Fit 8, pg. 81/2 … The Origin of Snark in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Well, isn't this jolly? The Baker's vanished at last, leaving his fellow Snarquistadores in their usual state of slack-jawed bafflement. The assiduous illustrator has little left to work with in this cryptic stanzel — German Snarkologists call it the "Unheimliche-Jumpunkt" — except for a wandering sigh disguised as a passing breeze better known to the authorities as "Jum."

The illustrator's task is not made any easier by the general ambience of fruity-headed lunacy which saturates the entire poem and renders all such illustrative chores, well, choreful indeed. Try drawing a breeze in these drearily monotheistic times, when the zephyrean and borean puffy-cheeked gods which once provided hot and cold running air to the art-loving masses are relegated to wine labels and New Age tattooes.

As for the wandering sighs, they are but a consonant away from the Wandering Singhs, a subspecies of sticky-fingered North Indian circus folk with a penchant for small change and unattached nautch girls, ie., not only un-drawable but all-in-all unfit for genteel Carrollian society.

Which leaves us with a visual and even moral problem: in a world which lacks clear-cut visual solutions to most such questions, what's a young artist to do? Luckily for us, a contemporary acquaintance of the Admirable Carroll, the photographer Oscar Rejlander, once confronted that very same problem.


Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “Two Ways of Life”

His solution was an epic montage photograph, “Two Ways of Life," which depicted a generic specimen of Modern Victorian Youth confronted with a choice between Evil (naked party chicks brandishing fulsome jeroboams of French plonk) and Good (fully dressed college co-eds armed with deadly dull social and moral compasses). Tough choice, eh?

After a bit of gentle persuasion involving the traditional lead-weighted feather duster, this illustrator persuaded the Fellowship of the Snark to step into Rejlander's tableau vivant and pose for the stanzel in question. The subtle moral and factual questions posed by Carroll's verse are now neatly translated into a clever post-post-Modern, crypto-Victorian meditation upon whatever it was that the verse was about.

And just what is this verse about? It's about choosing between a wandering sigh and a passing breeze in the Carrollian Multiverse's police line-up of suspected villains, between saying "jum" or merely maintaining an awkward silence … the two ways of the Nonsensical Life!

Fit 8, pg. 80/2 … If a snark could talk, we could not understand him

The story so far: The Rev. CL Dodgson, disguised as Lewis Carroll, has insinuated himself atop a crag whilst playing at being a Baker in an anapaestic search of a snark. His demise looms large …

Readers who have been following along at home will probably recognize the setting of this stanzel for it's the very same setting in which our snark hunt began, way back in the paleographic pages of Fit the First. Less memorable readers will have to make do with this pithy observation: that Lewis Carroll gets away with murder!

Gosh, how many poets could pass muster in any modern MBA writing program spouting off verse in which a hero clearly named as "The Baker" is then immediately re-branded as a "hero unnamed?"

Or is Lewis Carroll insinuating that one's function cannot serve as one's name? Lesser minds might dismiss all of this as overly hirsute hair-splitting of the highest order but that's the beauty of Snarkology, don't you see? It's a Big Mind/Big Beard thing … and even if you don't, you will have to admit that an Anglican deacon moonlighting as a logician whilst writing anapaestic verse devolving upon the theoretical demise of his own fictional doppelganger, it's a debauched semiotician's fantasy come true — hubba hubba!

All of which is a ghastly sort of slovenly guttersnipe's shorthand for saying that our poet's refusal to allow practical function to cohabitate with symbolic function is quite cheeky indeed! Why, it undermines the very basis of language and symbolic logic itself, it's an underminery of the very same sort as, say, an Anglican deacon-cum-logician devoting his life to the promulgation of utter Nonsense.

Form and function, the desperate wags of the Carrollian Multiverse!

Fit 8, pg. 80/1 … crouching tiger, hidden snark

The Bellman is referring to his acolyte, the Baker, who is played here by Lewis Carroll, who is himself being played by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Both of these players were the guiding genii and prime movers of what scholars now call the Carrollian Multiverse, a multi-bibliarium transcending time and space and logic wherein many curious beasties and a few human weirdoes lived their freakish lives.

As I've pointed out before, this poem we call the Snark is the only Victorian verse epic (or epyllion) that has withstood the test of time. As such, it is a direct descendant of such literary blockbusters as the Iliad and the Odyssey and we all know what that means … for example, the famous device of the Homeric epithet — rosy-fingered Dawn or sticky-fingered Odysseus — has been handily transmogrified by the Admirable Carroll into the Carrollian epithet.

We can see two of them in the above stanzel (stanza+panel). One of them is Thingumbob, a Carrollian epithet which the Baker gladly accepts for the simple fact that he had forgotten his own name, way back in Fit the Second. (Need we mention, parenthetically of course, that this amnesia is a sly exegesis upon the Adamic Nominative Imperative that is made so much of in the Book of Genesis? I thought so.)

Another Second Fit epithet for the Baker is Candle-ends, an epithet which I'm sure all of my readers will instantly remember as being the English equivalent of the Chinese ideogram known as "xié", ie. candle-stub.


Xié : Candlestub


The "xié" ideogram has been liberally sprinkled about this stanzel to reinforce this Sino-Carrollian epithet, an epithet which curiously enough was also the nickname of one of Carroll's best friends, the charming Alexandra "Xie" Kitchin. We see her here in a photograph of Carroll's, a photo in which she plays the role of a rather diffident Chinese tea merchant.




Alexandra "Xié" Kitchin, photo by Lewis Carroll

Naturally, all this Carrollian epithetting cannot hold a candlestub to that Greek guy Homer's epithetting but on the other hand, the Carrollian Multiverse is not one of the world's top importers of Porsche sports cars and is in no need of a Eurozone bail-out. Who's talking Nonsense now, eh?

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

NB. I'll be signing copies of my Snark and also participating in the Poetry and Visual Arts Roundtable, February 17, 2012, 2 - 4 p.m. at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, NYC. This will provide a rare opportunity for myself to leave the house without being pelted with freezing rain, snow, ice and poutine … featured poets will also include Sommer Browning, Matthea Harvey, Mark Leidner, Bianca Stone, and Paul Tunis. More info here …

Fit 8, pg. 79/1 … the memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a snark in his prime

My Newt Gingrich illo (see last posting below) possessed so much mojo that this Snark illo of mine is probably going to break the internets. Sure, to some people it's just a picture of the Fellowship of the Snark girding their loins for the heavy-going of Fit the Eighth but to some other people it's voodoo of the highest order.

These other people know that the verse quoted here is actually an Anglo-Saxon galdor, cunningly disguised as the refrain of the Victorian era's only genuine, certifiable verse epic, The Hunting of the Snark. Its author, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, devised this Fit as a cunning disguise for a particularly violent dénouement of his literary protagonist, the Baker, who was himself a cunning disguise for Lewis Carroll, the well-known cunning disguise of the good Reverend.

None of this matters much to modern readers (particularly American ones), some of whom seem to have difficulty remembering that only a few years ago, Newt Gingrich announced that “the idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”

Substitute the word "congressman" with the word "illustrator" and the above drawing quickly becomes an inevitable reality, spawned by the unholy conjunction of this illustrator's Snark and a small bit of private industry known as Melville House. Doubtful readers can test the veracity of this statement by purchasing a copy of our Snark GN and seeing how tainted this illustrator feels afterwards … none at all, I can assure you.

Thimble, care, fork, hope … the fetish objects of a political cargo cult which roams the post-postmodern halls of power, charming the pants off the American electorate with mere smiles and soap.

NB. This elective affinity for Newt springs from the basest of motives, I can assure you … a long-ago, half-remembered encounter at the AEI during yet another one of those fruitless, inane job interviews which blighted this artist's salad days … which brings us (finally) to this:

"What we need today more than anything else is to invest in beauty, because beauty is harmony … But we invest in chaos, because chaos is much more profitable than peace ...." — Vangelis

Foucault's Snarkulum

Deep in the wierdings of The Hunting of the Snark, in the very nerve center of Fit the Fourth, a snippet of Old English verse charm has popped up unexpectedly …

This infamous Snarkic Galdor of thimbly-forky-soapy-hopes makes its first appearance in our poem at this point … we should note that this verse charm is not designed to repel but to attract Snarks. Hence, it is a form of white magic.

The white magic of paper is nicely balanced here by the black magic of ink, combined into a drawing which depicts the Baker being employed as human bait to attract the Snark.

Human sacrifice was also a popular habit of Old English (or Celtic, really) daily life. The druids seemed to think highly of it and we must admit that Lewis Carroll may have been reenacting this grim custom of his ancestors by using the Baker as human prey for his Snark.

So much of this poem harks back to the half-forgotten tropes and patterns of Old English verse and the Baker is very much the sacrificial hero-victim that all such poems require. The fact that he’s going to be annihilated by a bit of genuine Nonsense gives it all such a striking air of modernist irony, don’t you agree?

Oh, I’m sorry … I forgot … we’re all postmodernists here. In that case, just look at the pretty picture and let your mind go fashionably blank. Something will happen … eventually …

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Cogito ergo snarquo

Platos retreat, snarks advance …

If you’re in the USA, you’ll be reading this in a postprandial, Thanksgiving Day stupor. My favorite sort of reader, in fact, eyes glazed and easily satiated.

In which case, I’ll direct you to my latest posting on MobyLives, where I have penned a weighty turkey of an explanation of the connection between my Snark and Messers Plato, Aristotle and Raphael.

It’s all good clean fun, better than watching your family quarrel savagely around the dinner table, I can assure you …

The Snarking of the Hunt

In an earlier exegesis of this stanzel (see the THOTS link below) I waxed eloquent on the colonial and post-colonial nuances of the Baker’s fear of Boojum-Orientalism.

Luckily for us, Boojum-Colonialism is no longer a threat to world peace since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, some Boojums are even our allies now, isn’t that jolly? But I digress …

Readers will remember that in this version of the Snark, the Snark is represented by a bodiless Eye, a homophonous lunge at some sort of deeper meaning or possibly even a clumsy threat.

In any case, the Baker’s panic at being threatened by teddy-bears and soap and matches and his parental homunculi is being exacerbated by the leering presence of the Eye in the closet behind him.

It is this gaze of the Boojum Snark which is lethal, that is what the Baker fears, it’s a gaze which will make him vanish which is rather odd because when an Eye sees something, the owner of the Eye will usually say that this something has appeared to them.

This business of mismatching words and sense (with logical precision) is called Nonsense and Lewis Carroll is the acknowledged master and sole proprietor. His Snark is not only his finest and longest Nonsense verse, it is also the only real Victorian epic poem ever written and best of all, it was meant for young people.

So I’m tickled pink that the learned Eileen Reynolds, in her review of this Snark in the New Yorker blog, saw fit to emphasize that this version of the Snark is perfectly suitable for children and teenagers of a literate and inquisitive disposition because that is the entire point!

As she puts it so concisely, "older children eager to leave the world of candy-colored cuteness behind" will have a jolly time with this GN Snark and I do fervently hope that their visual and cultural curiosity will be spurred on by the artwork.

Intelligent young people deprived of culture, it is this that we cannot endure!

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Hey-hey, ho-ho, the Baker’s Tale has got to go!

How green was my snark …

It’s been a busy week here at Chez Snark but not so busy that we can’t take a quick peek at the on-going struggles of the Baker, struggles which we’ve been following for some time now in previous posts.

The character of the Baker is widely believed by Snarkologists to be a parodic self-caricature of the poet, Lewis Carroll. The Baker’s meekness, absent-mindedness and general goofy demeanor match up closely with the public persona of Carroll, or should we say, his public doppelganger, the Rev. C. L. Dodgson.

In my Snark, I’ve done Carroll the fictional courtesy of depicting the Baker in the guise of Lewis Carroll, and even better, Carroll as depicted in the guise of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson. Or is it the other way around? It's all rather confusing and at times I think my pen’s going to have a nervous fit, navigating the labyrinth of the Snarkian Multiverse.

In any case, we see here the Admirable Carroll playing at being a Baker giving his Snark wholesome green vegetables right before setting it alight. Jolly good English lunatic fun, what ho, eh?

And above, dear reader, keep your eye on the half-shut cabinet door behind the Baker … it’s not just the place where he keeps his seven coats and three pairs of boots … it’s a place where the next stanzel will blow his pretty little mind! Yow!

NB. Many thanks to Johanna Draper Carlson for her kind review of our Snark, a review in which she summarized it all as "nonsense as mind-altering influence, which I rather like. Now hurry out and get your fix before the government bans it!


Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Boojum! Boojum! burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Turn on, tune in, snark out!

Despite those pesky so-called appearances everyone's so hung up about, The Hunting of the Snark is a classic of the psychedelic canon, and despite its author's so-called intentions too. Lewis Carroll is usually regarded as the very model of a Victorian button-down just-give-us-the-facts-ma'am kind of square but his Snark is a dead give-away that in the field of semiolinguistic trippery, the Admirable Carroll was certainly waving his freak flag high!

Let's see … in the Snark we're trying to chase down certain imaginary creatures which may or may not totally freak you out and even blow your pretty little mind … and meanwhile, we have the most respectable members of society publicly flipping out with giant forks and bars of soap and even bits of salad while humming Gilbert & Sullivan airs, trying to count with their fingers in a purple haze of numerical discombobulation and even tripping, yes, tripping backwards in the bounciest of anapestic rhythms.

I could say more but why bother when MobyLives is posting my commentary on my favorite stanzel of my GN Snark … who am I to say no to a bit of shameless self-promotion?

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

Quelques arpents de snark …

Yet another vaguely familiar stanzel of this on-going comixed version of Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. In this case, the experienced reader will be reminiscing over a faint bouquet of René Magritte with india ink undertones and a strong finish of unasked-for avuncular advice.

Readers who don’t go in for that sort of thing will prefer to enjoy the bowl of brimming curds, an oblique reference to the Baker’s nom de guerre of « toasted cheese ». Carroll’s fixation upon dairy products in the Snark would make a fruitful topic for a doctoral dissertation for correspondance-course shut-ins and distance-learning basement-dwellers.

The weeping dolls on the Baker’s coffinate bed are a clumsy attempt on this artist’s part to create a sense of familial crisis; they are representing the Baker’s honest though poor parents mourning his oppresséd soul.

Thick gravy-like helpings of oppresséd souls served upon cheesy hearts, a perfectly melodramatic serving of Victorian poutine!

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• This snark is your snark, this snark is my snark

Brideshead Resnarked

Children who play with ships and all those other whats-its who go down to the sea in ships always come to a sticky end. It matters not if a Snark or something even less wholesome awaits them at the end, they’re all doomed, doomed to being reduced to a concoction of india ink and paper all squiggled upon by a middle-aged illustrator bent upon that very same paper!

Middle age, my fellow Snarkistas, is very much a skipping of forty years and then a bit of a pratfall when one lands upon the deck of one’s Snark-Hunting ship to find it exactly as one left it, so long ago, the exact same Carrollian ship of fools adrift in a sea of ink.

Whenever I’m asked what do I think is the meaning of the Hunting of the Snark — the 134-year old Holy Grail of Carrollian research — I simply reply : proceed without further remark.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to make the boojums fit the crime

Stop me before I snark again

It’s all the rage to blame one’s parents for one’s own little problems; many literary critics think this to be a modern phenomenon but it’s a habit dating back to the Old Testament at least (so we can blame our ancestors for this one, at least).

Pinning the blame for present misfortunes upon past misfortunes will, if left unchecked, lead to the dreaded Infinite Regression, that annihilating Boojum of all Western philosophical thought.

Of course, in this instance, Lewis Carroll is having his little joke with us, for by taking on an assumed identity, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson had essentially negated his parents (in the most genteel manner) and thus absolved them of all blame for whatever it was that Lewis Carroll was about.

Or the Rev. Dodgson could have just skipped all that and admitted that he, and he alone was entirely responsible for his own problems in life and thus made the entire foundation of all narrative art softly and suddenly vanish away.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Having placed in my mouth sufficient boojum for three minutes’ chewing

Cool Hand Snark

The Baker is vamping again, trying to hog that meager scrap of limelight which is all this production of Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark can afford for now.

He’s taken it into his head to do what we in the inking business call a Full Grünewald, this man called Ho, while the Boots, the Barrister and the Bellman assume suitably indolent poses of slack-jawed amazement at this clumsy reference to the otherwise self-effacing Baker's self-sacrificial destiny.

The idea of referring to various famous bits of artwork throughout my version of the Snark was a clever plan on my part. It allows me to avoid coming up with an excessively tiresome number of ideas and also allows any grad students skulking off-stage to grasp upon a easy thesis subject which could afford them years of cheap lukewarm stipends in the company of various beery-eyed coeds, to wit: that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Extra! The Fall 2011 meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America will be in at the New York Institute of Technology this year and a great line-up of speakers is planned. Oleg Lipchenko will be discussing his own Snark project, and Edward Giuliano, Jenny Woolf and Adam Gopnik will be giving various talks on Carroll. The latter two will be doing book signings and in addition, I am pleased to say that I will also be there to sign copies of my own Snark, available there at a members' discount. Details here …

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Ecce pistor!

A Snarkimental Education

Yet another visual conundrum to grace these hapless pages of The Hunting of the Snark by the safely dead Lewis Carroll. I say safely for I cannot know how Carroll would have taken this particular bit of sketchy jobbery and like all illustrators, I am a bit of an inky rascal who prefers to avoid outraged authors.

The duenna on the right is a generic optical illusion found in all the better sorts of psychology textbooks, the sort of textbooks which prefer not to delve too deeply into why a grown man feels the need to be pelted with salad and ice whilst clutching a giant muffin.

Such mysteries form the very bedrock of Human Stupidity and as such, are best left to the experts in such matters, psychologists, behavioral scientists, theologians and philosophers, all of whom concur in answering the question thus: because!

More Snark Cinematic News! It appears that another animated version of the Snark is in the works, produced by Saranne Bensusan and 3rd Story Productions. It appears to be a stop-motion production in the UK, more info here.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• On le nomme aussi BOUJUM par erreur

Life’s a Joke and All Things Show It, I Thought So Once and This SNARK Shows It!

There’s a pun of sorts lurking about somewhere in this inky mess although I am well aware that certain of my readers don’t go in for that sort of thing at all.

Puns are proof positive that the words which we employ are ready to betray us at the first opportunity, and visual puns are doubleplus-proof-positive of the illusory nature of Things As They Are. Let’s face it, most everything we say and see is just a fib and it is this which drives pun-o-phobes nuts, they like a bit of order in their chaos.

But we Snark Hunters are made of sterner stuff! It is we, and we alone, who have the unmitigated semiotic gall to stand up in the midst of the stuffed-shirt cocktail party of Reality, our hair awry, our curry-soaked ties undone, our bloodshot eyes rolling madly, and proclaim loudly to our hostess that the Baker’s Tale has a point after all, the point being that it entails a waist of time.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Look on my snark, ye mighty, and despair!

The Persecution and Assassination of the Baker as Performed by the Inmates of the Hunting of the Snark Under the Direction of Lewis Carroll

This stanzel of The Hunting of the Snark would make anyone faint away, the way it leers at us with its inky visage of squiggly lines and blobby crochets, all of ‘em denoting a sound and fury signifying nothing, nothing at all!

Why does this artist feel it necessary to illustrate an otherwise ordinary bit of verse about the dangers of fainting on the job with this overly baroque reference to the Rake’s Progress of William Hogarth?

Is he making some futile, pseudo-erudite stab at a bit of ironic postmodern reference to a long-dead fellow illustrator, a useless pastime when one considers that no one reads comic books for that sort of thing anymore?

Or has he gone mad? Has the cheap brand of india ink which he surreptitiously imbibes when no one’s looking rotted out his last synapses, synapses already nibbled down to a nub by Stravinsky's rakish earworm?

Or is he, like the Baker, simply overwhelmed by the horror of it all, by that creepy Mistuh-Kurtz-he-dead malaise which so pervades Lewis Carroll’s Snark and the modern world?

Questions, questions everywhere, they’re the bane of all thinking folk … just look at the pretty picture and admire my off-hand reference to Mister Hogarth’s Line of Beauty.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Old Snarks for sale, old Snarks, prim Snarks, silly and grim Snarks for sale

How to get ahead in Snark Hunting without really trying

After much delay, probably intended to elicit sensations of apprehension and excitement on someone’s trembling, custardy part, we are confronted at last with the true identity of the final member of The Hunting of the Snark — it is the Baker!

You can refer to the several proceeding weeks’ postings to see how this artist has chosen the cunning strategy of depicting the Baker as Lewis Carroll himself. In this week’s stanzel, you can ponder further the zen-like what-you-may-call-um ramifications of this conflation of both hero and poet into one giant, power-packed specimen of Jolly Old English Eccentricity.

On board the HMS Snark, seen above steaming at half-mad-speed-ahead, there is a total absence of that which the Baker needs to be a Baker. This ontological dilemma would seem to put our hero on the unemployment line tout de suite in today’s modern globalized business environment but it appears that the Bellman, being half-mad (or half-sane, but not simultaneously) will overlook this little detail in his Snark-Hunting applicant’s work history.

In doing so, the Bellman is merely obeying the Peter Principle, that axiom of business management which so many freshly-minted MBAs laugh at when they first enter the working world, and then dine off for the rest of their surprisingly successful careers.

Needless to say, the fact that we’ve chosen Lewis Carroll as the Human Face of the Baker (an oddly Prague-Springish turn of phrase best kept in check for now) is a crushing indictment of the Venerable Carroll’s fictional hiring practices. In fact, to those of us who believe that each of the Snark Hunters combined represents the totality of Carroll himself, the Baker’s dundering ways are the final straw. As the hero of the epic, and a tragic hero too, mind you, one expects a certain stiff upper lip and a bit of manly competence from the Baker, and frankly, what we have here is a sort of anapaestic Bertie Wooster let loose in a floating patisserie. All that is lacking is Aunt Agatha wrinkling her nose at the Baker as if he were a drain that had got out of order.

This parodic reversal of one of the most elemental tropes of epic poetry is a perfect example of the Peter Principle rearing its well-fed head once again. Even in prosody, the most patently unfit character will inevitably stumble upwards into the role of Number One Hero. Certain Carrollian Illuminati will nod knowingly at all this, for have they not seen the Petric Mojo of the entire corpus of Carrolian Nonsense itself inexorably shove aside and supplant Demotic Commonsense in all fields of modern life? The very fact that parsing the above bit of blovation is beyond the cognitive skills of your current employer is double-plus-proof positive!

But of course, dear reader, you understand all of the above perfectly! Yes, you get it and as you slave away in your Dickensian cubicle whilst your boss reads aloud the newspaper funny pages in the men’s room, you can munch on a bit of mostly non-existent Bridecake and have a chuckle at the expense of the Bellmen and Bakers who run our lives, god bless ‘em.

You might even consider the on-going project of Life, the Universe and Everything In It as a sterling example of the Peter Principle on a cosmological scale, if you were so inclined. But that would be half-mad, wouldn't it?

See, see, how the blood of snark streams across the firmament

Keep ‘em guessing was the motto of Lewis Carroll and nowhere does he keep the panting mob howling for more than in the slo-mo introduction of our Mystery Snark-Hunter Number 10, first seen last week and now shown above doing a bit of nominal music-hall slapstick in the earlier stanzas of Fit the First of The Hunting of the Snark.

What we have here is a case of the AKAs run amuck or if you prefer, a surfeit of pseudonymy sufficient to make one’s senses spin in snarkish eccentricity. Our Mystery Snarkista (whose physical resemblance to Lewis Carroll bodes ill for somebody or the other) has been furnished with a total of nine names, if one accepts a generic loud cry as a name.

Mister Toasted-Cheese is suffering from what Snarkologists call Megalonamia and it’s not a pretty picture. Through the process of Epistomological Osmosis (AKA Fritter-My-Wig in academic circles) his nominal surplus is seeping into the nominal vacuum of an otherwise anonymous landscape, resulting in a Candle-End Multiverse of staggering proportions. Everywhere you look, it’s Fry Me, Fry Me, Fry Me!

One might even say the our poet is indulging in a bit of Adamic Prelapsarian linguistic Thing-Um-A-Jig or even What-You-May-Call-Um … you know, that bit in Genesis where every thing gets one name except this time around, the Reverend Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, has seen fit to give one thing every name.

Some people call it solipsism, I call it What-Was-His-Name writ large! Yow!
______________

NB. The Spring 2010 meeting of the LCSNA will be held this April 24th in Philadelphia. Stop by and say Hi or just loiter in the shadows looking thoughtful and grave while our speakers bewilder the crew.

My life in the bush of snarks

The Admirable Mister Carroll would have his little surprises for The Hunting of the Snark certainly seems nothing but surprises. Of course, aside from certain unfortunate mishaps, such as sudden insanity or total annihilation, most of Mister Carroll’s Snarkian surprises tend towards the cheerily nonsensical and comfortably numb variety.

This is because he was a master craftsman and knew full well that a bit of well-oiled authorial surprise keeps the groundlings happy enough to stick through the heavy going of the more intellectual bits, such as plot or thematic development. (Mister Burton, are you taking notes?)

Like revenge or cheap plonk, surprise is best served cold, and so we’ll stick to Carroll’s master plan and introduce the final member of our Fellowship of the Snark as Carroll did … vaguely, mysteriously, even confusingly …

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,
With his name painted clearly on each:
But, since he omitted to mention the fact,
They were all left behind on the beach.

The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
He had seven coats on when he came,
With three pairs of boots — but the worst of it was,
He had wholly forgotten his name.




Do not be alarmed by the curious fact that the above drawing depicts Our Mystery Snark-Hunter’s 42 boxes on the beach as being labeled with the Chinese ideogram for "candlestub" known as “xié”. Simply remain calm while I remind you that our Mystery Snarkistadore's alias of “candlestub” will be revealed at a later date. And do not panic if you happen to know that the boxes and the girl with the fan are directly taken from one of Carroll’s own photographs, a portrait of Alexandra “Xie” Kitchins posing as an off-duty Chinese tea merchant.

Keep your cool, dear reader, even if the gentleman at the easel should prove to be the late and sorely missed British author Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy proved conclusively that the Answer to the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything In It is 42. Above all, take no notice of the curious coincidence of the painting of a box that he is working at. It is labeled with a variation upon Magritte’s famous anti-dictum, “this is not my box” and is itself a play upon the Belgian’s seminal work, The Human Condition I.

It cannot harm you, simply move around it cautiously whilst noting the utter absence of the seven coats and six boots mentioned in the verses. They are unworthy of inclusion in this drawing, owing to the fact that since the clothes make the man, the commutative principle of haute couture allows the man to make the clothes. Therefore, the sartorial and ontological nudity of this man (still un-named, un-manned and un-drawn) is his own lookout. No doubt, if left alone, nature will have its way and his coats and boots would multiply and eventually replenish his wardrobe (the commutative spirit of Victorian men's fashion was biblically fecund) and he will find himself the proud possessor of 42 coots and boats. QED, eh?

Surprise and anticipation, the twin bogeymen of Nonsense poets and Hollywood scriptwriters alike! Stay tuned, dear readers, for next week's exciting episode!