Mark Dery's Blog
May 17, 2019
August 12, 2018
EDWARD GOREY: "OBSESSED WITH LANDSCAPE"
Gorey told the interviewer Simon Henwood that he was “really quite obsessed with landscape” but didn’t “know how to deal with it.” That's bosh. In _Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey_ (pre-order now at https://books.google.com/books?id=hx6...), I take a close look at the landscapes in his work, pointing out just how beautifully handled they are.
Just look at the backgrounds on the covers he illustrated for Doubleday Anchor paperbacks in the '50s, many of which are really foregrounds in terms of their visual interest: the lunar desolation on Charles Doughty's _Travels in Arabia Deserta_, the lone traveler on the road snaking into a vaguely disquieting forest on Alain-Fournier’s _The Wanderer_. Think, too, of the exquisitely limned landscapes in Gorey titles such as _The Object-Lesson_ (1958), where the spidery trees clawing at the sky recall Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints but also Arthur Rackham's spooky Wild Wood in his pen-and-ink drawings for _Wind in the Willows_. Think, finally, of Gorey's susceptibility to landscape in movies like Feuillade's silent classic _Tih Minh_ (1918), whose location footage of "absolutely desolate mountain landscapes of rock and scrub outside Nice with the sea in the distance" flickered in his dreams forever, though he only saw the movie once, at a rare screening at MOMA in 1969. And let's not forget his raptures over _I Know Where I'm Going!_ (1945), a gothic romance by the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger whose location shots of the craggy, storm-lashed Scottish Isle of Mull so captured Gorey's heart that he--an inveterate homebody with a horror of travel--made a pilgrimage to the islands off the west coast of Scotland to take in their lonely, windswept beauty firsthand.
Of course, as I also note in BTBP, "Gorey’s landscapes are highly stylized, like the Japanese woodcuts he admired. 'I’ve never really attempted to create any form from nature,' he said. 'I often think, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this vista make a lovely landscape drawing.’ But I wouldn’t dream of attempting it.'”
Yet we should always be wary of such sweeping statements because just when we think we have Gorey pegged, he upends our assumptions. Consider the boulder that provides a suitable perch for the chap in tweeds in _The Object-Lesson_, on the page captioned "It now became apparent (despite the lack of library paste." Given Gorey's comments on his hopeless ineptitude at realistic landscapes and his insistence that he never drew from life, we can safely assume it's his Platonic ideal of a big rock, excavated from his imagination.
Or can we? Leafing through the photos taken on the Cape by Gorey's cousin Eleanor Garvey, we see--what's this? A dead ringer for the boulder in _The Object-Lesson_! As Ken Morton, Gorey's first cousin once removed, confirms, it's almost certainly a fastidious copy of the "glacial erratic" Gorey and his cousins saw on their Fort Hill walks in Eastham, on the Cape, and which Eleanor captured in a 1966 snap.
https://www.facebook.com/markderywrit...
https://www.facebook.com/markderywrit...
Just look at the backgrounds on the covers he illustrated for Doubleday Anchor paperbacks in the '50s, many of which are really foregrounds in terms of their visual interest: the lunar desolation on Charles Doughty's _Travels in Arabia Deserta_, the lone traveler on the road snaking into a vaguely disquieting forest on Alain-Fournier’s _The Wanderer_. Think, too, of the exquisitely limned landscapes in Gorey titles such as _The Object-Lesson_ (1958), where the spidery trees clawing at the sky recall Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints but also Arthur Rackham's spooky Wild Wood in his pen-and-ink drawings for _Wind in the Willows_. Think, finally, of Gorey's susceptibility to landscape in movies like Feuillade's silent classic _Tih Minh_ (1918), whose location footage of "absolutely desolate mountain landscapes of rock and scrub outside Nice with the sea in the distance" flickered in his dreams forever, though he only saw the movie once, at a rare screening at MOMA in 1969. And let's not forget his raptures over _I Know Where I'm Going!_ (1945), a gothic romance by the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger whose location shots of the craggy, storm-lashed Scottish Isle of Mull so captured Gorey's heart that he--an inveterate homebody with a horror of travel--made a pilgrimage to the islands off the west coast of Scotland to take in their lonely, windswept beauty firsthand.
Of course, as I also note in BTBP, "Gorey’s landscapes are highly stylized, like the Japanese woodcuts he admired. 'I’ve never really attempted to create any form from nature,' he said. 'I often think, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this vista make a lovely landscape drawing.’ But I wouldn’t dream of attempting it.'”
Yet we should always be wary of such sweeping statements because just when we think we have Gorey pegged, he upends our assumptions. Consider the boulder that provides a suitable perch for the chap in tweeds in _The Object-Lesson_, on the page captioned "It now became apparent (despite the lack of library paste." Given Gorey's comments on his hopeless ineptitude at realistic landscapes and his insistence that he never drew from life, we can safely assume it's his Platonic ideal of a big rock, excavated from his imagination.
Or can we? Leafing through the photos taken on the Cape by Gorey's cousin Eleanor Garvey, we see--what's this? A dead ringer for the boulder in _The Object-Lesson_! As Ken Morton, Gorey's first cousin once removed, confirms, it's almost certainly a fastidious copy of the "glacial erratic" Gorey and his cousins saw on their Fort Hill walks in Eastham, on the Cape, and which Eleanor captured in a 1966 snap.
https://www.facebook.com/markderywrit...
https://www.facebook.com/markderywrit...
WHERE GOREY GOT HIS TALENT
(Another teaser for _Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey_ (pre-order now at https://books.google.com/books?id=hx6...).
“My great-grandmother,” Edward Gorey told Alexander Theroux in Theroux’s memoir of their friendship, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, “is the single person, I guess, from whom I inherited my talent. Or”—here, he inserts one of his trademark sighs of melodramatic despair—“whatever you want to call it.”
When poor health forced her husband to retire from his law practice, Helen Amelia St. John Garvey (1834-1907)—from whom Edward St. John Gorey got his middle name—kept food on the table by designing Christmas cards for the Chicago publishing house A.C. McClurg & Co. She had shown evidence of artistic talent early on: the 1849 Transactions of the N.Y. State Agricultural Society mention an award given to “Miss Helen A. St. John, 13 years old,” of Fabius, in Onondaga county, for a “painting in India ink,” which the judges deemed “very fine.”
It was, presumably, just such a “small botanical study” that hung near the desk where Gorey worked at his cousins’ summer house in Barnstable, Cape Cod. In a 1968 letter to the writer Peter F. Neumeyer, with whom he was working on a series of series of children’s books, Gorey wrote,
"I am deriving sustenance of a sort from looking at the sort of thing I could never manage at all, a small botanical study of morning glories, individual blooms, buds, leaves, tendrils in watercolours done by my great-grandmother, which hangs on the wall beside my desk. ... She supported an invalid husband and their child] for I have no idea how long by painting mottoes and greeting cards."
Most of Helen Amelia St. John Garvey’s watercolors--some of which still hang in the big Barnstable house--are “botanical studies” of the sort Gorey mentions, delicately wrought close-ups of flowers and vines characterized, yes, by Victorian sentimentality but also by a scrupulous attention to naturalistic accuracy and a subtle, expressive way with color. Imagine Beatrix Potter—the Beatrix Potter who rendered mosses, lichens, and fungi with a scientific eye—with a shakier grasp on draftsmanship. Helen Amelia’s anatomy is a littly iffy—the Dutch girl in wooden shoes and traditional cap is either slouching or suffering from scoliosis—and her landscapes are indifferently handled: the waders dotting the shoreline in a dashed-off beach scene are little more than stick figures; the perspective in her Wordsworthian ruin is all askew.
But her “mottoes,” some of which decorate the Georgia home of Gorey’s cousin Joyce LaMar (née Joyce Garvey, daughter of Gorey’s aunt on his mother’s side, Ruth Cranston Garvey), are something else altogether: Victorian design at its most delirious, a promiscuous jumble of unrelated typefaces and capricious capitalizations, with flowers and ferns entwining the uppercase letters.
In one, the hand-painted phrase “He giveth His beloved Sleep” (Psalm 127:2) floats against a white background. Gilded and richly ornamented with dots and curlicues, the gothic capital “H”’s look like escapees from an illuminated medieval manuscript; violets and peonies clamber up them, like creepers writhing around the pillar-stumps of some tumbledown castle. The “S” in “Sleep” is a topiary “S,” made out of snow-white blossoms and electric-blue leaves; “giveth” and “beloved” are fashioned from branches coaxed into letter shapes, sprigs tufting their tops.
If we’re looking for premonitions of the Goreyesque in Helen Amelia’s gift-card art, we can make them out, if we squint hard enough, in her spiderweb-fine line, her muted palette, maybe even in a pair of disquieting—oh, all right, very slightly disquieting—landscapes: country fields, desolate in the slanting twilight, empty but for some anthropomorphic haystacks (or mounds of cornhusks or whatever they are) marching toward us in a vaguely menacing way.
But the most obvious point of contact between Helen Amelia’s watercolors and Gorey’s work is her elaborate script: one of the distinctive characteristics of Gorey’s art, established during his time as a book-jacket designer and illustrator at Anchor Books in the 1950s, is his hand-lettered typography, from book titles to the text in his little books.
“My great-grandmother,” Edward Gorey told Alexander Theroux in Theroux’s memoir of their friendship, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, “is the single person, I guess, from whom I inherited my talent. Or”—here, he inserts one of his trademark sighs of melodramatic despair—“whatever you want to call it.”
When poor health forced her husband to retire from his law practice, Helen Amelia St. John Garvey (1834-1907)—from whom Edward St. John Gorey got his middle name—kept food on the table by designing Christmas cards for the Chicago publishing house A.C. McClurg & Co. She had shown evidence of artistic talent early on: the 1849 Transactions of the N.Y. State Agricultural Society mention an award given to “Miss Helen A. St. John, 13 years old,” of Fabius, in Onondaga county, for a “painting in India ink,” which the judges deemed “very fine.”
It was, presumably, just such a “small botanical study” that hung near the desk where Gorey worked at his cousins’ summer house in Barnstable, Cape Cod. In a 1968 letter to the writer Peter F. Neumeyer, with whom he was working on a series of series of children’s books, Gorey wrote,
"I am deriving sustenance of a sort from looking at the sort of thing I could never manage at all, a small botanical study of morning glories, individual blooms, buds, leaves, tendrils in watercolours done by my great-grandmother, which hangs on the wall beside my desk. ... She supported an invalid husband and their child] for I have no idea how long by painting mottoes and greeting cards."
Most of Helen Amelia St. John Garvey’s watercolors--some of which still hang in the big Barnstable house--are “botanical studies” of the sort Gorey mentions, delicately wrought close-ups of flowers and vines characterized, yes, by Victorian sentimentality but also by a scrupulous attention to naturalistic accuracy and a subtle, expressive way with color. Imagine Beatrix Potter—the Beatrix Potter who rendered mosses, lichens, and fungi with a scientific eye—with a shakier grasp on draftsmanship. Helen Amelia’s anatomy is a littly iffy—the Dutch girl in wooden shoes and traditional cap is either slouching or suffering from scoliosis—and her landscapes are indifferently handled: the waders dotting the shoreline in a dashed-off beach scene are little more than stick figures; the perspective in her Wordsworthian ruin is all askew.
But her “mottoes,” some of which decorate the Georgia home of Gorey’s cousin Joyce LaMar (née Joyce Garvey, daughter of Gorey’s aunt on his mother’s side, Ruth Cranston Garvey), are something else altogether: Victorian design at its most delirious, a promiscuous jumble of unrelated typefaces and capricious capitalizations, with flowers and ferns entwining the uppercase letters.
In one, the hand-painted phrase “He giveth His beloved Sleep” (Psalm 127:2) floats against a white background. Gilded and richly ornamented with dots and curlicues, the gothic capital “H”’s look like escapees from an illuminated medieval manuscript; violets and peonies clamber up them, like creepers writhing around the pillar-stumps of some tumbledown castle. The “S” in “Sleep” is a topiary “S,” made out of snow-white blossoms and electric-blue leaves; “giveth” and “beloved” are fashioned from branches coaxed into letter shapes, sprigs tufting their tops.
If we’re looking for premonitions of the Goreyesque in Helen Amelia’s gift-card art, we can make them out, if we squint hard enough, in her spiderweb-fine line, her muted palette, maybe even in a pair of disquieting—oh, all right, very slightly disquieting—landscapes: country fields, desolate in the slanting twilight, empty but for some anthropomorphic haystacks (or mounds of cornhusks or whatever they are) marching toward us in a vaguely menacing way.
But the most obvious point of contact between Helen Amelia’s watercolors and Gorey’s work is her elaborate script: one of the distinctive characteristics of Gorey’s art, established during his time as a book-jacket designer and illustrator at Anchor Books in the 1950s, is his hand-lettered typography, from book titles to the text in his little books.
March 9, 2017
LOST IN CYBERSPACE
If you've read my Kindle single, "All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Rock Matters," and were moved to post a rhapsodic review on Amazon--or even if you weren't--please consider posting, or re-posting, your thoughts HERE: https://www.amazon.com/All-Young-Dude.... Amazon, in its infinite wisdom, deleted ALL OF THE ACCUMULATED REVIEWS when I submitted an infinitesimally different version and, per Amazon protocol, requested that they republish it for me. Five days of thumb-twiddling followed, while I waited for the elves in Bezos's Magic Kingdom to push the button. In the fullness of time, they did, inadvertently denuding my little single of all the paeans and panegyrics posted by satisfied customers, over time. This matters, to an author, because positive reviews push titles upward, in Amazon searches, and influence consumers' decision-making, obviously. "Be the first to review this item!"
June 6, 2013
ALL THE YOUNG DUDES: WHY GLAM ROCK MATTERS
LIVE, NOW: ALL THE YOUNG DUDES: WHY GLAM ROCK MATTERS [KINDLE SINGLE].
BOING BOING‘s inaugural Kindle title, and my latest.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASI...
From the Amazon blurb:
“All the Young Dudes,” glam rock’s rallying cry, turned 40 last year. David Bowie wrote it, but Mott the Hoople owned it: their version was, and will ever remain, glam’s anthem, a hymn of exuberant disenchantment that also happens to be one of rock’s all-time irresistible sing-alongs.
Bowie, glam, and “All the Young Dudes” are inseparable in the public mind, summoning memories of a subculture dismissed as apolitical escapism, a glitter bomb of fashion and attitude that briefly relieved the malaise of the ‘70s.
Now, cultural critic Mark Dery gives the movement its due in an 8,000-word exploration of glam as rebellion through style. As polymorphously perverse as the subculture it explores, “All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Matters” is equal parts fan letter, visual-culture criticism, queer theory, and true confession.
In bravura style, Dery teases out lines of connection between glam, the socioeconomic backdrop of the ‘70s, Oscar Wilde as a late-Victorian Ziggy Stardust, the etymology and queer subtext of the slang term “dude,” the associative links between the ‘20s-style cover of the Mott album on which “Dudes” appeared and the coded homoeroticism of the ‘20s magazine illustrator J.C. Leyendecker (considered in the context of the 1970s fad for all things 1920s), and Dery’s own memories of growing up glam in ‘70s San Diego, where coming out as a Bowie fan—even for straight kids—was an invitation to bullying.
Glam emboldened kids in America and England to dream of a world beyond suburbia’s oppressive notions of normalcy, Dery argues, a world conjured up in pop songs full of Wildean irony and Aestheticism and jaw-dropping fashion statements to match. More important, glam drew inspiration from feminism and gay liberation to articulate a radical critique of mainstream manhood—a pomosexual vision of masculinity whose promise remains only partly fulfilled, even now.
Guaranteed to put your spine outta place.
BOING BOING‘s inaugural Kindle title, and my latest.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASI...
From the Amazon blurb:
“All the Young Dudes,” glam rock’s rallying cry, turned 40 last year. David Bowie wrote it, but Mott the Hoople owned it: their version was, and will ever remain, glam’s anthem, a hymn of exuberant disenchantment that also happens to be one of rock’s all-time irresistible sing-alongs.
Bowie, glam, and “All the Young Dudes” are inseparable in the public mind, summoning memories of a subculture dismissed as apolitical escapism, a glitter bomb of fashion and attitude that briefly relieved the malaise of the ‘70s.
Now, cultural critic Mark Dery gives the movement its due in an 8,000-word exploration of glam as rebellion through style. As polymorphously perverse as the subculture it explores, “All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Matters” is equal parts fan letter, visual-culture criticism, queer theory, and true confession.
In bravura style, Dery teases out lines of connection between glam, the socioeconomic backdrop of the ‘70s, Oscar Wilde as a late-Victorian Ziggy Stardust, the etymology and queer subtext of the slang term “dude,” the associative links between the ‘20s-style cover of the Mott album on which “Dudes” appeared and the coded homoeroticism of the ‘20s magazine illustrator J.C. Leyendecker (considered in the context of the 1970s fad for all things 1920s), and Dery’s own memories of growing up glam in ‘70s San Diego, where coming out as a Bowie fan—even for straight kids—was an invitation to bullying.
Glam emboldened kids in America and England to dream of a world beyond suburbia’s oppressive notions of normalcy, Dery argues, a world conjured up in pop songs full of Wildean irony and Aestheticism and jaw-dropping fashion statements to match. More important, glam drew inspiration from feminism and gay liberation to articulate a radical critique of mainstream manhood—a pomosexual vision of masculinity whose promise remains only partly fulfilled, even now.
Guaranteed to put your spine outta place.
January 8, 2013
The Year in Books 2012: Worth a Second Look
From the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography’s “Year in Books 2012: Worth a Second Look“:
http://www.cclapcenter.com/2013/01/th...
“I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, by Mark Dery. After a fully established career that has seen this cultishly loved essayist slowly building a following, 2012 seemed to finally be the big breakout year for Mark Dery, with this dark yet erudite collection being one of the big buzzes among lit hipsters all last year. Granted, it’s not quite as groundbreaking as some of its breathless praise warrants, which is what kept it off the “Best of the Best” list — although always smart and subversive, it ultimately isn’t anything different than what’s being said by Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling, the staff of Boing Boing, etc — but if you’re not familiar with any of these other people, it’s an absolute imperative that you pick this up as soon as you can, a writer destined to be as important to future hackers and Sub-Geniuses as William Gibson and Mondo 2000 was to my own youth.”
Not unalloyed praise, but we take our compliments where we find them.
http://www.cclapcenter.com/2013/01/th...
“I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, by Mark Dery. After a fully established career that has seen this cultishly loved essayist slowly building a following, 2012 seemed to finally be the big breakout year for Mark Dery, with this dark yet erudite collection being one of the big buzzes among lit hipsters all last year. Granted, it’s not quite as groundbreaking as some of its breathless praise warrants, which is what kept it off the “Best of the Best” list — although always smart and subversive, it ultimately isn’t anything different than what’s being said by Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling, the staff of Boing Boing, etc — but if you’re not familiar with any of these other people, it’s an absolute imperative that you pick this up as soon as you can, a writer destined to be as important to future hackers and Sub-Geniuses as William Gibson and Mondo 2000 was to my own youth.”
Not unalloyed praise, but we take our compliments where we find them.
