Edward Gorey was born on February 22, 1925. Among other things, he is remembered as a writer and illustrator of odd books. A little nonsense here. A tragic story there. Tiny monsters in every picture over there. Alphabet books as well. He enjoyed using pen names that were anagrams of his own. Here are some of them: Ogdred Weary, Eduard Blutig, Mrs. Regera Dowdy, Raddory Gewe, Dogear Wryde, E. G. Deadworry, Edward Pig, Wardore Edgy, Madame Groeda Weyrd, and D. Awdrey-Gore. He died April 15, 2000.
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For this review on an Edward Gorey book I am going to make up a new term. Hopefully some day it will become famous and as a result I will be the most famous monster in the entire world (instead of being just one of the most famous). Here is the term. You should use this term at least three times today to help me spread it everywhere.
“Extra-Content Content”
I define “extra-content content” as content outside of what is in front of your face (which is the obvious content).
Before we get to the term, what can I say about Edward Gorey? He is one of my heroes. I said that one day before I was aware it was coming out of my mouth, and I know that it’s true. Oftentimes there are a lot of heavy words thrown about when people try to talk about Gorey’s works. One of these words is “Surrealist,” which I think should be modified to “Dadaist” in that Edward Gorey seemed to delight in creating art by rules. Something Gorey once said about his methods ended up being the title of a book about him. Answering a question about a book he had written, he said “I put them in order of ascending peculiarity.” If that isn’t Dada, then I don’t know what is.
The Glorious Nosebleed is one of my favorite works by Edward Gorey. I am also partial to The Curious Sofa, The Hapless Child, The Gilded Bat, and The Loathsome Couple. Unlike Glorious Nosebleed, these four books all follow a roughly narrative form, with a beginning, middle, and end. For example The Gilded Bat follows the trajectory (and eventual end) of a ballerina’s career and life.
Books like The Glorious Nosebleed are not narrative and instead follow a formula. The Glorious Nosebleed is an alphabet book. It is a collection of 26 couplets consisting of a simple sentence and an illustration. Every sentence contains a word that starts with a letter of the alphabet, and the letters progress A, B, C, and so on. As you read the book, each sentence is viewed on the left page of the open book, and each illustration appears on the right.
The real genius of The Glorious Nosebleed lies in the “extra-content content,” which can be found in the language Gorey used and the details of the illustrations. Here are some examples:
For the letter J: “She toyed with her beads Jadedly.” In this couplet, Gorey presents us with a man and a woman. The woman is reclining odalisque-like on a divan. She is wearing a white dress and toying with a long string of pearls around her neck. The man is in what appears to be a gargantuan floor-length smoking jacket. He is carrying what looks like a (presumably roasted) bear’s head on a platter. The teeth of the roast are bared. The woman is looking away, bored. The “extra-content content” is where the magic begins. What is the relationship between the man and the woman? Did he slay the bear himself as a gift to her? Would she really want a roasted bear head? Does she toy with the man the way she toys with her beads?
For the letter Q: “She let go of it Quickly.” A woman in a jaunty outfit perched on a rock wall in a field is dropping what looks like a snake. Again, there is barely any emotion in the face. Again, there is a lot of “extra-content content” in this Gorey couplet. Is that a snake? Did it just bite her? Is she poisoned now? (I like to think it did and she is.) She is the antithesis of Cleopatra. She looks nothing like Cleopatra. Did Edward Gorey think of Cleopatra when he wrote and illustrated this?
By far my favorite is the letter X: “The piece was sung eXcruciatingly.” Here Gorey presents us with three wilting audience members in fancy dress, sitting behind an enormous, wild plant. The ladies are both wearing opera gloves (I love opera gloves!) The lady in front is clasping her hands as if begging. The floor is tessellated in a loud op-art pattern. The “extra-content content”? I don’t know about anybody else, but I can hear the singing just by looking at this scene. It is pure genius.
The last couplet is “He wrote it all down Zealously.” The illustration is of a man who is obviously Edward Gorey himself, with his beard, glasses, and signature enormous fur coat.
Dreamybee, Jackie (Literary Escapism), and Louise all wondered about the title, The Glorious Nosebleed, and if there was some meaning in it.
The front cover of the book shows a miserable woman draped on her back over some large rocks. She is holding a handkerchief to her face to staunch the flow of blood from her nose. Standing next to her are two men looking off into the distance. The title and Edward Gorey’s name are etched into the clouds. The back cover shows a white dog in the same scene from the front cover, presumably after the people have gone. The dog is sniffing the spot where the nosebleed victim was resting her head. I think that the title and cover might be the best way to describe this book: It happens. It is meaningless. There is something essential spilled. Then it ends. Maybe you will never have another one like it.
The Glorious Nosebleed - By Edward Gorey – 1974
The Glorious Nosebleed on Amazon
P.S. Here is more information about Edward Gorey – Wikipedia, a documentary in progress and the Edward Gorey House.
P.P.S. This post is part of a Weekly Geeks Meme.
Yes I know, I know, I said that Mad Tea was going to be about monsters, but really nothing says “Mad Tea” more than a hauntingly beautiful doll with a thousand yard stare wearing an Edwardian tea dress. MAD TEA stands for Monster Art Dolls Toy Etsy Artists. It’s a stretch I know. See this page for details about MAD TEA.
Today I want to talk about these amazing dolls that are available on Black-eyed Suzie’s Etsy page. These could be tragic heroines from an Edward Gorey tale, or maybe an aristocratic lady with a bad case of the vapours.
The dolls are OOAK, which is short of One-Of-A-Kind. They are constructed from paperclay, which is a form of papier mache. The arms have wire in them and can be posed.
The artist can work from photos to make custom dolls. These take 4-6 weeks to make. Black-eyed Suzie can also make accessories. Simple ones are free, but more complicated ones like parasols, pets, or steampunk goggles will cost you. Black-eyed Suzie also has a Typepad page that you should definitely visit if you like her work.
Well, that’s it for this week’s installment of MAD TEA. See you next week for more Monster Art Doll Toy Etsy Artists.
I’m excited because it’s only once in a great while that I discover an author who I want to follow. By “follow” I don’t mean it in the traditional monster-wise sense of the word as in “to stalk, with the intent of rending limb from limb” or even the new more socially-conscious but still monster-specific “to appear suddenly as if from nowhere and bury a hatchet into after having pretended to be dead or no longer interested.” (How, I ask, did the world get so complicated?) To get back to the topic – by “follow” I mean to scan new release announcements and news for her name like I do with Susanna Clarke. I felt that way about Kelly Link about a quarter of the way through this book. Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link:
The wizards of Perfil are lazy and useless. They hate to climb stairs and they never listen when you talk. They don’t answer questions because their ears are full of beetles and wax and their faces are wrinkled and hideous. Marsh fairies live deep in the wrinkles of the faces of the wizards of Perfil and the marsh fairies ride around in the bottomless canyons of the wrinkles on saddle-broken fleas who grow fat grazing on magical, wizardly blood. The wizards of Perfil spend all night scratching their fleabites and sleep all day. I’d rather be a scullery maid than a servant of the invisible, doddering, nearly blind, flea-bitten, mildewy, clammy-fingered, conceited marsh-wizards of Perfil.
This description of the mysterious Wizards of Perfil is so many flavors of awesome I don’t even know where to start. Pretty Monsters is a collection of nine stories by Kelly Link. The target audience of this book is young adults, although I think that in most of the stories, there’s enough here that an adult could get into them as well. As it usually goes with collections, there is enough variety that most people will find something they like.
The Wrong Grave - The wrong grave sets the tone of the collection very well. This being: Whatever you were expecting when you picked up this book, you were mistaken. This story, like all the rest of the stories in the book, is wildly imaginative, entertaining, and unconventional. Although the story begins as a portrait of puppy love gone awry, and seems to be about a boy who is making some serious mistakes, it ends up being more of a tale about how people change and grow over time, and how that process is mysterious. This amazingly short, very simple story is built on a very deep truth and has something important to say about the nature of love and humanity (not that I would know much about that because I’m A MONSTER.) I bet that sounds like I’m overstating the case, but after reading this story my expectations for the book went many notches higher.
The Wizards of Perfil – Another really amazing story about the nature of love and our personal interactions. This story is insanely imaginative, and reads very much like how Jorge Luis Borges might update an authentic Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Two of the reviewers on the back cover of this book compare Link to Borges, and I think the comparison is fair.
Magic for Beginners – Also very reminiscent of Borges, but even more so of Douglas Adams, in that it is endlessly imaginative. Each page of this story has several ideas that could each be their own story. Magic for Beginners is about some teenage fans of a TV show that may or may not be real. The story includes a poignant teenage love triangle and the marital troubles of the protagonist’s parents. Both relationships are presented with the complexity and depth that they would have in real life. Add to this an unending imaginative discourse on the TV show and its characters, and you’ve got Magic for Beginners.
The Faery Handbag – Another contemporary take on a classic subject. This was good, but I think it could have used some more humor, or some more darkness.
The Specialist’s Hat – The scariest story of the lot, this is a ghost story in the best tradition of M.R. James. It is a short, sweet, and richly complex tale about the mysterious fate of two little girls who are sisters. The reader is left having to make up their mind who the real ghosts in the story were, who is lost, and who is saved. I loved this story. It’s the best thing I’ve read so far this year, and could end up being the champion of 2009. As a bonus, this story can be imagined with Edward Gorey characters and settings.
Monster – A very strangely conventional but absurd summer camp monster tale. Complete with bullying kids and lots of blood.
The Surfer – Cyberpunk dystopian cautionary tale of a plague-ridden future but populated with teenagers and a UFO abduction paperback guru. A tad slow but still interesting and with a wholly unexpected ending.
The Constable of Abal – Again another complex and fascinating tale about the nature of love, fate, and how we perceive one another. Especially how these perceptions can change or how the people we love can possess hidden potentialities. A witch/con-artist mother and her daughter, both of whom can summon and trap ghosts, are forced to leave town when the mother murders a handsome constable.
Pretty Monsters – It seems like in a collection like this, there will always be a story you don’t like. Like the rest of the stories in the book, Pretty Monsters is built on an interesting idea. Maybe this one just wasn’t my cup of tea. Anyhow…
The real strength of this book and Link’s writing seems to be about the relationships between the characters. As in real life, not all of these relationships are peaceful or even happy (although some are.) Link portrays all of them with an unflinching eye and the result is stories with emotional depth, warmth, pain, and even real terror. Add to this an amazing imagination, monsters, ghosts, dead girls, and magical hats, and you’ve got a real winner.
Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5 (if you call vague teenaged confusion about romance “erotic”)
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 4 out of 5
Final result: I thought Pretty Monsters was an awesome book. I’m definitely going to look for Link in the future, and am going back to her last two books to see what I missed.
Have you read this book? Did you immediately think of Edward Gorey when you read The Specialist’s Hat? Am I totally dysfunctional? I’m still bewitched, bothered, and love-sick over the Beldam, Coraline’s Other Mother.
Pretty Monsters – Kelly Link – Illustrations by Shaun Tan – Viking Juvenile – 2008
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link on Amazon
Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. Hopefully next time I review a nice juicy horror novel with loads of Weird Erotic Tension. I’m working on it! See you next time!
I took a break last week from the Weekly Geeks. Mostly because the topic was social issues. Social issues are difficult for monsters because very often they lead to angry mobs of villagers with pitchforks and torches. So one minute you feel like you’re advancing the rights of monsters everywhere, and the next you’re climbing up the side of the Empire State Building with Fay Wray in one hand, and swatting down airplanes with the other. Not that there was anything wrong with Fay Wray. Quite the opposite. It’s the airplanes that worry a monster. And the torches. And the pitchforks. So… Without further ado, here is today’s quote!
Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.” ~Edward Gorey (Author, Artist 1925 – 2000)
See my favorite Edward Gorey couplet here.
Fhtagn Spoken Here.
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