The Stench of Creativity: Dante, SpongeBob & Unintentionally Bizarre Titles

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!

Like St. Paul warned by Archangel Michael, and Dante by Virgil, the visions of the Hell they were touring was also stinky, though the robes they held to the noses did not prevent them from experiencing the very lofty stench of sin.  Perhaps it was something like the crawled-in-and-died stench made by the beautiful Patrick starfish from SpongeBob Squarepants, his brain’s intellectual exuda 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