Another one of Warren Ellis’ remake/remodel things at his Engine forum. He asked for an “oaken space ship, and it’s captain,” and I needed to procrastinate.
Captain Jack Stanley, mutinied, asks only the following of his former crew: a wine cask, a solar sail, and duct tape. Now he sails the seven spaceways, Dread Cap’n Stanley of the starship Misericordia.
When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion†with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,†what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser’s most popular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because of Eliot’s use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism’s contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Harper’s, Feb. 2007
Three of Blood Diamonds.
Attempt # 546 In my apparent quest to harsh the high of all the nice people who usually participate in Illustration Friday. No, it’s not playing-card-size. I’m not that smart.
I have no idea what the hell’s in my paradise. But I know it’s red and black.
Jeffrey Stewart Timmins. Goddamn Canadians.
There is another James the Third out there and he is a far better artist than I. I will now have to kill him and eat his heart.
Have no fear, ladies; Robot Holmes is on the case.
Painter, then Pshop, then back and forth between the two. Adobe should buy that and streamline the workflow. They’re buying everything else…
