{"id":685,"date":"2009-09-19T22:25:18","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T22:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=685"},"modified":"2024-01-21T18:54:31","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T23:54:31","slug":"wilkin_gorey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2009\/09\/wilkin_gorey\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilkin, Karen: <cite>Elegant Engimas: The Art of Edward Gorey<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I received a copy of <strong><cite>Elegant Engimas: The Art of Edward Gorey<\/cite><\/strong> through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/er\/list\">LibraryThing&#8217;s Early Reviewers program<\/a>, a shamefully long time ago, and was very pleasantly surprised when I received it to discover it was basically a hardcover exhibition catalog, in other words, much nicer than I was vaguely expecting.<\/p>\n<p>As that may suggest, there are two significant parts to this book, an introductory essay and then a large number of reproduced images. The essay is by Karen Wilkin and is titled &#8220;Mildly Unsettling.&#8221; I think this gives you a reasonable way of calibrating your tastes against hers: as I&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/www.steelypips.org\/weblog\/2002\/10\/gorey_edward_am.php\">said before<\/a>, I find Gorey&#8217;s art considerably more than mildly unsettling, so a lot of the ways Wilkin&#8217;s essay was useful to me was crystallizing the ways I didn&#8217;t agree with her, that is, didn&#8217;t have the same reactions. But it did a very good job of pointing out some characteristics of Gorey&#8217;s art that I would not have consciously identified and describing the breadth of Gorey&#8217;s work and some of his influences.<\/p>\n<p>Between the essay and the images, I now have a short list of Gorey works that I want to see in their entirety:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><cite>The Raging Tide; or, The Black Doll&#8217;s Imbroglio<\/cite>, which features &#8220;battered stuffed toys&#8221; in &#8220;ambiguous settings, simultaneously indoors and out,&#8221; and whose captions are things like: &#8220;No. 18. There&#8217;s no going to town in a bathtub. If you want to get back to the story, turn to 16. If you would like to tour the Villa Amnesia, turn to 23,&#8221; where of course the pages in question have nothing obvious to do with the text;<\/li>\n<li><cite>[The Untitled Book]<\/cite>, &#8220;in which a fierce battle between real and invented creatures is elucidated by such captions as &#8216;Ipsifendus&#8217; and &#8216;Quoggenzocker,&#8217; ending with an enigmatic &#8216;Hip, hop, hoo&#8221;; and<\/li>\n<li><cite>The Haunted Tea-Cosy<\/cite>, a parody of <cite>A Christmas Carol<\/cite> in which &#8220;Scrooge becomes a generic parsimonious recluse, confronted by a multilimbed insect, the Bahhum Bug, whose role is &#8216;to diffuse the interests of didacticism.'&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The plates include some unpublished images, alternate covers and studies for later drawings; drawings that Gorey did for other authors; theater designs; and really cool illustrated envelopes he sent to his mother (never before printed). Oddly, nothing from <cite>The Curious Sofa<\/cite> is included, though it&#8217;s mentioned in the essay and presumably they would have had access (since other works also reprinted in <cite>Amphigorey<\/cite> are included). I can only assume that the exhibition didn&#8217;t want the controversy of displaying &#8220;pornographic&#8221; works, though they&#8217;re nothing of the sort.<\/p>\n<p>This would be particularly good for library collections, but those who like Gorey&#8217;s work should definitely take a look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I received a copy of Elegant Engimas: The Art of Edward Gorey through LibraryThing&#8217;s Early Reviewers program, a shamefully long time ago, and was very pleasantly surprised when I received it to discover it was basically a hardcover exhibition catalog, in other words, much nicer than I was vaguely expecting. As that may suggest, there &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2009\/09\/wilkin_gorey\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Wilkin, Karen: <cite>Elegant Engimas: The Art of Edward Gorey<\/cite>&#8220;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,9],"tags":[227,437],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-non-fiction","tag-gorey-edward","tag-wilkin-karen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2537,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions\/2537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}