blog – Page 12 – The Hunting of the Snark

Thinking it Through

Among the issues the The Hunting of the Snark is about, one of them perhaps might be reasoning. There are several remedies against bad reasoning. One of them is clear thinking. That is what Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s Thinking It Through – An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (2003) is about. The book also is available as PDF file

Grandville’s Monsters

The big beast perhaps gave birth to a Boojum.

(John Tufail made me aware of this illustration by J. J. Grandville.)

Thomas Cranmer

As for The Hunting of the Snark, I think that this is the most important finding of my Snark hunt.

The Dream Book of Mr. Pyridine

From Mahendra Singh’s The Dream Book of Mr. Pyridine

Snark Puppetery

Animators (2015): Saranne Bensusan, Louisa Brooks, Karen Morris, Chris Wright, Lawrence Mallinson

Charlotte Emerson’s Shadow Cranky

This is the beautiful result of a 1st year university project to create a video to go alongside a given prose. Charlotte Emerson made a shadow cranky, animating Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. She uploeded it to YouTube on 2016-05-12.

There is no sound. It’s up to you to add it.

The Image Breakers

[left]: The Banker after his encounter with the Bandersnatch, depicted in Henry Holiday’s illustration (woodcut by Joseph Swain) to the chapter The Banker’s Fate in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
[right]: a slightly horizontally compressed rendering of The Imagebreakers (1566-1568, aka Allegory of Iconoclasm), an etching by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder.

Monsters

Monstrances

Usually elements borrowed by Henry Holiday from other artists are inconspicuously integrated into Holiday’s illustrations. Here is an exception. The monstrance-shaped tree is just a small element in John Martin’s The Bard. In Holiday’s illustration it is more prominent.

more | crucifix

The Ocean Chart

Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876) has been published “with nine illustrations by Henry Holiday”. But there are ten illustrations. One possible explanation: The Ocean-Chart (aka the Bellman’s map) has been made neither by Henry Holiday nor by Joseph Swain, but by a typesetter.

In the more recent British history, the map has been used by Britain’s contemporary Bellmen before 2016-06-23 to present their understanding of the impact of the Brexit to the rest of the crew. Admittedly, by now the majority of Britains understand the trouble they put themselves into. But as pride and face-saving of course is much more important than something profane like a healthy economy and rational thinking, that map won’t be updated.

2017-09-29