Guy Davenport's Mushrooms

Roy R. Behrens © illustrations for Guy Davenport (1979)

In speaking with students, I am increasingly puzzled by how quickly and completely society's past has been effaced by popular culture. They've all read Harry Potter of course, but are totally unfamiliar with Charles Dickens or H.L. Mencken ("old white guys," as one explained). They are thoroughly acquainted with the Mario Brothers, but have never heard of the James brothers, William (the writer) and Henry (the psychologist). Not even the Marx Brothers.

Above are stages in illustrations I designed in 1979 (full-color cover and six interior collages) to complement a short story by American fiction writer, essayist and scholar Guy Davenport, with whom I was then corresponding. Each day, increasingly few can understand what the imagery refers to, since education now rarely includes such peripheral gems of history as Paolo Ucello, Albrecht Dürer, Thomas Eakins, William Hogarth's line of beauty, Stanley Spencer—and Guy Davenport.

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Guy Davenport, in "Pleasant Hill," an interview by Bernard Hoepffner—

I am a minor writer because I deal in mere frissons and adventitious insights, and with things peripheral.…

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I'm not a novelist. Paul Klee was not a muralist. My ambition is to write as little as possible, in the smallest possible space.
     All my discrete paragraphing is to force the reader to read. Most narrative prose can be read by running one's eye down the page. If I've worked one hour on a sentence, I want the reader to pay attention to it. I hope there's a web of symbols and themes running through all the stories.

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The major writers in whose shadows I grow my mushrooms are Osip Mandelstam, Donald Barthelme, Robert Walser, and Walter Savage Landor.

See also this.

Talk by Robert Abbott | Context Digital

Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa

Amazing Game Parodies

Copyright © Andy Snitker

Copyright © Aaron Van Fossen

Copyright © Mackenzie Pape

Copyright © Rhiannon Rasmussen

Copyright © Rob Bauer

Copyright © Travis Tjelmeland

A few days ago, in two sections of a course called Graphic Design I, at the University of Northern Iowa, we had an initial critique of the students' solutions to a game parody problem. The problem was essentially this: Using the rules and game components of the code-breaking game called MasterMind, design a new version of the game that has some kind of narrative theme.

Shown above are a few of the finest designs, solutions that I find amazing. Remember that this is only the second problem in the course, and in some cases the students have had very limited computer experience and even less in graphic design. 

About thirty students submitted their work, and a number of others were also very strong, but needed some further adjustment. Everyone now has an additional week to make those adjustments and/or to go back to the drawing board.

Student achievements at this level make teaching well-worth all its challenging days.

Al Capone | Jenni Lehmann

Portrait of Al Capone (2012) © Jenni Lehmann

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung, heroic or not. Jenni Lehmann chose Chicago gangster Al Capone.

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Saul Steinberg—

People who see a drawing in the New Yorker will think automatically that it's funny because it is a cartoon. If they see it in a museum, they think it is artistic; and if they find it in a fortune cookie, they think it is a prediction.

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Anon—

At a local auction, he bought an antique writing desk. When he got home, he opened it up, and a dozen people fell out. It was a missing persons bureau.

Cutting Meat with Scissors | Context

German satirist G.C. Lichtenberg, as quoted in W.H. Auden, A Certain World (New York: Viking Press, 1970), pp. 136-137—

How much depends upon the way things are presented in this world can be seen from the very fact that coffee drunk out of wine glasses is really miserable stuff, as is meat cut at the table with a pair of scissors. Worst of all, as I once actually saw, is butter spread on a piece of bread with an old but very clean razor.