Personal background: I decided to declare today to be a Sick Day and have been doing only the minimal things of life, mostly dozing fitfully in my recliner chair, wrapped up in my bathrobe. (Meanwhile, workmen did serious work on the balcony above my patio, so I had them and their ladders and noisy tools all over my patio, but I just let this activity drift by on the fringes of my consciousness.)
Mingled in with my tortured dreams were actual useful thoughts about postings — I am pretty much incapable of not plying my craft, even in the most unlikely circumstances — including a really neat follow-up to my 11/7 posting “Centennial moments in NYC”, which has a section on the The New Yorker’s first cover illustration, a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle — the gentleman now referred to as “Eustace Tilley”, who serves as a kind of mascot for the magazine. Rea Irvin’s original Tilley cover is used every year on the issue closest to the anniversary date of February 21, sometimes with a newly drawn variation in its place.
So, I wondered, what was the 2022 cover like?
Wow! Kadir Nelson’s “High Style”, with Eustace as a proud Black woman in butterfly-ornamented apparel, including a mask for the pandemic.
And then I wondered when you crossed the line from a (new) interpretation, version, or variant of an original cultural item (like the Eustace Tilley image) and moved into the territory of an abstract form, format, or pattern (something you might think of as a meme or trope — Eustace as a vehicle for, or expression of, cultural content). And I even thought of a linguistic parallel to this distinction: in playful variation of a fixed expressions vs. a snowclone.
What follows now is not a posting elaborating on all of this — I’m guessing I have maybe half an hour before I’m poleaxed by exhaustion again — but just a teaser. Please be patient.
Irvin’s original cover:
(#1)
And Kadir Nelson’s cover “High Style”:
(#2)
(about which I will have a lot to say, including discussion from an interview of Nelson by New Yorker editor Françoise Mouly about this cover, also notes about a spectacular Tilley cover by Nelson from 2016).
I expect to touch on Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and the cultural figure of Don Juan; on Jane Smiley’s amazing novel A Thousand Acres and Shakespeare’s play King Lear; and the 1954 American musical film Carmen Jones and Bizet’s opera Carmen. And of course on the natural history of snowclones (the subject of my final public presentation of my work, given on 3/14/19).
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