Snark vs. Adventure Time: The Final Battle

“’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.

Scholasticism 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.*
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* Yes, yes, I know. And while we’re on the subject of the Great Cham, have you seen this?
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Apropos of nothing in particular … what time is it? It's Adventure Time! Thanks to the honeyed tongue of Martin Olson, this artist and a host of other talented artists and designers are eschewing the usual holiday festivities to cobble together what promises to be the publishing event of the post-Armageddon year … more to come, but for now, feast your hipster eyes upon this oddly compelling cover, designed by Sean Tejaratchi and illustrated by yours truly. 

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.

Oh, Lord, save us from the fury of the Snarkmen!

I’ve tossed aside the inky soapbox which I was perched atop for the last week and shall now return to more purely Snarkish things, in particular this incantatory stanzel from the nether reaches of Fit the Third.

This infamous bit of verse is a strapping young specimen of what Viking literary critics once called a galdor, a magic charm put into verse designed to, as T.S. Eliot noted, fetch a cow out of a bog or similar military, amorous or financial quandaries.

This galdor is straining mightily to catch us a Snark, a beast which the glib-tongued Viking bards of yore would have certainly approved of. The theme of a heroic and hopeless armed struggle against a vastly evil beast is an ancient trope of Norse and Old English poetry and I am glad to see that Lewis Carroll saw fit to liberally sprinkle his Snarkiad with several galdors.

The jolly ironies of a clergyman’s son resorting to pagan charms to hunt a mythic beast is one of those rumply, disheveled things which the better sort of literary critics prefer to send off to the cleaners for a good pressing and crushing.

But we are Vikings today! We shall sail onwards to the next stanzel with our booty of enslaved critics filling the ships’ holds, the wind swelling our unfurled anapests and our galdors reeking of smiles and soap. Brashly seeking Baker-bane, with forkéd hopes flew Boojum-thane …

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Swept away!

Late breaking news … go here for some YouTube videos of Martin Olson's soon-to-appear Encyclopedia of Hell (illustrated by this artist and Tony Millionaire), videos featuring Ron Lynch, Bobcat Goldthwait (no, he's not dead … yet) and Rick Shapiro. Laugh, and the entire underworld laughs with you …