JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 927 [Part of the Fantastic Titles series]
Squidward:
What's that horrible smell?! [sees steam coming out of SpongeBob's window]
Is Patrick thinking again?
Patrick: [sticking
his head out of the window] I'm making art!
Squidward:
Patrick, it smells like something crawled into your brain and died!
Patrick:
That's the creative process at work!
forming a pretty but stench-ridden
experience.
And so to with experiencing the found, unintentional absurd--or
the naïve surreal—in printed material like some of the examples below. Their title pages can be experienced as art
in a way, at least today, so far removed from their original meaning and
context that the words float like disembodied arks of meaning looking for
whatever piece of land/meaning that they bump into. Sometimes their titles are the bizarre-ity,
masking a mundane, pedestrian contents; much of the time the title and contents
emanate the stench of lost meaning through and through.
“… ‘Why us thy mind’, he said,
‘so far away, unlike its usual self,
What are thy wits about, where have they fled?’
—Virgil yelling at Dante for asking a dumb question outside the City of Dis,. Inferno, XI, 76-78
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