There go the ships: there is that Snark, whom thou hast made to play therein

The HMS Snark, silently proceeding at full speed, has just narrowly avoided a collision with a gigantic avatar of the Prussian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, cunningly disguised here as the Bonnet Maker in the Hunting of the Snark.

Let this be a warning to all those Snarkistadores who go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great nonsense: keep a sharp eye out for the wonders of the deep, in particular the to and fro reeling and writhing of Continental philosophers with a penchant for cross dressing and cross hatching.

Thanks, Will!
Will Schofield has been kind enough to do a profusely illustrated posting about some of my projects at his wonderful bibliophile's blog, A Journey Round My Skull. It's all good clean fun, and it makes me realize just how much illustrating of verse I've been doing for the last few years. What a novel and even more penurious niche for an illustrator to stake out for himself … poetry! What's next for me, I wonder, in my rapid descent into the nether regions of unprofitability … stay tuned — you won't be disappointed!

Fit Two, Page 13, Panel 1 … also sprach das Schnark

Another wordless sighting of the HMS Snark, observed tacking ‘round the Bonnet-Maker, whose resemblance to Friedrich Nietzsche borders upon the implausible. But plause we must, nonetheless. After a promising start in hunting Snark on the Continent, Nietzsche was surprised by a Boojum on the streets of Turin* in 1889. The shock was fatal … in his own words …

"Since I am condemned to amuse the coming eternity with bad jokes, I have set up a writing business which actually leaves nothing to be desired … Last autumn I attended, dressed as lightly as possible, my own burial twice … negligé of one’s attire is a pre-requisite of good form … I go everywhere in my student jacket, here and there I tap someone on the shoulder and say : ' Siamo contente? Son dio, ho fatto questa caricatura (Are we happy? I am god, we did this caricature today) . " **

Apart from this, our communal Snark enterprise, to this day no one has ever taken Nietzsche at his final word, preferring instead his earlier, less humorous work. What a brilliant career this Prussian Snark-hunter could have had in the realm of Wilhelminian nonsense literature …

Let this be a lesson to all those who hunt the Snark — some Boojums one will never discover, unless one invents them first!
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NB. By habitually linking the words "Friedrich Nietzsche" with the word "Bonnet", I plan to create the germ of the seed of the beginning of a informational non-sequitur (triggered by some unusually google-gullible undergraduate searching for a quick copypasteprint) which will bring western civilization as we know it to its arthritic knees. Après la snarque, le deluge! Cue evil laughter here!

* Empty piazzi, depopulated train stations, the eternally recurring backdrop for our Snark hunt, de Chirico, Hebdomeros, Savinio, Calvino … all the lost and emptied portmanteaux of European protosurrealism.

**Black Letters Unleashed: 300 Years of Enthused Writing in German, Ed. by Malcolm Green, Atlas Press, London, 1989. Do we detect the perfectly light and razor-sharp touch of Robert Walser in these sad lines? Walser … the only genuine heir to Cervantes of the last century (and both of them the definitive book-ends to European literature) … oh, these delicious literary bread-crumbs with which we encrust our Wiener Schnitzel of postpostmodern protosurrealist angst!