A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don’t think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world…etc. It has that look.
EDWARD GOREY'S ELEPHANT HOUSE
Whether Come By Epiplectic Bicycle with broken spoke or by willowdale handcar, Enter all Doubtful Guests, Hapless Children, Beastly Babies, Wuggly Umps, Gilded Bats, Osbick Birds, Deranged Cousins, Abandoned Socks, Lost Lions, Dancing Cats, Neglected Murderesses, Loathsome Couples, Prune People, Unknown Vegetables, Headless Busts, Welcome to This Deadly edward Blotter where this gorey party never dwindles.
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Neither mine nor other people’s prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.
Mr Oswell’s shock at finding them together in the bathtub having proved fatal, Larry and Freddie were free to be married by a sympathetic clergyman in Niantic, Connecticut.
(one of Edward Gorey’s Happy Endings in National Lampoon, March 1973)
(via leanonstephen)
I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven’t read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty…
1 year ago | 23 notes | Reblog |
reading, cats, old age, death, aging, ageing, books, edward gorey, letter, floating worlds,
reading, cats, old age, death, aging, ageing, books, edward gorey, letter, floating worlds,
Man on Horseback by Gerard ter Borch, 1634
…”Thank you for the Xerox of the C. S. Lewis article; you are remarkably thoughtful. Also for the Gerard ter Borch “Cavalier.” It put me in mind of a slightly curious idea I had for a visual anthology in which all the subjects would have their backs to the viewer; I have several Japanese prints of poets, and at least one of a puppy in this position, and I’m sure a quite respectable book could be got together from all times and places.” - Edward Gorey, 1968
![I’m all right (this is only sepia ink, not blood), but I’m so distracted from?/by? drawing that I just can’t cope with anything else for the present, however long that is.
O the horror of it all….(I think this is a shade more poetic than ‘Oh, the….etc.’)
The Penguin Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the great Dismal Works.
Excuse handwriting.
Yr friend, E.G.
[a letter from Edward Gorey to Peter F. Neumeyer dated February 2, 1969]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu6za2n73C1qhtqgho1_400.jpg)
I’m all right (this is only sepia ink, not blood), but I’m so distracted from?/by? drawing that I just can’t cope with anything else for the present, however long that is.
O the horror of it all….(I think this is a shade more poetic than ‘Oh, the….etc.’)
The Penguin Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the great Dismal Works.
Excuse handwriting.
Yr friend, E.G.
[a letter from Edward Gorey to Peter F. Neumeyer dated February 2, 1969]
Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer in 1968 on a buoy in Barnstable Harbor on Cape Cod.
Edward St. John Gorey by Don Bachardy, graphite on paper, 1974
We did I think talk about your feeling of it’s fun to be square, and while I’ll go along with the Borges-like ramifications, I don’t think I was the one who thought it up. In the past my justification for my self-conscious oddness of appearance (by now I figure this is the way I look, and it would not only be more self-conscious but also uncomfortable to change) was that people would think their impression of oddity came simply from the way I looked, and eventually become (hopefully) pleasantly surprised that I was not nearly as much of a nut as I looked, and was really quite ordinary, which is also true I think. It seemed preferable to people thinking ‘Well, he looked perfectly ordinary and then it became apparent there was something wrong with his head…’ Of course now practically everybody to my middle aged way of thinking looks too peculiar for words, and only very infrequently attractive at the same time.
Apropos of nothing at all except that it has been on my mind and I think I had better say it because it accounts for a good deal of my behaviour. There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do, so that I tend to become unnerved when these curious ideas are proved to be not really true because someone (in this case you) has responded to something I have said or done just as if I were an actual person the same as you (especially) or anyone else. Some of it is, I guess, just the worst sorts of arrogance and irresponsibility , but not all of it, as I really don’t think I exist a lot of the time, so I’m asking you to bear with it, me, whatever, for the sake of what?—friendship I suppose, which I want to be capable of, which is obviously not enough. More brains might help, but enough unseemly remarks for eight o’clock in the morning and the shivering in pyjama bottoms syndrome.
The world may think it idiotic,
Nor care at all we’re symbiotic,
But I will say at once and twice:
I find it nice. I find it nice.
Nor care at all we’re symbiotic,
But I will say at once and twice:
I find it nice. I find it nice.
Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following ‘because’ in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.
The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it’s the way I tell, is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.
STORY FOR SARA: WHAT HAPPENED TO A LITTLE GIRL
by Alphonse Allais put into English and with drawings by Edward Gorey
First edition: New York: Albondocani Press, 1971. Yellow wrappers with black pictorial stamping. Limited to 300 numbered and 26 lettered copies signed by Edward Gorey. A statement of first edition appears as part of the colophon.
donutsandcoffees: Gashlycrumb Tinies.
