© 2018 lcmt
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Thursday, March 1, 2018
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Ancient Quincuncial Networks
Jainne Lummrey was a postgraduate student at Newcastle University, studying the history and literature of early modern Britain, when she discovered Geranium Lake Properties in the British comic magazine Viz. (GLP appeared irregularly in Viz from 1987 to 1991, according to a deal with John Brown that was independent from Yost’s agreements with his other comics syndication services.) Jainne wrote to Yost after the “Ancient Quincuncial Networks” panel was published in May 1990. Thus began an ardent correspondence that lasted for nine years, until Jainne Lummrey’s death in 1999. Yost last letter arrived at Jainne’s London address two days after the police discovered her body. The letter was sent from New Zealand, postmarked the day before Yost disappeared after boarding a ferry from Auckland to Rangitoto Island.
A Tale of Congenial Confusion Between Bronze, Iron, Calico and Velveteen
No-one noticed that this story was unfinished until five years later, when Yost published “The Conclusion To A Tale of Congenial Confusion Between Bronze, Iron, Calico and Velveteen”.
Begriffsschrift
Beriwa Tholdry is one of the Four Twilight Kingdoms in Geranium Lake Properties. It has been almost universally accepted among fans of GLP that the names of the Twilight Kingdoms are anagrams of friends or relatives of Wm. Yost, who had his own rules for making the anagrams he used in GLP comics. Most of the rules he kept secret, I know only two of them. He never used the letter “p” except under special circumstances, and he always made four letter changes. Four was a number of extraordinary significance for Yost.
One of my friends over at Ello, comandantechispas, a true master of anagrams, came up with a notable solution to the “Beriwa Tholdry” anagram: “writable hydro”. Writable water as a concept seems to me an entirely suitable (and perhaps even essential) element in the GLP universe.
© 2018 lcmt
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Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Monday, January 8, 2018
Friday, December 29, 2017
Firemare
The shape of the horse's head comes from an image I found online of a sculpture by John Lopez.
© 2017 lcmt
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Sunday, December 17, 2017
A Most Sacred Round Song
A prayer to the patron divinity of travelers, a plea to unblock the flow of water, i.e.,”the heart-stamping sea”.
Turlehide Whales Stranded
I had a little help from James Joyce and Max Ernst with this one. The title was lifted from Ulysses, and I stole a bit of texture from an image of this painting.
© 2017 Lin Tarczynski
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Saturday, December 16, 2017
Rainwater Mama
Yost often challenged other artists to make Geranium Lake Propeties comics. For a shy eccentric, he could be surprising brazen when inviting people to participate in the GLP universe. Al Hischfeld, Saul Steinberg, Charles Addams, Shel Silverstein (who all declined) were among the many Yost asked to contribute a GLP panel.
Today's post is by Gina Garey, who worked as an inker and colorist for Marvel Comics in the 70's and 80's, when she was married to editor Fred Garey. She started her career at the age of 17, painting animation cels. Her divorce from Garey ended her employment with Marvel, but she immediately found a job at DC Comics, where she worked for five years, then she quit comics altogether. After that she dedicated herself to making zines and mail art. She came out of professional retirement in 1993 to work with Vertigo Comics until 1996. She died in 2001 of cancer at the age of 72. She always signed her zine and mail art as "uggi". At Marvel, DC and Vertigo she was always credited as Gina Garey, even after her divorce. Her legal name was Ursula Regina Garey Iversen.
GLP historian Michael Veerduer has a theory that "hrera dachre" was derived from four names of democratically-elected leaders who were assassinated by CIA, but he has not been able to decode it and tell us the four names.
© 2017 lcmt
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Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Patchy Kettle's Lantern
Today is Lantern Day, which honors Patchy Kettle, the most merry of the Jackalopian gods, and the favorite god of jackalope children. A lantern is Patchy Kettle's commonest symbol, an accoutrement he carries both night and day. The description of the lantern differs from story to story, it is sometimes made of copper or bronze or rusted iron, or carved from chalcedony, or constructed of bones and wire, using chicken bones. The light has been provided by sheep tallow candles, or fueled by pumpkin seed oil or urine or salt. People often misunderstand the lamp of Patchy Kettle, confusing it with the lamp of Diogenes, who lit his lamp in the daylight to search for an honest man. Patchy Kettle had this to say about honest men:
The problem with "calls for the severest and most indignant repudiation on the part of all honest men" is that "honest men" was and will always be a mythical entity that was of no use to anyone except liars. Abandon your belief in "honest men", and continue to resist your desire to revive that belief. Only then can you ask yourself, "What can be accomplished?"
This quote comes from the Esornom Imaginaria, one of the two most popular books for tales about Patchy Kettle. The Esornom Imaginaria is divided into five books, this passage can be found in the Book of Ornasein, which is about the adventures of Patchy Kettle and a young poet-monk named Ornasein, who is the narrator. Ornasein tells us he is the duke of a rich province and he has many good wives and a horde of children. Many citizens admire and respect him, and few vilify him. His book is a fond reminiscence of a time when he was young, poor, mostly drunk and carefree. He remembers drinking so much that he is amazed at how his memories can be so vivid and full of detail. His stories have plenty of adventure, romance, horror, ironic twists, plus good advice from Patchy Kettle to his young companion. Ornasein confesses that he ignored all the advice, and thus became a rich, successful man who is miserable and powerless, crushed out of existence by his obligations to his wealth, family and nation. No longer human, he has become a machine that serves the whims and needs of other people. At the end of his book, he gets drunk one night, packs a knapsack with cheese, buffalo jerky and almond cakes, and runs away from everything. We learn in the other four books of the Esornom Imaginaria that Ornasein died years later in a state of bliss.
© 2017 lcmt
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Thursday, November 2, 2017
Invoking the Name of the Mystery as Elilim and Kochavim
For Catholics, today is All Soul's Day, overtaken among Mexicans and hip moderns by the traditions of the Day of the Dead. Elilkocha is the name given to this holiday by jackalopes, who honor the day by drinking coffee and consuming brown butter cake made with bourbon or rum, preferably in their favorite diners. If you want to be really traditional, you will add some coconut liqueur to your coffee, which ruins the coffee and tastes nothing like coconut.
Jackalopes are unabashed thieves of culture, and they stole two Hebrew words for their holiday, Elilim, which means "false gods", and Kochavim, "stars". I mentioned to comandantechispas that jackalopes have a saying, "All names are the name of God." They also have another saying, "All gods are false gods." Jack Loki, the sometimes protagonist of Geranium Lake Properties, explains it like this, "Jackalopes are, by nature and every inclination, atheists, and they consider the various god concepts as metaphors. Metaphors are essentially lies that make facts more poetic, more epic, more mythic. Metaphors make a better story, a good yarn, or a lesson memorable as a parable or fable. If you want to celebrate Elilkocha, use this day to remind yourself not to scorn the good stories and lessons found in the religions of gods you think are false."
The other half of the Elilkocha honors stars as the creators of all life--of all of everything, actually. Patron saint? Carl Sagan, of course.
PS. Diners are sacred places in America, don't you think? Also, there is a larger invocation of this work.
© 2017 lcmt
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Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Periphery View with a Betokened Apparition
...and finally, the GLP Halloween offering for 2017. This comic is based on one of my visual poems, "The Jolly Crowded House Dream", which you can view in its entirety as a poster or as a t-shirt. I will continue to offer these kinds of products as long as it's fun for me to see my visual poetry as apparel on computer models. The various posters, art prints, mini-skirts, mugs, etc. are not limited editions according to a strict definition of the term, but if anyone purchased something, they would own a one-of-a-kind or extremely limited edition by circumstances. The circumstances mostly depend on my patience for the lessons in humility I receive from these types of online marketplaces. They are valuable lessons, I guess, but not materially remunerative.
© 2017 lcmt
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A Malicious Tea Drinker With Vast Fingers and Tall Eyelashes
This is the comic panel that inspired Gralie Bohe to create the Black Scorpion Cafe in her novel, The Boy in the Yellow Leatherette Portmanteau, which is an imaginary novel about Wm. Yost, the imaginary creator of Geranium Lake Properties. The owner of the Black Scorpion Cafe is a minor deity in the universal pantheon, albeit a major one for jackalopes. He is described in this excerpt from The Boy in the YLP:
"The entity that currently called himself Aliquando Jade Irwin, currently manifesting as a tall, skinny, dark-skinned man, stood at the side of the Pacific Coast Highway as a eucalyptus might stand, an alien, an invader, but at home in the landscape. He wore a business suit, which hung loosely on his slightly stooped frame. Despite being cleaned and pressed, the suit had the appearance of casual clothes, its pale color seemed tropical. The color was called Apricot Ice by the manufacturer, but it was more cream than apricot or ice. The ensemble was completed with a white dress shirt under a black bolo tie, and if the shirt did not dazzle, it was only because the overcast had not yet burned off. (The day would later become unrelentingly sunny but not too warm, another day of perfect weather on the northern end of the central California coast.) The entity that called himself Aliquando Jade Irwin (and tried unsuccessfully to get people to call him Aljair for short) was barefoot, his shoes tied together by their laces and slung over one shoulder. Slung over the opposite shoulder by a wide leather strap was an acoustic guitar, its body finished with an iridescent green surface trimmed in abalone and ormulu.
Aliquando Jade Irwin was a literal child of the Sea, yet currently he felt himself most closely identified with savannas, grasslands and deserts. He did not worry too much about his transitive nature--most of the old gods had highly-developed talents for adaptability. Aliquando Jade Irwin's divine origin had come with an embarrasingly brief job description, leaving a lot to the imagination. He had been one of 11 children, and his power was mastery over violent storms. That was it, that was his entire origin story. He had been thankful he had been given his own name at least (but that had never stopped him from changing it many times since the Beginning). In his early existence, he had met many fearsome entities who were nameless, or had to share their name with a group, or worse yet, with a concept. That circumstance, so unfotunate for others, had turned out to be a blessing of sorts for Aliquando Jade Irwin. He had established a nice little business for a while, creating and selling names to the Nameless Ones. He was convinced that his exhorbitant fees had been a validation of his genius for realizing the need for good nomenclature, and he had provided sound, durable products. However, eventually, one of the many organized forces for the Preservation of the Inviolable Rules had caught up with him, and had discouraged, with totally uncalled-for punitive action, his efforts to improve the lives of some of the lesser avatars. Apparently he had been messing up the Mysteries."
I was amused to discover that The Boy in the YLP has inspired a few people to write fanfiction about it. I find this appropriately recursive because Gralie Bohe's novel is essentially a piece of fanfiction about Yost and Geranium Lake Properties. Here's a quote from a fanfiction piece, "Striped Tea and Owl Sandwiches" (Aliquando Jade Irwin/Joe Baluende), by GreenTigerLily8304, in which the author brings Aliquando Jade Irwin into the Internet Age:
"He was philosophical about it now, but for a few centuries his pain and resentment had been worthy of legend. He had in fact wrote several legends about his suffering, but his book had never found a significant following, so he had stuffed it into his extra-dimensional drawer with his many other failed endeavors. Since then, he had managed to absorb a few helpful tips from the lectures of some of the most popular philosophers of the ancient worlds, and nowadays he browsed YouTube to catch up with the more modern stuff. Lately he had been thinking about taking out his book and re-writing it. Since the invention of the internet, all the old gods were getting new temples. Even before the internet, his mother had received an auspicious Dungeons and Dragons franchise. Now she was huge. (Huge again, really--her tail had once defined the Milky Way--not too many gods get huger than that.) Aliquando Jade Irwin, aka Ekchuajumudabrutu, was thinking more modestly about Nanowrimo opportunities. Or even fanfiction."
Second version of the logo for the Black Scorpion Cafe:
© 2017 lcmt
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Tuesday, October 24, 2017
The Stele of 14-Shull Min, from Izabal, Guatemala
When melissadawn showed me these N52 magnets I started digging through my image files, looking for this particular GLP comic. Her image had reminded me of a note from Ha Kim Ngoc, Yost's assistant and occasional collaborator, about a puzzling inscription. "Drawn by magnets" had been written by Yost in pencil, in one of his most easily recognized forms of handwriting, on the back of the original drawing for this comic.
The original art for Geranium Lake Properties is in an inaccessible place, spirited away by the Italian media corporation that claims ownership of Yost's intellectual property, but I have a nearly complete set of images made from high quality transparencies of Yost's drawings. This incomparable resource was entrusted to me by Ha Kim Ngoc. Along with the image library, Ha Kim Ngoc gave me copies of her notes about the creative history and physical characteristics of the drawings.
© 2017 lcmt
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