{"id":4077,"date":"2021-01-08T14:47:54","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T19:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=4077"},"modified":"2021-01-08T16:56:21","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T21:56:21","slug":"krazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=4077","title":{"rendered":"Krazy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I often have the experience of being inspired by something I read or see to order a book (used via Amazon, most often), but when it arrives I don’t recall the details of the inspiration, having by then moved on to yet more inspirations… Today’s case in point is Louis Kronenberger’s Quality: Its Image in the Arts<\/b> (1969), which turns out to have a very interesting chapter on Photography by Walker Evans (which I had read about a couple of weeks ago in Svetlana Alpers’ Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch<\/b> (2020), and was, as I now reconstruct it, the source of the inspiration to order). The Kronenberger book has chapters by a variety of mid-20th century luminaries (Virgil Thompson on Music, Gilbert Seldes on Popular Arts, Milton Glaser on Graphics, Ada Louise Huxtable on Architecture, Eliza beth Hardwick on Literature…), some of which are a bit musty a half century later (though their points of view are memorable to those of us who were there then). There are lots of wonderful illustrations, some very familiar and others quite new to me. One that especially delights me is this from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, ca. 1922 (that is, nearly a century ago):


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Now, Herriman himself is an interesting character, subject of the biography Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White<\/b><\/a> (2016), and “a visionary whose influence helped shape popular culture for decades after his death… you may never look at the zigzag on Charlie Brown\u2019s t-shirt again without remembering that it was Charles Schulz\u2019s tribute to the Navaho designs that recurred in Herriman\u2019s work…” (from the Amazon blurb). I retrieved it from the Auxiliary Library in the barn and started reading it again.<\/p>\n

And Herriman drew the cartoons for Archy & Mehitabel (written by Don Marquis):
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\ni have had my ups and downs
\nbut wotthehell wotthehell
\nyesterday sceptres and crowns
\nfried oysters and velvet gowns
\nand today i herd with bums
\nbut wotthehell wotthehell
\ni wake the world from sleep
\nas i caper and sing and leap
\nwhen i sing my wild free tune
\nwotthehell wotthehell
\nunder the blear eyed moon
\ni am pelted with cast off shoon
\nbut wotthehell wotthehell<\/p>\n

\n(and see What Kittens?<\/a> for more from A&M)<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I often have the experience of being inspired by something I read or see to order a book (used via Amazon, most often), but when it arrives I don’t recall the details of the inspiration, having by then moved on to yet more inspirations… Today’s case in point is Louis Kronenberger’s Quality: Its Image in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4077"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4082,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4077\/revisions\/4082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}