upon 20 centuries of artists lying on the sofa with their feet up and eyes shut in search of inspiration.

But beware the light of the Bellman’s magic lantern! Beware the paranoiac-critical method — it’s bad juju! Once you start using it, you can’t stop — gateway surrealism I call it! Image generating out of image, a maelstrom of vivid mental pictures at the very speed of thought itself, free-association finally run amuck while perceptual reality as we know it disintegrates in a chain reaction of infinite visual meanings — until you’re trapped, trapped in a causally frozen world in which one breakfasts at five-o’clock tea and literally thinks nothing of it!

We find our hapless Snark lost in this paranoiac-critical Ice Age (perhaps the evolutionary niche of the dreaded Boojum itself!), trapped in a world not of his own making! Within this glacial Lost World of the paranoiac-critical zone, it is only the persistence of memory which allows the Snark to find nourishment. Its primitive intellect swamped with the visual overload of everything-being-at-once, it will starve to death if it cannot remember to eat its supper, even if a day too late. It even carries on its person a railway watch (shown above) with which it plans its desperate, solitary meals.

And so … our Bellman confounds for Sloth what we now know to be Hunger! Come on, guv'nor, spare a kind thought for a ‘ungry Snark, eh? He’s not such a bad fellow after all … (cue orchestra) … for when a Snark’s not engaged in his employment or maturing his felonious little plans, his capacity for innocent enjoyment is just as great as any honest man’s. Take one consideration with another, the Snark’s lot is not a happy one!
_________________________________________________

*It should be noted that the Bellman’s sermon upon this sin of Sloth is amplified with instances of Gluttony which are thematically derived from the Snark’s prior sin of Bad Taste. Whether the Bellman’s general exposition is a catalog of Sins (Snarkian lapses from its ideal state of nonexistential perfection) or of Elements (qualifications of the Snark’s non-qualifiable nonexistence) is for the more subtle reader to decide. The distinction is scholastic, and thus, genuinely protosurrealist. The final word on the sinful ontology of the Seven Deadly Elements might be Max Ernst’s masterpiece, A Week of Kindness. Like The Hunting of the Snark, Max Ernst’s personal composition upon this earth was finished before his decomposition, his birthday being this Wednesday, April 2nd and his deathday being April 1st. We tug on our ink-soaked forelocks in salute to Max Ernst, the Police Gazeteer of Surrealism!