“If something doesn't creep into a drawing that you're not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.” ― Edward Gorey

(Gorey, early 1970s)

I first encountered Edward Gorey as an illustrator; he did the drawings for a peculiar little 1961 book by Paul Behn (who, by the way, went on to write the screenplays for two Planet of the Apes sequels, in large part because of his concerns over nuclear proliferation) I bought as a kid, Quake, Quake, Quake, a collection of Cold War nursery rhymes that mimicked established rhymes and poems, including (which I did not know at the time) Tennyson's Break, Break, Break. I liked the book, and loved the illustrations. So I started looking for Gorey, and discovered he was a prolific writer who popped up everywhere, including, in the '70s, National Lampoon magazine. But he also designed the sets for a '70s production of Dracula and continued to show up in odd corners of pop culture, including the animated opening of PBS's Mystery! series.

But it was his own slim volumes, shaped like children's books but not really, that most attracted me. I'd read Jane Eyre when I was a little kid, and the woodcuts of the famous Random House edition of that book (along with Wuthering Heights) addicted me to finely detailed, crosshatched drawing. And boy did Gorey deliver—but with the added bonus of creating a sideways universe of Victorian quiet, Edwardian delicacy—and all the bottomless strangeness that lies lurking back there in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

But let's leave it there so you can look at these here:

"I come to extend to you my simpitty—"

 If Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927) was the elegant flame that burned brightly (and relatively briefly) on early 20th century newspaper comics pages, George Herriman's Krazy Kat (1913-1944) was—what? The kerosene lantern knocked over in a barn? The St. Elmo's Fire dancing at the tip of a ship's mast? The analogies fall flat—but more than that, miss the mark. Krazy Kat created an alternate comics universe of surreal juxtaposition and hybridity and expressionistic Id-bombs, all wrapped in phonetic shenanigans so strange it's easy to shrug it all off as an artifact from Another Time, way back before WWII, when the U.S. was so radically different that its pop culture jittered and spun in an arrhythmic discontinuity we assume made some sort of sense back then—along with spats and green-door good times, children sent by mail, and hibernating bartenders—but it didn't, really—make sense, that is; instead, it created its own sense, and in the teens and '20s and '30s—times of catastrophe and new-newer-newest-ness followed by mass murder—Herriman's nose-thumbing chaos was a welcome relief. And perhaps best of all, it was drawn with such originality and spare exuberance that it still seems new—and that's because it got under the brainpan of every goof with a pen and an urge to send things flying whichaway, from Chuck Jones' abstracted Southwest (prime real estate for coyote trajectory) to Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and on to Dirty Duck, Pogo and all those underground cartoonists and manga-maniacs who stuck their head aboveground and hooted "Li'l anjil!" at the mundane laws of geometry, physics, linguistics, and sundry fiddlesticks. As Officer Pup once complained, "Unfair somnambulism." A good weird dream for once and all.

What the Bloody Hell

First of all, make sure to seek out The Public Domain Review if you want to be continuously surprised, delighted, brought up short, creeped out, or bemused. I get their email newsletter, and when it arrives in my inbox I'm never sure how deep a dive I'm willing to take. Today, let us consider The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60).

Weirdo Book of the Week: Tristram Shandy

mise en abyme, or the Droste Effect

Published between 1759 and 1767, Tristram Shandy remains a novel I'm certain was written by a time-traveller who went back to the later 18th century just to fuck with people. Here's the first chapter, in its entirety:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.—Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;—you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. &c.—and a great deal to that purpose:—Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a half-penny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.

Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,——Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?————Nothing.

The hero announces on page one that his character and life have been irrevocably altered because his father stopped during the hero's conception to wind a clock. It is a conception conception that is at once funny and tragic (in a funny way), an early announcement that the smallest thing, often beyond our control, makes all the difference.

But that is not where the novel rests. No, Tristram tries heroically to live—well, at least to start the novel. And that is what I, a fellow weirdo, love about this book: the constant digressions, sidetracks, backtracks, and tangents. I talk that way, and I like to write that way. Well, I did read this as an undergrad, and it seeped into my already-teeming-with-flotsam-and-effluvia brain, and over the decades has had as profound effect on my path as an unwound clock.

If you can bear the constant irony and meta-ness, if you love hearing a story that the storyteller constantly interrupts with lengthy addenda and other stories (and as I write that, it sounds like torture), then this is the tale for you. Just don't get too close to the mise en abyme. 

(btw there's a pretty good film, A Cock and Bull Story (2006), somehow wrenched out of the heart of this book. A movie version is being made of the novel, and like the novel, it's a movie about trying (and essentially failing) to make a movie.