Imagine The Waste Land as film noir. Imagine good old Christopher Marlowe, navigating his way through the seedy underworld of Eliot's masterpiece, pitting his wits against the evil duo of Bleistein (with a cigar) and Burbank (with a Baedeker service automatic), trying desperately to find Phlebas the Phoenician while warding off the advances of the Hyacinth Girl. Imagine a graphic novel that includes the line "I'd walked in on Madame S. playing pixie poker with some arty types who looked like they'd write a Haiku if they ever heard something go bump in the night. I took the drink offered me by Tinkerbell the butler and cased the joint..."
Or better yet, just go read Martin Rowson's The Waste Land. It's all in there.
P.S. Am I the only person on the planet who had never heard of Rowson? I discovered him by chance yesterday - I was browsing through the graphic novel section of the UPenn Library, and came upon a version of Tristram Shandy. Now Tristram Shandy has long been a favourite of mine, and the idea that someone could make a comic book out of it intrigued me, so I went ahead and borrowed it. It proved to be a hilarious take on the book. So then I go look up Rowson in the library catalogue, and it turns out he's done a version of The Waste Land.
I was outside the library at 8:30 this morning, waiting for it to open.
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6 comments:
Er. You may count me among the ignorant ones.
And I wish we had a library we could wait outside of.
*sigh*
Interesting reco.
Also recommended is Peter Kuper's (Kafka's) "Metamorphosis".
Second on the 'ignorant' bandwagon apparently. The Vietnam Moment is particulary good, I thought
geek!
Falsie: Its not the UPenn library, its the Penn library.
And you ARE the only person on the planet who had never heard of Rowson. My mother was just telling me the other day how her dhobi was asking for Rowson. Oh wait, it could have been Ration. Hmmm. Anyway, am guessing it was a rhetorical question.
n!
P.S at 8.30 this morning, I WAS the wasteland.
tangled: Good. So it's not just me.
km: Thanks. Will go get.
revealed: The Vietnam Moment?? Please to reveal more.
tr: Of course. Always.
n!: Pedant. And no, it wasn't a rhetorical question - I genuinely wanted to know if this was something that I'd just missed out on, or a genuine discovery I could act snobbish about.
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