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

Money can't buy you love but it can buy you this attractively illustrated Snark …

Melville House (the publishers behind MobyLives, a CBC inamorata) chose this drawing as the cover for their edition of my forthcoming BD version of Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark, a drawing which can be hummed aloud to this jolly tune called "The Fifth and Final Mark of a Snark":

"The fifth is ambition. It next will be right
To describe each particular batch:
Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,
From those that have whiskers, and scratch.

Some of you might read the above verses (which cohabitate in the same panel as this drawing) and assume that we are seeing here a mis-toed Snark lounging around the house between Fits, pursuing his usual dampened reverie of the bathing-machine variety, taking afternoon tiffin whilst the rising morning tide goes about its daily business of lifting and moistening him in all those scratchy, hard-to-bite places, etc.

Some of you might prefer instead to just order a copy of my comixed Snark and find out for yourselves without all this pesky, messy business of me telling you what to think!

The book will appear this November and believe me, you won't be disappointed — in the book, that is, not in being able to think clearly for a change — considering that mine is the only graphic poem/sequential-art/comic book version of the Snark yet known to mankind and hence qualifies as a distinguishing feature in the better sort of police line-up.

NB. 42% of your purchase money will vaguely go towards the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Snarks, a theoretically charitable organization almost entirely dissimilar to the less ambitious RSPCA.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Truly, my Snark, thou art still the son of morn in weary night’s decline, the lost traveller’s dream under the hill

Arma snarkumque cano …

It’s easy for us to snicker at the Snark’s bathing-machinephilia from the security of our 21st century beach cabana but such is life …

Oh, the times, oh, the customs, as the Poet once said, when gaudily tattooed youngsters bedecked in fashionable Bangladeshi slave-factory rags and sporting expensive university degrees that have rendered them unable to recognize the identity of the poet quoted above gather on the beaches to hoot at our modest Snark emerging from her bathing machine, clutching only her unfashionable sewing machine, umbrella and dissecting table!

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Most of life’s evils arise from man's inability to sit still in a bathing-machine

The Conqueror Snark!

It appears that our Snark is a humorless beast, an embarrassing situation for the eponymous hero of a comic epic. Yes, I did say hero, for I firmly believe that the Snark is that, and not the Baker as so many others think.

It was the genius of the Admirable Carroll to construct an entire comic epic upon the tragic premise of Inevitable Annihilation. This sort of mash-up, so beloved of present-day hipsters, is an ancient device practised by such masters as Cervantes, Shakespeare and Mozart, it is the hallmark of a certain sophistication in regarding Things As They Are and also requires a visceral commingling of humility and craftsmanship which goes far beyond mere technical bravado.

It is also one of the unquestionable marks of true Modernism (regardless of the actual date of creation) and leads us to a final enigma : is the Snark a comic poem with a tragic motif or a tragic poem with a comic motif? Frankly, I have no idea, and in place of one I’ll pilfer and then mangle Henri Michaux’s admonition to never jest with a dead man.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• Belgium, Man, Belgium!

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Attention illustrators/photogs/sculptors/etc!
Eternal glory and neat prizes!
MobyLives is holding a contest to see who can best summarize the contents of any Melville House title into one page/image. Some of the prizes being offered are quite compelling. Since one of the titles eligible for the contest could be The Hunting of the Snark (I assume since pub date is very soon), regular readers of this blog should have a good head start upon the competition … I'll give you an extra clue for summarization … 42, man, 42 …

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.

Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Snark)

This stanzel is a crispy, hollow sort of illustration endowed with a zen-like mojo which lesser artists are well-advised to handle with care, to wit: depicting a sensory impression entirely through the medium of another, totally different sensory impression.

In this case, the idea of Taste has traveled down my brain, through my hand, past my trusty 1950 Gillot pen nib, dripped onto a conveniently positioned sheet of Denril and then lain there, like a squiggly blobby pool of FW Steig's India ink which almost, but not entirely, doesn’t encapsulate the Idea of the Snark’s Flavor.

If you don’t believe me, go ahead and take a taste, dab a little of this drawing onto your tongue and see where that gets you. Or if you prefer, refer to an earlier recipe for this stanzel (the infamous Assamese Snark Curry posting) a mixing of art and verse which tastes far better than Lewis Carroll’s dreary concoction of will-o-the-wisps and tight-waisted coats, I assure you!

Seven Snarks for Seven Brothers

Some more faux-cabbalah numerological teasing from the Admirable Carroll. In this case seven days-to-a-week and five marks-of-the-Snarks are being bandied about with an alarming insouciance. The Bellman is explicating all of this with his steam-powered magic lantern, a Victorian ancestor of the modern-day petrol-driven flatscreen TV.

The attentive reader plucking at my ink-sodden sleeve with his pesky insistence that I explain the previous cabbalistic reference is to be ignored. Focus your eyes instead on my horse-driven pencil as I divide 42 (the Ur-Number of The Hunting of the Snark) by the product of 7 and 5 to obtain the number 1.2, which I them multiply by 7, and then multiply by 5, to obtain … 42!

Of such inexplicable yet amazing coincidences have entire religions (and even financial systems) been built upon, as Bertrand Russell once pointed out, far more succinctly than I.

Snark Film Update … some art and an interview with a matte painter (named Matt, what else?) on the soon-to-be-released-somewhere McNeff live-action version of the Snark. Share and enjoy!

Under the Boojum Tree I sold you & you sold me (reprise)

Pressing deadlines required a quick visit into the mouldering archives at Snark Central, where we found these crypto-Orwellian musings to pad out today’s posting …

There are those who might quibble and look askance at my rather ideologically vacant interpretation of this stanza. Yes, it is a trifle irrelevant … perhaps even mendacious to illustrate a purported lack of Snarks with a veritable snathe of Snarks. The concerned reader might well ask : by whose leave do you have artistic license to mangle the words of Lewis Carroll so? Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

The eminent Oxford don and man-about-town, Charles Dodgson, was probably the only person who could genuinely claim to be intimate with Lewis Carroll. Mr. Dodgson had this to say about the so-called sanctity of Carrollian texts, their meaning and interpretation:

... I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to any word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word black I shall always mean white, and that by the word white I shall always mean black," I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.

Well, that’s pretty much QED, I should think. Simply substitute the word "illustrator" for "writer"; it’s a mere sneesh of semantic and orthographic difference and expressly allowed for by the above-mentioned axiom. In fact, upon further reflection, we can see that the vast bulk of modern art, philosophy, politics and commerce is based upon Dodgson’s diabolically simple postulate.

So stop fussing over these drawings and rest a spell under the ole Boojum tree with me. Goshdarned wordpeople, always making trouble for poor picturefolk …

Nasty, snarkish and short

This stanzel is the only overtly political stanzel in the entire Hunting of the Snark and as such, affords us a rare glimpse into the political workings of Lewis Carroll’s mind. Unfortunately, the oddly menacing figure of the mono-eared Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh, is somewhat obscuring our political view of Carroll, who is shown here vamping as the White Knight doing an off-hand impersonation of Sir John Tenniel channeling the Bellman.

Concealment is the holy grail of all political discourse and as we’ve shown earlier, this stanzel is doing a splendid job in that direction. The Bellman’s offer of free booze to his constituency is in the jolly tradition of democratic alcoholism through the ages, whilst Van Gogh’s cue card is a splendid summation of the Pavlovian tendencies of the Common Man, and yet no one seems the wiser.

And how could we? How could the electorate get any wiser, in this, the most perfect of all possible political worlds?

Beware of snarks baring greeks

This stanzel has already had its fair share of analytical pummeling (go ahead, I know you like to watch), but we artists know that it’s best to kick a drawing when it’s down and so I present you with this tasteless, additional bit of post-pummeling pudding :

This stanzel is a perfectly cooked example of a big-shot Greek philosopher, So-crates as he’s known to Bill & Ted, being roasted and basted on the spit of my crowquill until he cries out « Μπάρμπας » and admits that he is the Father of Nonsense and not Philosophy, the big faker!

I’ll leave the expository details of my cunning argument to whomever is in need of an quickie thesis for their doctoral dissertation. Let’s just say for now that all this Socratic business of Forms, all this wordy confusion between meaning and structure, first begat Plato (seen here in the Form of Charles Darwin seen here in the Form of the Boots) and then begat all of Western Philosophy — and then begat Nonsense, the idiot man-child cowering in the linguistic basement of that slum-lord Plato’s grubby cave!

Words, words, words, they mean nothing and everything at once and let’s face it, in a wrestling match between Ontology and Nonsense, who are you really going to put your money on? Yow!

Mayayantrasnarkamaya

Our previous view of the HMS Snark rounding Cape Nietzsche has now been clarified to reveal a striking scene of disembarkation, a full complement of rather displeased Snarkonauts with accompanying baggage, unceremoniously dumped in the less-fashionable suburbs of Fit the Second.

And what is this baggage they carry? It is the expectation that they would enjoy the view, a great expectation to be sure but sadly unfulfilled in this stanzel.

No one likes to be confronted with chasms and crags after a long sea voyage, even if they are nothing more than a painted backdrop. In fact, the painted backdrop only makes things worse, it reminds the viewer that they are participating in a communal illusion and that their feelings of discomfort are thus self-inflicted.

‘Tis all a matter of that Good Ol’ Maya, that world-spinning dance of grand illusions and also further proof of Lewis Carroll’s crypto-Hindu sympathies, sympathies which he kept well-hidden in his customized Samsaronite® portmanteaux.