Fit Two, Page 14, Panel 1 … 'cause my heart belongs to dada

The Bellman perceived that their spirits were low,
And repeated in musical tone
Some jokes he had kept for a season of woe —
But the crew would do nothing but groan.


Jokes kept for a season of woe, an almost biblical undertaking on the part of the Bellman, whose storehouse of mirth has been sorely depleted by divers chasms and crags. But to this geologically disheartened hunter of the Snark, we say, in the finest demotic vulgate we can muster : lighten up, dude! Like, get a hobby!

Hmmm … how about music? Music is nice, musical tones are even nicer. How about the fiddle? It’s an instrument that’s still welcome at hoe-down and rave alike. And all the girls love musicians, especially those hirsute ones (musicians, not girls) who emote over their Boojums in smoky Parisian cabarets, the kind of place where Kiki de Montparnasse might toss her turban at sugar-dada Man Ray or Jean Ingres pops in to play some violon airs upon a g-string behind her naked bach.

But the Bellman knows it will never work out. From the vantage point of his solitary table in a dark corner, he sighs aloud and weeps a solitary English tear into his hemlock and branch water. He knows he’s the wisest man in the place, simply because he’s the only one aware of his own ignorance. That and the numbness creeping up his legs … and up his back …

______________________________


NB. A tip o’ the poutine-sodden solar-topee to the Poetry Foundation, who have very kindly furnished their readers with a link to this Snark Hunt. Comix lovers should reciprocate with a look at the Poetry Foundation’s on-going series, The Poem As Comic Strip. It’s an encouraging development in the often overly-commercial world of sequential art and deserves more attention and hopefully, imitation and expansion. Besides, poets are even lower than ink-stained illustrators on the capitalist food-chain, they deserve a respite.

Fit Two, Pages 12 and 13 as a Spread … il est toujours préférable de ne pas dessiner avec un mort

The languid pacing and incongruous imagery of this Fit, exemplified in the cunningly delineated page-spread seen above, is a perfect example of what a recent edition of a certain Canadian newspaper’s Book Review referred to as a "posthumuous collaboration". I must tip the soiled brim of my sauerbraten-stained turban-cum-tuque in genuine respect at the linguistic dexterity of the joining-together-today-in-the-sight-of-god-and-man-of-these-two-words: posthumuous collaboration.

The mind boggles. But afterwards, it resumes its reconsiderations and rereflections. Must it cavil and carp so? Is not a posthumuous collaboration with the dead also the postmortem plagiarism of the dead upon the living? Or perhaps even the prenatal borrowings of the as-yet-unborn intra-reincarnative? In fact, dear reader, may we not say, in truth, that all art is but a posthumuous collaboration with a penurious but talented past, an artists’ community of the not-so-grateful-dead which is willing to overlook our modern deficiencies as long as the check is in the mail?

For too long, certain narrow-minded artists have Canadianized the living and the dead into twin solitudes. Pshaw to all that! As the late, great, Douglas Adams* once noted, life is wasted on the living. It’s high time we frittered away the time and energies of the dead! Tally ho to posthumuous collaboration and the Boojum of Originality!

___________________________

* Mister Adams was gracious enough to assent to a prior posthumuous collaboration with me, vide Fit One, Page Four, Panel Two. And as nyhav (an occluded 'pataphysician, I suspect) astutely noted earlier, Protosurrealism is in many respects a posthumuous collaboration with Alfred Jarry. However, it shall be noted that Protosurrealism intellectually predates ‘Pataphysics, an anachronistic precaution necessary to create that frisson of uncertainty as to who is colloborating with whom … and who is post- and who is pre-mortem.

NB. I encourage all readers interested in Lewis Carroll to visit and bookmark the newly-launched blog, Let "Universe" Be "Books", a production of the associate editor of the LCSNA's "Knight Letter Journal". Onwards and upwards, with forks and hope!

Fit Two, Page 13, Panel 2 … heppy heppy valentine, dagnab it!

But the danger was past — they had landed at last,
With their boxes, portmanteaus, and bags:
Yet at first sight the crew were not pleased with the view,
Which consisted of chasms and crags.

All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely Snark hunters: they have their exits and their entrances; and one Bellman in his time plays many parts, his acts being eight Fits. Today being the feast-day of St. Valentine (patron saint of lovers and apiarists), we have arranged things so that our decahedroid players shall now disembark into a romantic comedy of the sort calculated to warm the cockles of even a Boojum’s heart.

While our snarkistes peek backstage, the action downstage is upstaging them. A painted backdrop of the Desierto Pintado has set the mood. Love is in the air and will soon compel the Mouse pictured at stage-left to propel a fortuitous Brick upon the noggin of the unsuspecting Kat.

But is it true love, ask the critics? Is Mouse + Kat + Brick = Love a suitable proposition for the hardnosed, Gradgrindish theater of today? A Boojum in Surrey … a Brick in Coconino … an allegory of the search for happiness or a quick krease to a Kat’s noggin … the course of true love never did run smooth.

I say pshaw to the critics, the play's the thing! When confronted by such dismal antivalentinians we must follow the sterling example of the sublime Mr. Herriman and summon the local gendarmerie! Offisa Pup, take ‘em away, the l’il dahlinks! Yezzah …

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!
_______________________________________

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!

Fit Two, Page 12, Panel 3 … the vocabulary of Bradshaw is nervous and terse but limited

In a world without words, only the small-minded will be tongue-tied. Although our gallant crew aboard the HMS Snark is none of the above, they are maintaining strict radio silence as they slip by the pictorially-fortified beaches of the deadly Festung Schnark. The tension is palpable, our brave lads (and lass) are straining every nerve as they man (and miss) their weapons.

And what weapons are these? Steam-powered concussion-primed pencils? Petrol-driven semi-automatic violins? Pshaw to such antiquated music-hall-cross-talk-claptrap! Our snarqistadores are armed with only an indifferent somnolence, punctuated by an insouciant nasal susurration … they are snoring, they are snorting, they are sniffing and sneezing, they are speaking that most ancient, somatic and asemic dialect of the body physical, proof positive against all visual illusions and cognitive man-traps of the so-called higher intellect.

Hold on, what’s all this, you say? Lost in the disorienting farrago of my mixed metaphors and strained allusions? Missing the connection, the old brain-box gone off-track, signals crossed somewhere? Don’t panic! I shall refer you to the classic solace of the dislocated and confused Victorian bourgeois Snark hunter — a Bradshaw’s Guide!

Look here, sirrah, here it is writ out, plain as can be! All the lost luggage and missed connections of long-dead phonemes, waiting on long-gone railway platforms for a linguistic rendez-vous with a common usage that never arrived … schnarren, schnarchen, snarren, snerka … and yes, dare we say it — SNARK!

I think I’d better go and have a nice lie-down now. To sleep, perchance to snore — aye, there’s the snark.

_____________________________


NB. A tip of the ink-stained tuque to goofy, the proprietor of the wonderful and highly recommended Bradshaw of the Future, whose etymological assistance in our Snark hunt has been invaluable and fascinating. BOTF’s provenance stems from that " desperate wrong-doer " in Lewis Carroll’s " A Tangled Tale ". Any resemblance to railroad Bradshaws real or fictional , either living or dead, is purely coincidental on my part … dismiss it all as a false cognate destined to plague as-yet-unborn googlistas surfing the digital Bradshaw of the future.

Fit Two, Page 12, Panel 2 … English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water ...

January 27th, 1832 is the birthday of Charles Dodgson, who passed away January 14th, 1898. The former preceded the latter, as befits an Eminent Victorian. Coincidentally, the English poet and author Lewis Carroll also died on the 14th, last Monday, 13 days before his birthday on the 27th, next Sunday.

As I have noted once before, this befits the author of The Hunting of the Snark, a poem whose composition was finished before it was begun.

Repeat the previous paragraph to fulfill the Clochetic Rule of Three and as a reward for your truthiness, you may have a slice of the birthday panel shown above. Delicious, eh? Some nice bits of Sir John Tenniel, a juicy morsel of Dora Maar (with a succulent Alfred Jarry center) and all of it garnished with the abraded glyphs of Oysters à la Alberto Savinio!

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

NB. Congratulations to the LCSNA and Messers P.L. Heath, J. Dixon and L. Carroll on their well-done and informative publication of "La Guida di Bragia". This work has been obliquely referred to before in these pages, during a meandering blather on Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio. It seems that the heady scent of Anglo-Italian Railway-Surrealism is in the air … bravo!

Fit Two, Page 12, Panel 1 … oh, my decacephalic, clochetic captain

A quick-thinking Silesian photographer captures the rare spectacle of a school of puppetfish (Puppespielen bellmerensis*) disporting themselves in the mangrove-shoals of the River Spree while the HMS Snark heads out to sea on its final voyage … a wordless panel, as befits this week in which we observe the January 14th deathday of Lewis Carroll …

O Bellman! my Bellman! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, your bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring …
_______________________________

*This particular taxonomic, visual and surrealist reference must remain somewhat vague. But what a draftsman! Perhaps the best of the last century … you google at your own risk. NSFW.

Fit Two, Pages 10 and 11 as a Spread … le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

Shhhhhh, we’re hunting Snark! We have been tracking a magnificent specimen for over eight months and I think we have it cornered now, here in the thick undergrowth of pages 10 and 11.

Weapons at the ready, we plunge in! A brief, violent struggle and we re-emerge with our prey, securely trussed and in the bag! But wait, what’s this? Not a Snark at all, but rather — Henri Matisse, Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Sigmund Freud, René Magritte, Théodore Géricault, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy! Not a Snark, not even a Boojum — just a plenum of dead Continentals reeking of turpentine, cigars and cheap plonk. We return to camp with our luckless prey, chastened and humiliated.

Later that night the quintessential protosurreal big-game hunter, Louis Aragon, waxes poetic on the pleasures of the chase as he sinks deeper into his cups …

"It was a time when, meeting in the evening like hunters after a day in the field, we made the day's accounting, the list of beasts we had invented, of fantastic plants, of images bagged."

We turn to him, a knowing smile upon our lips … yes, M. Aragon, why not? We roughly thrust him into our game bag alongside the others, those other exquisite corpses … the perfect bait for a Snark! Drink that new wine now, Louis!

Auld Lang Snarkyn

This New Year's Eve greeting from all of us at chez snarque will not only convey our best wishes for your future prosperity and happiness but more importantly, serve as a suprachromatic hypercognitive post-bibulative remedy, ie., a New Year Day pick-me-up guaranteed to open the eyes of even the most inert dionysiacs and bacchantes.

Special thanks to my 3-month old nephew, Leopold, who so kindly lent himself to the production of this garish, yet genuinely protosurrealist illustration. I have come to the conclusion that the true, genuine, singular and ineffable Meaning of the Snark can only be apprehended by a cheerfully small human being in a funny hat and plastic loincloth with an insatiable, drooling, passion for women's breasts. Nonsense is this young fellow's meat and drink!

Happy Snark Hunting in 2008, with forks and hope and railway-shares for all!

Boojamus in excelsis!

Snark hunting is passé this festive week, this being a time of general goodwill and peace on earth, etc. Hunting anything with forks and hope is right out, which should be a comfort to all Snarks wishing to take a few days off with their families.

And I'm certain that all such nonsensical beasts would express along with me (if anyone ever bothered to ask them), the most heartfelt best wishes to everyone who has so kindly written to me or taken the trouble to encourage others to view my humble efforts, in particular: La source aux bois, Stochastic Bookmark, Michael Sporn Animation, Scott Sharplin's Infinite Number of Monkeys and especially the truly erudite Snarkologist, Doug Howick. All of the above are the most sporting-type fellow snarquistes you could wish for.

As a small holiday token of my gratitude (and another manifestation of my relentlessly misplaced and futile commercial instincts), I offer my readers the screensaver seen above (1280x1024). It is eminently suitable for the desktops of all cubicle-trapped office drones who entertain idle fantasies of a tropical cruise in this, my private world … the best of all possible worlds …

For those who revel in such minutiae, a 1024x768 version is available here and a 1280x854 beastie is lurking here.

Enough of talk, so, if you don't object, my dear, we'll try a glass of bitter beer. I think it looks inviting.

Fit Two, Page 11, Panel 3 … Spatial Education

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due West!

And so, even the least of the Bellman's hopes shall be occidentally disoriented. What wind blew you hither, noble Bellman? Not the ill wind which blows no man to good. Nor that wind which is winding the watch of your wit; so that by and by it will strike.

I think this wind is what the learned scholastic Flann O'Brien would call the ultimate and inexorable and supreme pancake at the back of the whole shooting match, ie., omnium. And what is this omnium of this wind that we hear so much of on the tellyvision? It is the essential, inherent, interior essence which is hidden inside the root of the kernel of everything and it is always the same. The bane of Booja* and Bellmen alike, the curse of the drinking classes, this here omnium-wind is the wind of an indefinite divisibility.

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* The nominative plural of boojum is booja, this particular species of the genus Snark being neuter in nature — Snarkus boojum. The verb itself is regular, of course: booja, boojas, boojat, boojamus, boojatis, boojant; although the correct orthography should really be BOOIVM, BOOIA, etc.

Fit Two, Page 11, Panel 2 … Heute sind wir im Ernst!

He was thoughtful and grave — but the orders he gave
Were enough to bewilder a crew.
When he cried "Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!"
What on earth was the helmsman to do?
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:
A thing, as the Bellman remarked,
That frequently happens in tropical climes,
When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."


As the nurturing, endlessly comforting snows of Québec begin to numb our cerebelli at chez snarque, we have ample time to reflect upon the old adage: good artists borrow; great artists steal (and never from the merely good artists). I've mercilessly looted the Belgians, French and Italians, so the inspiration for this stanza will have to be purloined from the Germans.

Easier said than done, I soon discovered. Friedrich Nietzsche (The Bonnets) and Martin Heidegger (The Barrister) refused to countenance my scheme but Karl Marx (The Banker), that preternaturally prescient Protosurrealist, quickly came up with some snappy double-talk to justify my larcenous designs. He pointed out that crime is actually good for the likes of Lewis Carroll and his ilk (double-plus-good, in fact):

"The criminal produces not only crime but also the criminal law; he produces the professor who lectures on this law and even the inevitable textbook … the whole apparatus of the police and criminal justice … also art, literature, novels, even tragic dramas … he (the criminal) gives a new impulse to the productive forces."

That's pretty juicy stuff, say no more, Karl! Within minutes, my crack team of ninja-idiot-savant-cat-burglar-draftsmen had illicitly purloined and haphazardly reproduced this picture of a giant thumb lusting after his maternal walnut from none other than Max Ernst, the noted German surrealist and an echt bon vivant with the consummate Carrollian taste to die the day before he was born.

Of course, you, the dear reader, may ask: what's this picture got to do with a vessel being snarked in tropical climes? I can only reply: It's a fair cop, guv'nor!

____________________


NB. Max Ernst's illustrations for the Snark are dadamax-loplop-good! One may wonder what Lewis Carroll would have made of them, but by using our Protosurrealist critical apparatus we can safely say: yes.

Fit Two, Page 11, Panel 1 … Tingle-Bell Rock

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out
That the Captain they trusted so well
Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
And that was to tingle his bell.

Apropos of nothing in particular … Eugène Delacroix pooh-poohed maritime disasters and English literature, both of them subjects dear to my heart …

"… I have been reading the story of a shipwreck by Edgar Allan Poe, where the survivors remain in the most horrible and desperate situation for fifty pages on end — nothing could be more boring. Here we have an example of foreign bad taste. The English, German and other non-Latin peoples have no literature because they have no taste or proportion … they drown one beneath a flood of detail that takes away all the interest."

Later that same evening, over a beaker of pure rainwater, he tossed off this observation:

"Lord Byron praised gin as his Hippocrene, because it made him bold … happy are they who, like Voltaire and other great men, can reach a state of inspiration on fresh water and plain living."

So, you want fresh water and plain living with no details? Very well! Get on this sinking raft, Eugène! You did it for Théodore Géricault, you can do it for me! Down there in front, behind the Bellman with your arms outstretched and quit your whining, this ain't no alexandrine hémistichery — this here's Lewis Carroll! Tingle that bell!

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

NB. I have increased the mineral content of Delacroix's head to compensate for his natural Gallic bouyancy and to highlight his affinity for impersonating an Easter Island moia.

Fit Two, Page 10, Panel 3

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!"


Yet another shameless Magritte pastiche, and not the last one to grace these pages, I'll wager. Shameless — the 10th Muse of Protosurrealism!

Even more shameless — this insistence that the crew of the HMS Snark use the French language for navigational purposes when it is clearly evident to anyone who has ever been lost at sea that English is the natural language of confusion. This is easily verified. Stand on a streetcorner in any francophone city and ask a stranger: where am I? If necessary, pull at shirtsleeves and wave your arms, speak very slowly while pronouncing every phoneme at the utmost decibel level.

I shall be observing you from inside the comfortable vantage point of a nearby bottle of plonk. Do not make eye contact with me or else — sapristi! Garçon, call the police, this crazy-man-anglais-cowboy-streetperson is bothering me!

Words, words, words … if only they had the decency to cover themselves up, like the Bellman & Company. They have no loyalty, they can't be bothered to mean anything anymore, they're shameless!

Fit Two, Page 10, Panel 2

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

The original illustration by Holiday of this Universal Map is, to be honest, a bit trite. It's obvious that the poor man was trying to economize on india ink and pen nibs. However, as the 11th Commandment reminds us: thou shalt not speak ill of another artist, particularly when they are dead and defenseless (the precise state in which their work is best appreciated and appreciates best).

I felt that I could do better. I assumed the traditional artist's position of cogitation whilst supine on my charpoy. I puffed upon the hookah proferred me by the Assamese chorus-girl who also pressed my feet, the predominant organ of mentation in my species. I was, of course, familiar with the etymology of the word "map", which ultimately conjured up the hebraic motif of a cloth which conceals and a cloth which reveals, all of which I deftly distilled into "what's-behind-curtain-number-four" and "the-Freudian-Slip".

But still … it was obvious … too obvious, perhaps. All the better for my class of readers! Starting with a gratuitious insult to Henry Holiday I had mentally arrived at a hookah-puffing Jewish savant peddling obscurantism to a witless Bellman in a Cairene souk. In the distance I could hear the blood-curdling screams of native children conjugating French verbs. I paid them no heed! I bent over my drawing board, pen in hand, my thoughts feverishly coagulating in a vivid mental maelstrom of mixed metaphors and incongruous images! Two weeks ago I couldn't even spell "artist", now I are one!

Fit Two, Page 10, Panel 1

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies —
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one looked in his face!

There are some who might say this artist's conception of the Bellman is a base and underhanded attack upon the same, suggesting as it does that the Bellman was literally birdbrained and furthermore, that his colleagues (depicted here and here) possessed the collective wisdom and general prescience of a flock of chickens on the way to the abattoir.

But this is not the case.

I put it to you that the English penchant for all things avian is well-known. I put it to you that Lewis Carroll populated his verse and prose with many avian and semi-avian portmanteaux (or portmantanimaux?) such as the Jubjub Bird and the Borogrove.

I put it to you that the Bellman has suffered the ill-effects of a Violent Unknown Event and that he has metamorphasized into an avian state common amongst avant-garde English cineastes. The wisdom on his face is actually the smug look of a sporting wallah who finally knows for certain which came first, the chicken or the egg.