Profiles in Nonsense: Canadian Snark!

For the past few weeks, we have been dishing up the dirt on each of the ten members of the Fellowship of the Snark. This week’s dish is the Beaver, the only Canadian member of the crew, the only female, and the only whiskey drinker …

A SNARKHUNTER'S PROFILE …
THE BEAVER

HOME : Pacing on the deck, making lace in the bow, anywhere but Mississauga.

AGE : 42, eh? Sexier in French, though … quarante-deux, euh?

PROFESSION : Hunting the Snark in a safely multicultural, environmentally-friendly and totally rapturous Canadian way whilst ensuring that there are no dismal surprises.

HOBBIES : Let’s see … chewing export-grade softwood lumber, lacing and pacing (see above), saving ‘em all from wreck, I dunno, sometimes I lose count.

LAST BOOK READ : The Hunting of the Snark, but all in pictures for kids who can't read good and wanna learn to do other stuff good too.

LAST ACCOMPLISHMENT : Procuring a second-hand dagger-proof coat and insuring my life in some office of note because a certain somebody won’t convey another certain somebody in a separate ship.

QUOTE : "I’ve learnt in ten minutes far more nonsense than all books would have taught me in seventy years".

PROFILE : Counts with her fingers, likes it all in a "popular style" … just your average girl-next-door thinking of nothing but Snark …

SCOTCH : Cutty Snark, what else? Cheers, eh?

Profiles in Nonsense: The Dialectical Banker

Our on-going exposé of the Snark Hunters participating in my GN version of the Snark continues with the Banker …

… a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,
Had the whole of their cash in his care.

The Admirable Carroll devoted an entire Fit to the Banker, the notorious Banker’s Fate of Fit the Seventh in which this paladin of capitalism was reduced to busking for rupees on the streets of Old Delhi.

Before he took up busking, the Banker Marx made quite a splash as a caged attraction in the Snark Circus with which I fleshed out my version of Fit the Fourth. In this panel, we see the Banker as he

… endorsed a blank cheque (which he crossed),
And changed his loose silver for notes.

Those of our readers who have ever been employed as buskers in a British financial establishment or even as Belgian Surrealist financial establishment will instantly spot the significance of the Banker endorsing a blank check and then crossing it, a bit of complex British financial skulduggery involving a stale and phlegmish sight gag redolent of the vaudevillian buffoonery of certain other, far more talented artist.

However, those of our readers who can employ their cognitive skills to better purposes will brush all of that aside and demand to see the management. What the blazes is going on here, they will sputter over their breakfast kippers and stockinged tart, there’s a d***** bolshevik in my Snark!



Alas, they are correct! Our Banker is being played by none other than Karl Marx and I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it. You see, what we have here is a collection of disparate Victorian stock characters hunting an imaginary beast, a beast of a bogey-man, one might say. One might further add that without this bogey-man our B-Boyz would be unemployed and reduced to busking toute de suite; a similar situation to 20th-century Capitalism’s stormy relationship with its favorite bogey-man, Karl Marx.

Of course, this artist is not suggesting for one moment that the entire globalized, capitalistic network of intricate financial arrangements which has wreaked such havoc on so many lives can in any way be compared to High Nonsense. As the Americans say, that would be beyond my pay-grade. Gosh-darn-it, I’m just a plain ol’ artist — another college-educated busker working the subway platforms of Capitalism.

Profiles in Nonsense: The Billiard-Marker

This week’s episode of The Hunting of the Snark is pleased to present you with Snark Hunter Number Six, the Billiard-Marker!

When the Billiard-Marker is not busying himself keeping score in Victorian pool-halls, he’s available for cameo, walk-on roles in such popular thrillers as Conan Doyle’s "The Greek Interpreter ", where he appeared as an extra in a scene involving Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes and the Boots (duly noted by Martin Gardner, the Herodotus of Snarkology).

Keen-eyed Snark watchers will also remember his scene-stealing appearance in Fit the Fourth of The Hunting of the Snark, where he chalked the tip of the Bonnet’s nose, with hilariously predictable results as we can see in this illustration.

In his spare time, the Billiard-Marker enjoys gardening, cooking, reading the novels of Pierre Loti and attending Carrollian events dressed up as Raymond Roussel, the French novelist and poet whom Louis Aragon dubbed "the president of the republic of dreams." The Billard-Marker has garnered numerous awards and citations for his pitch-perfect, Rousselian rendition of le non-sens haut …

"I shall reach the heights; I was born for dazzling glory. It may be long in coming, but I shall have greater glory than that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon … This glory will reflect on all my works without exception; it will cast itself on all the events of my life … no author has been or can be superior to me … as the poet said, you feel a burning sensation at your brow. I felt once that there was a star at my brow and I shall never forget it."



The Billiard-Marker has been known to finish up his Rousselian "performances" by placing a hot casserole dish upon his head and then mailing electric heaters to any friends desiring souvenirs of tropical India, all whilst employing detective agencies to search out and hire suitable illustrators for an alexandrine, protohypertextual epic endowed with a crushing five-fold level of nesting texts.

We’ll be right back with our first question for the Billiard-Marker, after this important message …

Profiles in Nonsense: The Broker AKA Erik Satie

The Broker (far right)

In our economically blighted times, when the very mention of Brokers and their fiscal ilk makes even the staunchest of capitalists wobble somewhat at the knees, it behooves us to remember that Lewis Carroll thought it prudent to include a Broker amongst the Fellowship of the Snark. We see a picture of the Broker above, in the midst of some menacing spade-work in Fit the Fourth.

The Broker’s job description is minimal : he is charged with valuing the B-Boyz goods. Beyond that, the Admirable Carroll can add little else and nor should he, since the Research Department here at The Hunting of the Snark is perfectly capable of adding it all up on their own.

The Broker’s resemblance to the French musical gadfly, Erik Satie, is compelling evidence of something or the other. The Assamese nautch girl in charge of the investigation managed to curtail her lascivious gyrations long enough to unearth further details of Satie’s involvement in late Victorian financial nonsense:



« … if memory serves, Satie enjoyed creating miniscule models of houses shaped out of lead, which he kept in a cabinet in his home. He would periodically advertise these houses in the local newspaper — making no mention of their actual size — and would take great delight in ushering the prospective home-purchaser into his parlor, and there solemnly presenting him with the unexpected lilliputian house. »

This crackalackin’ summation of the essential nature of the global financial industry was then collated and cross-referenced with additional information concerning the mysterious Monsieur Satie which had been slipped anonymously into the go-go boots of the above-mentioned Assamese nautch girl in a rare, stationary moment …

Item : Erik Satie … this mysterious person who founded his own religion, The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus, Leader.

Item : Erik Satie … who took up smoking to give his physician extra income.

Item : Erik Satie … whose 14-hour long solo piano masterpiece, Vexations, (which Gavin Bryars described as a sort of "Ring des Nibelungen des pauvres"), initiated the modern use of boredom as an artistic strategy.

Conclusion? Don’t be fooled by the sloppily inked moustache and glasses, nor even by the phony, Brad-Pitt-style French accent — Erik Satie was a dangerous character and unsafe in elevators and department stores, with or without Muzak. His appearance in this version of the Snark as the Broker is a shocking reminder of the grim human cost of applying Carrollian Nonsense to global financial strategies. In a world where millionaires weep, we all weep!

Profiles in Nonsense: Boot of the Brute

 Melville House is the publisher of my GN version of The Hunting of the Snark, which
makes perfect sense when one considers that their eponymous hero, Herman Melville, knew a thing or two about fruitless quests for annihilating animals. Melville chose to clothe his Boojum in the blubbery lineaments of the fat, white whale, Moby Dick, and he also made certain that the whale's pursuers got a snootful of insane, nonsensical, contradictory ravings from their leader, Cap'n Ahab. In these critical matters, it's quite obvious that Melville was plundering Carroll's Snark in a classic example of what literary scholars call Anachronistic Plagiarism.

None the less, I'm in a forgiving mood today, and so we'll put aside these petty insinuations concerning the Second Greatest American Novel and move on to the far more pressing matter of Snarkian Ontology, exemplified here in the unassuming person of the Boots, seen above. Carroll makes little mention of this rather pedestrian character except for some perfunctory business with a spade in Fit the Fourth, and some commentators have even insinuated that the Boots did not really exist or that he might have been the actual murderer of the Baker, sharing as he does a "Boo" with the dreaded Boojum.

To all that I say phooey. However, drawing phooey is a bit trickier and it was only after considerable research by my crack team of crack-head researchers that we came up with a solution to all of the above: the Boots was Charles Darwin!



Carroll was probably present at the infamous 1860 debate on Darwinism between T.H. Huxley and Soapy Sam Wilberforce; we know that he owned and read Darwin's works; we even know that he and Darwin corresponded but we are uncertain as to the Great One's exact opinion on Natural Selection.

Well-oiled Carrollians suspect that he disapproved of this logical undoing of the basic tenets of all revealed religions on mainly philosophical grounds. Carroll's faith was unshakeable and more importantly, the Master of Nonsense certainly would have understood the difference between Faith and Logic as far as religions go, a simple mental operation which still seems beyond the limited cognitive abilities of many noisy commentators upon the subject today (so much for evolution, eh?). What might have perturbed Carroll could have been the spectacle of publicly quarreling over such private matters, and hence, our choice of Darwin as the Boots.

Both Darwin and the Boots lurk in the shadows of Victorian England and the Snark alike. The former utterly and categorically demolished the logical basis of organized religion almost apologetically, the latter utterly and categorically demolished the logical basis of Carroll's Snark almost apologetically. Both belief systems of religion and Snark are solely premised upon revelations, the verbal revelations of a god or a poet who presents us with a priori facts about the fictional Multiverses they have created. Carroll's colorless, practically blank persona of the Boots is a dead giveaway that there really is nothing going on here, that the Snark is just a sound and fury signifying nothing.

Nature and poetry alike shun vacuums, they make such an ontological mess of things and clever, up-to-date gods and poets alike eschew 'em. There's nothing worse than Nothing in the midst of your Something, it's a dead giveaway that you really are up to Something and that's the very last thing you want your acolytes and readers to suspect. Fictional suspension of disbelief and all that, don't you know.

In short, there's something going on here, as usual. I'll leave it to the Carroll boffins to sort out the sticky details of all of the above revelations, for now, just take my word for it.

Profiles in Nonsense: My Favorite Martin

The Encyclopedia Snarkiana defines a Barrister as someone who tries to appeal to the Beaver’s pride, vainly citing a number of cases in which making laces has been proved an infringment of right.

Lewis Carroll, the author of those lines, further elaborated upon them by providing the Barrister with a ready-made dream to occupy him with in Fit the 6th. This dream was also furnished with a snappy soundtrack by Messers Gilbert and Sullivan and a full supporting cast of judge, jury, witnesses and defendant. The oneiric defendant (and substitute judge and jury) was none other than the Snark itself, which led to a bit of what well-oiled jurists call a conflict of interest. The Snark’s legal status as a nonexistent, fictitious and nonsensical creature can be best summed up as being Nothing, and nothing, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, comes from Nothing.

This illustrator chewed over that legal, ethical and even metaphysical conundrum for quite a while when he was first looking about for someone to cast in the role of the Barrister. After countless auditions with aspiring non-entities ranging from obscenely wealthy middle-class American politicos to an entire gaggle of opiated American radio talkshow intellectuals, I threw my hands up in the air in despair. It was impossible, finding someone who could encapsulate the very essence of Nothing so thoroughly that it even permeated his dreams!

At that moment, the door opened and a sweaty and rotund German intellectual eased himself and his moustache onto The Hunting of the Snark’s rather tatty casting couch. It was Martin Heidegger, the notorious Continental philosopher and Black Forest gadabout. It turns out that good ol’ Martin had spent considerable ink and governmental educational subsidies bloviating ad nauseam on the subject of Nothing. It seems like everywhere Martin looked, in the kitchen, in the shower, behind the sofa, there it was, the bane of Existentialism — Nothing!



Of course, he had a fancy German name for it, curious readers can read all about it and much more here, but in short, Martin was our man. The fourth member of the B-Boyz, the Barrister, was going to be Martin Heidegger! Exhausted by the search, I lay back and lit up a hand-rolled Brazilian samba girl. Things were back to normal at Chez Snark, Nothing was working its nonsense mojo once again.

Profiles in Nonsense: Nietzsche's in Drag and I'm Feelin' Blue

We continue my GN Snark's Dramatis Personae with this week's specimen … the Maker of Bonnets and Hoods, or as he's known to the authorities, the Bonnet. Curiously, this character is given almost nothing to do in the epic, except for a brief episode in Fit the Fourth where he allows someone to chalk the tip of his nose. Other than that, not a peep, which poses obvious problems for an illustrator trying to flesh out this nonentity.

One might even say that the Bonnet poses us an existentialist problem, perhaps even a protoexistentialist problem of sorts. Luckily, the persona of Friedrich Nietzsche, the notorious Continental steamer, was available on short notice and we gladly inducted him into our Fellowship of the Snark, moustache and all.

We see him above, as he appears in Fit the Second of our version of The Hunting of the Snark, leering at the HMS Snark in a nautical manner. I think he looks rather fetching in his big bonnet, don't you?




No doubt the more well-heeled aficionados of Lewis Carroll, and Western Civ in general, are having a quick apopleptic fit upon seeing all of this. Why, they wonder aloud over their breakfast scotch-and-cornflakes, did this artist feel it necessary to clothe the persona of the Bonnet-Maker in the fleshly lineaments of the Prussian demiexistentialist Nietzsche?

Was it the leather, the machismo, the whips and such-like that Nietzsche was wont to bandy about when talking of women, a bandying which he not only spoke of in print but would even indulge in personally right in front of a camera operated by — yow! — a man named Bonnet?



And so … have we hoisted Nietzche upon his very own petard here, a petard which the philosopher had himself loaded with the scattershot observation that there are no facts, only interpretations? Have we stooped so low that we must rely upon the flimsiest of nominal accidents to populate our Hunting of the Snark?

Or is it just a petty bit of passive-aggressive revenge by an inkster who still suffers from debilitating bouts of Post-University-Philosophy-Course-Syndrome, an illness which can only be controlled by long-term exposure to Carrollian Nonsense and in severe cases, repeated applications of Three Stooges shorts?

In short, there’s nothing going on here at all, folks, just a guy with a moustache wearing women’s clothes, a guy who knows that to become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea what one is.