Disgressed

I’ve been doing a refurbishment of Conscious Entities recently; a nice new widgetised theme that is fully up-to-date and looks good; a new dynamic blogroll which is far better than a dull set of title links, and the addition of a front-page display of recent comments, all good stuff. In addition, I will now gradually bring over all the old content into the blog, in effect sweeping up some of the mess left over from when I actually moved to WordPress. Some old posts that have been absent ever since then will eventually reappear and then I may be in the position where I can use redirects so that the old hand-coded html stuff is no longer seen. I can’t get rid of those pages altogether because some of them remain among the most popular pages on the site.

Sorry about that geeky outburst; what I meant to explain was how I’ve gradually become fond of WordPress.  When I first contemplated blogifying the site I knew very little about the different options and I could easily have gone for one of the other options; but I’m glad I didn’t.

One of the things I like about the internet is the way you can get into the technical aspects gradually. It was a revelation to me when I first discovered that you could see the code for any page on the internet, copy it, muck about with it, slap it back in your browser and see what happened. This kind of idle tinkering was how I picked up enough html to start cobbling a site together by hand (and how I completely failed to pick up any knowledge or concern for prescribed standards).

WordPress sort of facilitates a similar gradual approach. You can use a hosted blog and never look under the bonnet; but if you want to host your own and choose a theme, you can do that too.  You really have to add your own masthead graphic. Then the temptation to fire up the editor and change a few variables, colours, fonts, spacing, and so on, is irresistible.  You can do a surprising amount without great difficulty; you randomly lob in a php file from a different template and lo: it works!  Let’s just snip some of that code there that looks as if it does this and see if it will do that…

Sorry. What really amused me yesterday that there was a particular feature I wanted and I couldn’t see how to do it. I started googling and visiting likely places for advice, and it turned out some woman had been on the forums and asked for advice on exactly the same point a year ago. She didn’t get a proper answer: I looked at the next possible place to find advice and she’d been there, too. I ended up following what must have been almost exactly the same path she had followed a year before. She got unhelpful advice, advice that was correct but not really what she wanted, and incomprehensible advice (I’m no css expert, but I’m pretty sure that some of this was actually just wrong).  At last I came across a post from her where she happily explained that now she’d found the answer – and luckily she said where.

The thing is, you can avoid techie details altogether if you like, or you can spend days writing up your own hand-crafted plugins. Or, if you’re like me, you can occasionally indulge in a little bit of fiddly customisation and then stop while it still works…

“Have you been reading the Bible?” asked Katharine suspiciously.

“Well, not reading it exactly. I was just checking a couple of things.”

“Looking for loopholes?”

“Yeah, yeah. Did  you see that they’ve found a tablet which suggests that the Ark was actually circular?”

“But that’s not in the Bible.”

“No, well I was also checking what the KJV says compared to that Crumb Genesis – you know? The comic book thing? Anyway, how did you know I was looking at the Bible?”

“I noticed it had moved.”

I got a copy of Robert Crumb’s comic-book interpretation of the Book of Genesis over Christmas; incidentally I also re-read Joseph Heller’s “God Knows” which is sort of the story of King David in the style of Catch-22.

There’s been a lot of fuss about Crumb’s version of Genesis – he’s always been popular and over the last decade or so has been taken increasingly seriously as an artist, a trend epitomised in Robert Hughes’ notorious comparison with Breughel (something Crumb himself disavowed). There’s always been an undercurrent of dissent from those who object to his nastier images, so maybe a Biblical subject is calculated to add respectability, though this being Genesis there was bound to be plenty of sex and violence.

I do think Crumb outclasses most of his peers in talent, style, and hard work, and it shows again here, with some striking images. He points out his own strict adherence to the material; not for him the interpolated passages and omissions of other cartoon Bibles. Even the ‘begats’ are dealt with in little groups of portraits.  But reviews sounded a bit disappointed, and I can see why: overall, I’m afraid Genesis exposes Crumb’s limitations more clearly than they have perhaps been exposed before:  in two main ways.

First, while doing things straight is a virtue, lack of imagination is not; but some of the most noteworthy challenges offered by Genesis are sadly muffed. “And there was light” – what could an artist do with that? Crumb gives us a white blob on a black background. The Tower of Babel? A realistic spiral minaret in a low-lying Middle-eastern town. Yes, realism is good, but if you weren’t going to do anything more than this with it, why bother?

Second, it becomes disappointingly clear that at the end of the day Crumb is a cartoonist; albeit a cartoonist who can rise to painstaking bits of graphic art at times. The mark of a cartoonist is that instead of drawing things, he represents them; this particular squiggle represents a nose, that one an ear. One result is that cartoonists sometimes struggle to make their characters look different. Here I’m afraid a lot of the beardy old men are at times hard to distinguish, and the same goes for many of the stout, big-breasted women. Fair’s fair; Crumb conscientiously tries to throw in a thin woman (Hagar) or one with unusual cheekbones once or twice, but for the most part we are dealing with small variations on the well-known Crumb Ideal Woman with huge legs, buttocks and breasts, (and a mouth not quite big enough for the inordinate number of teeth she seems to have). In the begats, it’s a different matter; we have a series of portraits of distinct individuals; but it seems these are copied from Hollywood stills taken from old Biblical epics. Even the range of facial expressions seems to lack something – there’s an awful lot of wide-eyed staring going on.

All in all, it seems that Crumb is not only not the Breughel de nos jours; he isn’t even the Gillray. Gillray’s Genesis – now that would have been an altogether livelier, funnier, and dare I say, probably ruder piece of work.

I remain a bit perplexed, because I’m sure Crumb could have done better. Is it, could it be, reverence that holds him back – or is it actually boredom, old age? The comparison with God Knows is instructive: Heller adopts a breezily anachronistic manner and language which, in my view anyway, work much better. Heller has King David refer in passing to Sarah, ‘who laughed and lied to God. I got a big kick out of that’. Crumb, naturally, portrays the episode in detail; we see the laughing and the lying, but it’s never half as vivid as in Heller’s David’s throwaway remark.

Maybe I’m dwelling unfairly on the negatives, and maybe it’s the high expectations that mainly cause the disappointment, but I’d still say don’t do Exodus.