Myth of a Thousand Eyes, c. 1950 by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)
Deadline Island, 2019 by Samplerman (Yvan Guillo)
Barges 1919, by David Bomberg (1890-1957)
Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The N’Gustro Affair is forthcoming from NYRB in a translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. NYRB’s blurb:
Mean, arrogant, naive, sadistic on occasion, the young Henri Butron records his life story on tape just before death catches up with him: a death passed off as a suicide by his killers, French secret service agents who need to hush up their role—and Butron’s—in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a prominent opposition leader from a third-world African nation in the throes of a postcolonial civil war.
The N’Gustro Affair is a thinly veiled retelling of the 1965 abduction and killing of Mehdi Ben Barka, a radical opponent of King Hassan II of Morocco. But this is merely the backdrop to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s first-person portrait (with shades of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me) of a man who lacks the insight to see himself for what he is: a wannabe nihilist too weak to be even a full-bore fascist.
Untitled, undated sketches of readers by George Jones (1786–1869)
Salomé, 1916 by Paul Iribe (1883–1935)
Off to the Pub, 1911 by Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942)
Peasants Arguing with Mutants, 1992 by Gely Korzhev (1925-2012)
Goblin Market, by Primrose Harley (1908-1978)
“Goblin Market”
by
Christina Rossetti
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
In summer weather,—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy:
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”
Odalisque Feeding a Faun, 1920s by Dorothy Webster Hawksley (1884-1970)
There’s a nice conversation between Art Spiegelman and Robert Coover at The Believer. The pair have collaborated on an illustrated “novelette” called Street Cop.
Their discussion begins with Street Cop but expands much further, touching on postmodernism, realism (“Our Zeitgeist has left us mostly with shards of media as our reality,” says Spiegelman; “When people ask me, I say that I learned my realism from Kafka,” replies Coover”), time and space, the desire for happy endings, and more. But like I said, it begins with Street Cop:
ART SPIEGELMAN: So first: why a street cop?
ROBERT COOVER:Well, I wrote Street Cop in 2019. It emerged, like everything I write, from anxieties about the present. I had written about private eyes, but the dumb street cop was something new. I liked the idea of a guy who would be technologically inept. It’s about a bumbler who began his career as a crook and drug dealer, before accidentally becoming a cop who stumbles his way through a techno-city where the landscape changes daily thanks to 3D printing—blurring past, present and future. His job is to convict suspects rather than solve crimes, but all he wants, really, is to return to the old part of town, a seamy noir-like zone where his urges, and their many flaws, are permissible.
AS:When I first read and signed on to illustrate your story early in 2020’s quarantine, I was grateful to dive into a Dystopia Next Door and escape the one that surrounded us even in the bucolic bunker in the woods we’d retreated to from NYC. Choking on an overdose of toxic news, and compulsively “doom-scrolling”—I really love that phrase—I found the Covid-free air of Street Cop breathable because at least it didn’t have the twin viruses of the Covid pandemic and Trump directly confronting me. Still, the very first picture I drew had Covids in it—it was inevitable that they found their way into the prescient present of the story.
The Crow Is Beautiful, 1988 by He Duoling (b. 1948)
Black Grouse in Gliding Flight, 1915 by Hans Emmenegger (1886-1940)
Pastoral (Angel Hunters), 1950 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
Buddhist Lama, 1875 by Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904)
Biblioklept 