Tag Archives: noah’s art

The Illustrated Wallace Stevens

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I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
—Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,

So what’s being compared here?

At first the answer seems fairly obvious; three minds are being compared to three blackbirds. When you think about it a little more, though, things get blurry. For one thing, the simile doesn’t quite map; the three minds are actually being compared to the tree, not to the blackbirds. So is there one overmind in which the three minds sit? Or is the tree the mind in which the blackbirds sit — or a number of minds, in which different explanations of the simile quietly caw? The poem doubles — or triples — back on itself; it seems to be describing or explaining its own processes. And if it’s talking about itself, the simile is there merely to multiply. The mind, the blackbird, and the poem are shadows that slide one into the other, each and each and each.

Or, to put it another way, the connection between the blackbird and the mind is arbitrary. That’s how metaphors work; they connect unlike things. Language is all metaphor; a string of arbitrary links, slipping signs that magically pull meaning out of non-meaning, like an infinite string of blackbirds rushing out of that tree, or mind, or poem. Wallace Stevens poems are built out of metaphors and think about metaphors, which is what I meant here when I said:

Wallace Stevens is very much about words. It’s words as imagery, but the point of most of his poems is the evanescence of those images; they’re arbitrary. They appear in language and disappear into language.

As a result, it’s not really possible — or at least very difficult — to create an illustration that works like a Wallace Stevens poem.

Though, of course, there isn’t anything to stop you from illustrating a Wallace Stevens poem. Nothing simpler. Here’s my own illustration of the above poem, taken from a zine I made way back in 2002.

This drawing neatly reverses the poem its illustrating. In Stevens, the mind comes first, and then the image of the blackbird follows. But in the illustration, the blackbirds are as solid as, and essentially precede, the split consciousness. Instead of three minds generating three blackbirds, the blackbirds generate three minds, represented by the chain of question marks. The poem spins an epistemological conundrum (what do I think?) into an ontological one (where are the blackbirds?) The illustration, on the other hand, takes an ontological question (what is the status of these multiple, poorly drawn critters?) and spins it into an epistemological one.

Here’s another example:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Here, the illustration’s concreteness doesn’t so much mirror the poem as parody it. The poem treats the blackbird’s insubstantiality as sublime; the word is beautiful because it shimmers and passes; the singing depends on the silence and the silence on the singing. The illustration, by nailing down the ephermerality, reimagines it as (or teases out the implication of) violence. Language’s play is freedom — what separates us from the blackbird is that we can contemplate the blackbird. But that (loooooooooooooong separation) from the animal is also our knowledge of sin, which is the knowledge of death. The poem is about the joy of the world slipping into words. The illustration is, maybe, a reminder that, from the perspective of the blackbird, human mastery of the world may have a downside.

One last one…and here, I think, the illustration and the poem really do come close to meaning the same thing.

In “Thirteen Ways,” the blackbird stands in for both sign and signified. It’s the mark that points and the thing pointed to; the trace of a reality that can be indicated but not reached. The poem above can be read, perhaps, as an acknowledgement that words are not a self-contained system; the world is in there too, even if we can’t really tell exactly where. If words coat our images, then maybe images infest our words. We speak blackbirds — or at least something that looks a little bit like them.

Before They Were Famous

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Joy and Sean’s bricolage Victorian Wire piece has netted us many new readers,most of whom probably have not yet realized that this blog is usually less about Omar and clever homage/parody and more about comics and post-structuralism and flame wars.

But! I am hoping to fool them at least a little longer, so I thought I’d reprint this piece which ran in Poor Mojo’s Almanac a little while back. It reimagines famous people in different eras/situations. It’s not about the Wire, but it’s what I’ve got.

What Were They Like Before They Were Famous?

1. Franz Josef

For the science fair, Franz Josef Haydn constructed a working castrato. No one expected it because the school was underfunded. So he had to use an abacus instead of a Bunsen burner, plus it was made out of rusty glass condom wrappers. But he tried hard and learned important lessons broadcast on television like “don’t be poor” and the Western cultural tradition. His teacher, Ms. Friedrich Nietzsche, gave him stickers with assertive slogans. She had a cave to go into for the Jedi Mind Trick, but when she came out she was just Aquaman, which doesn’t usually help.

Haydn didn’t understand what he had done wrong. “Doesn’t anybody like beautiful music?” He kept shouting that. The judges were stupid movie stars and people like that. First prize would go to growing bean sprouts like always. And all he wanted was to be able to look at his college pictures sometimes without being sad forever.

I think the problem is that there is too much creativity in the world. It means rich people can feel good about themselves too easily. Also everybody talks and nobody shoots them. If we really want to stop floods and starvation, a better way would be a lot of robots doing math in the dark. Without Oprah.

2. Christina

So it was in the car and we said who has the best memories? So the Little Mermaid was in the Holocaust and learned important lessons about personal growth, and Buffy had a sad marriage to Raymond Carver but with moments of real quirkiness. And everyone else was Asian. But Christina Aguilera kept saying, gee I don’t have any memories, isn’t that funny? They told her to make some up but she wasn’t inventive in that way, so they felt bad for her but wouldn’t talk to her anyway.

She tried to tell people about a dream where she met herself and was different. Buffy said, “Oh, right, you must be a creative writing major.” I guess that’s a memory, Christina thought. I’ll just listen to this song for the rest of my life.

Luckily there’s happiness and you’re more famous than some people. If you have cheerful slogans and make others say them then they will be depressed and you win. Even if that doesn’t work, someday high school will just be a place you read porn about.

3. Duke

It is underwater and the guidance counselors are puffy and fat like some kinds of fish. Duke Ellington is sort of a savior so he comes through security and down, down, down. It is pretty because it is green and no one has any clothes or penises.

The littlest teachers have lights in their tails. You are never more than fifteen feet from one and you accidentally eat them while you sleep. That happens to Duke Ellington too, which is why he ended up so creative just like most people. If you shut your eyes you can see their skulls because they glow and bob where the water is dark. That is all the teachers people swallowed making that possible and I think we should thank them for it.

Duke Ellington’s cell phone rings. It is Hollywood and they want him to be in a movie where he will listen to music and then be inspired to listen to better music. “When I do as they wish, even the eels sing of love.” He would cry a single tear but nobody would notice underwater. There are a lot of beautiful things and terrifying things where you can’t see them here, but if you really study them closely they become boring.

Copyright for Middle Brow Snobs (Or, Worst. Mashup. Ever.)

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I’ve been a little obsessed with mashups recently, so I thought in honor of our free culture roundtable, I’d try making one of my own. Of course:

— I can’t beat match,

—my only software is Garage Band

—which I don’t know how to use,

— I’m a Paid Music Critic

— which means I have the musical eptitude of a lightly lobotomized bag of hammers.

These factors might deter others…but hell, Nina Paley’s got me all gung ho on niche markets, so I figure somewhere out there there’s a vital fanbase that wants to hear Beyonce incompetently combined with Australian female doom metal. No doubt there are LiveJournal groups and message boards and lord knows what else, right?

Right?

In any case, without further ado, here is Single Plague, in which Beyonce battles Murkrat, with a brief cameo by the Carter Family. Download it and weep.

For a discussion of real mashups and a list of some of the best, try this list and discussion by Alan Benard.