TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Elizabeth Bishop, Kind Of

Oh man. My best laid plans gang so freaking aglay these past few days. I had planned to draw an epic interpretation of a Mary Jo Bang title and serve it up to you yesterday, but the power was out all day and I made no headway at all. But since I am utterly devoted, I offer you this quickie to stave off your hunger:
Large Bad Picture

--Elizabeth Bishop

Meta, right? It's large, it's bad, and it is in the most generous sense of the word a picture--more specifically, a picture of a rare elephant-infant centaur. Infelephantaur! Behold his sculpted pecs, behold his contorted ripe bottom!

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Herman Melville

The Maldive Shark

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw,
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril's abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat --
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

--Herman Melville

Do you know that I am currently reading Moby-Dick for the first time? I am twenty-four years old--imagine how small I feel. Also how furious that there is apparently this whole second Bible that no one ever told me about, least of all my parents, the douchebergs. What was I so busy reading that I had no time for Moby-Dick? Farmer Boy? Probably; I could not get enough of that Almanzo person. Anyway, my research informed me that Melville also dabbled in poetry, so it seemed only fitting that I should choose a line of his to celebrate, and why not this one? CAW! See how pale he is, the ravener; see how horrible the meat!

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Zbigniew Herbert

Mr Cogito Studies His Face in the Mirror

Who wrote our faces chicken pox for sure
marking its o's with a calligraphic pen
but who bestowed on me my double chin
what glutton was it when my whole soul
yearned for austerity why are my eyes
set so closely together it was him not me
waiting in the scrub for the Vened invasion
the ears that protrude two fleshy seashells
no doubt left me by an ancestor who strained for an echo
of the thunderous march of mammoths across the steppes

the forehead not too high it doesn't think very much
—women gold land don't get knocked off your horse
a prince did their thinking for them and a wind bore them along
they tore at walls with their bare fingers and with a sudden cry
fell into the void only to return in me

but didn't I go shopping in art salons
for powders potions masks
the cosmetics of nobility
I held marble up to my eyes Veronese's greens
I rubbed my ears with Mozart
I trained my nostrils on the musk of old books

in the mirror the face I inherited
a sack of old meats fermenting
medieval cravings and sins
paleolithic hunger and terror
an apple falls not far from the tree
the body is locked into the chain of species

    that's how I lost the tournament with my face

--Zbigniew Herbert

Do you like the gooey little brain-hats Mr. Cogito is wearing, accented with giant feathers? I thought they were appropriate. The boots I designed especially for him also, tailoring them for his sack-of-old-meats needs. No doubt we could have celebrated Zbigniew as long as anyone--it is obvious to me that his body of work is badly in need of my tender intellectual ministrations. However, since our TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH has begun and there is no turning back now, he must be content with intermittent attention.

I Have Such a Thing for Lizard Chub; Look At the Fatty Little Arm

Steef writes: "I have this dream of Henry Reed riding up on a white stallion, armed with a shield and lance, tasked with slaying the dreaded hydra MacSpaunday, a winged, venomous creature with four heads, standing on legs made of electric Pylons, breathing fiery words that people actually remember, in bold, 24-point Times New Roman." How chthonic of you, steef! I will admit that I have a very similar dream, except in mine it is Henry Reed who is many-headed, and all the heads are making out with me.

Dylan Thomas+Crazy Dick Weeklong Interpretive Extravaganza: Interpretation the Last

And that's the rub, the only rub that tickles.
The knobbly ape that swings along his sex
From damp love-darkness and the nurse's twist
Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,
Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast
Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six
Feet in the rubbing dust.

from "If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love"

It is tragical, but this marks the last official day of the Dylan Thomas+Crazy Dick Weeklong Interpretive Extravaganza. Oh, what? A week is however long I want it to be, fools. In today's drawing, Crazy Dick, who is insane, believes himself to be a bald little tree full of God's creatures. Notice that the line could be changed to read, "The sexly ape that swings along his knob," and not suffer a single iota for it.

Dylan Thomas+Crazy Dick Weeklong Interpretive Extravaganza: Interpretation the Third

I told you things were going to get more complex as time went on. This line, which I ingeniously culled from "A Grief Ago," has nothing to do with cocks, loins, or crotches, but I inserted Crazy Dick into its interpretation anyway because that is what his dick self wanted. Birds sail around his sweet pink face and roost in the whites of his eyes; he is holding, in his clumsy penis hands, a tubby tubby pigposy--"the fats and the flower."

Dylan Thomas+Crazy Dick Weeklong Interpretive Extravaganza: Interpretation the Second

Into the organpipes and steeples
Of the luminous cathedrals,
Into the weathercocks' molten mouths
Rippling in twelve-winded circles

from "Ceremony After a Fire Raid"

This one is way more horrifying than I first realized--I thought it was going to be cute and maybe even educational. Instead you get this: a lava-mouthed cloud penis dripping rain from its fluffy balls and hurling lightning bolts with its improbable arm. Anyway, this version of Crazy Dick is so crazy that not only is he orbited by tiny birds, he is also orbited by many of his own disembodied heads, so stick that in your mouth and melt it.

Edited because you people deserve a close-up

Dylan Thomas+Crazy Dick Weeklong Interpretive Extravaganza: Interpretation the First

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time's jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave

from "When, Like a Running Grave"

I thought we'd start off with a simple one, and get into the more torturously complex material later in the week. You will remember that Crazy Dick used to be a horrible sickly pink color, but I decided to make him red in these pictures because I wanted to play up the rooster connotation. Crazy is in rare form today: his insanity-birds are looking fine, his thighs are as chubby as they were the day he was born, his single eye is squeezed tightly shut, and his hooves are swift. The little bunny carrying his loin-key evades him now, but not for long.

Tell Your Friends

Today I was thinking that I was tired of the word douchebag and wanted something a little fresher, so I invented doucheberg, which means, you're such a douche that I can only see the tip of it! Exquisite, right? Man, I'm such a sparkling portmanteau fountain.

You Probably Saw This Coming

You will be pleased to hear that tomorrow marks the beginning of the First Ever Inaugural Dylan Thomas+Crazy Dick Weeklong Interpretive Extravaganza, during which I will illustrate a number of Dylan Thomas poems with the help of a certain long-neglected Crazy Dick, who wants terribly to be inserted between some bone and some blood, some worm and some loin. A quick thumb through his collected poems will tell you that, fond as the man was of the word cock, I could probably devote myself to Dylan Thomas+Crazy Dick drawings for months on end, but I wouldn't want my shtick to get repetitive. Obviously. Anyway, Radish King, this week's for you!

Come Quick

Tao Lin is having sex with us!

Edited to actually link to the man, God I am such a renard

Announcements!

My monkeypunch has at long last been unveiled over at the indomitable Monkey Punch Dinosaur, whose mission appears to have been tailor-made for my own particular talents. Go check it out, if you are not too lazy and/or unwilling to cast your eyes on yet another piece of my art for fear of going ignominiously blind.

Also, if you're in the mood to participate in a different, more purposeful kind of poetry contest, please go check out steef's Reeding Lessons, a blog that aims to document "the quest to track down everything written by (and written about) the poet, translator, critic, and radio dramatist, Henry Reed." He is having a research contest--you have till April 1st to photocopy the shit out of something useful, and you could win a book. I cannot be the only one who finds such concerted eggheadery extremely delicious, so go visit, and maybe read his chapbook too! I especially enjoyed "Lost Herodotus," which I cannot help thinking would make a great cartoon.

Farewell, Marianne Moore, It's Time for a MARCH SURPRISE

I have been feeling a little spiritually flea-bitten lately, so I absconded with my valuable wit for a few days and feel much better now, though Marianne Moore is a billion times the worse for it. I never even had the chance to illustrate that line from "Four Quartz Crystal Clocks": There are four vibrators, the world's exactest clocks;/ and these quartz time-pieces that tell/ time intervals to other clocks,/ these worksless clocks work well. What a wasted opportunity! Oh well, my health must come first. Every once in a while I start working so hard that I forget to look in mirrors and start believing that I look like an interesting monster, with craggy teeth and bristling hair and popeyes, and it is always a shock to go look in the mirror and see that I don't look like an interesting monster at all, just very clean and focused and maybe a little cow-like as far as expression goes. Luckily this doesn't happen every day. I also did a great deal of thinking about who to celebrate next here at Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes, and the more I thought about it the more it became clear that it is time to rebirth this party as a fatter, many-chinned, more expansive baby. That's right: from now on, I will be celebrating a different poet every time I post, because I am so variable like that. Won't this get confusing? you ask. Maybe, if you're an idiot. And of course, I am inviting you all, my ever-loyal conspirators, to submit artistic interpretations of any poem that takes your fancy. You may also draw my attention to poems that would make particularly good cartoons. Published poems are probably best--don't look at me like that, hear me out for a minute, I'm not working for The Man--since it would be easy to spend all of our time making fun of people on LiveJournal, but I do not play that way. Those young men and women are the future.

I might even celebrate one of your poems, if the spirit so moves me. Of course, I will email you first to ask your permission, since some people might not like to have their poems so raunchily and childishly dissected by my nasty knives.