Going back, adding my new "Little Prince" tag to a lot of old posts...

I find this, from my old man... before I ever met him other than in the comments.

Nick Gillespie gets soooo intellectual about the basis for judging Reason Magazine's "Everybody Draw Mohammed" contest...

... that I was forced to look up his educational background. Turns out he has a PhD in English literature. Ah, it makes too much sense to me.

Now, they got 190 entries in the contest. (I disapprove of the "Draw Mohammed" day, you should know.) I would love to see what the whole pile of drawings looked like. How many were stick figures or crude scratchings on the level of the "Draw Me" pirate? How many were loaded with embarrassingly violent or racial fantasy? I wish someone had had the foresight to film a documentary of these Reason guys cooking up their contest and then opening the various envelopes? I wonder if there was a point — one particular drawing? — when they felt bad about what they were doing.  And then something pushed them in the direction of getting super-elitist intellectual about picking the winners.

In coming to a consensus, we discussed standard concerns such as originality of vision, playfulness, a sense of proportion (both in terms of craftmanship and message), and relevance to the goals of the contest.

See? Read between the lines! What were they looking at when they reached that consensus? How many pieces of paper went into the discard pile over "craftsmanship"? How much did they laugh as they did a first cut over craftsmanship, and what did they say as they tossed these things aside? I would love to have been a fly on the wall... or a vole in the corner. "Sense of proportion"... what were the drawings that made them frame that standard? "Originality"? What percent of the artists drew Muhammad as a dog or as a guy with a turban-bomb? "Playfulness"... throw all the gruesome, gory things over there. "Relevance to the goals of the contest"... ha ha... so many of you scribblers did not get it. You thought it was about telling Muslims their prophet is evil, and not that free expression is precious. You fools! Did you think Nick Gillespie went to grad school for this?! 

Okay, I'm picturing approximately 90% of the drawings eliminated over these standards.

So Gillespie reveals the true test of a proper "Draw Mohammed" drawing.

The single most important element...

It's one thing.

.... and the thing that ties these selections together–is that each image forces the viewer to do two things.

I mean... it's 2 things!

First, they consciously call into question the nature of representation, no small matter in fights over whether it is allowed under Islamic law to depict Mohammed (for the historical record, there is no question that the idea that is always wrong is only of recent vintage; there is a long history of sacred and superficial images of the Prophet). The homage to Rene Magritte below states "This is not a pipe. This is Muhammed"...

He's translating the French for us. (And respelling "Muhammad" as "Muhammed," splitting the difference between the contest-name spelling — "Mohammed"— and the artist's use of the presumably politically correct spelling — "Muhammad.")

... playing with the surrealist's famous statement about the necessary disjuncture between a picture and the thing it seeks to represent. 

An insight that somehow fascinated people who studied post-modernism circa 1990. (Gillespie received his English PhD in 1996. I'd love to know more about what he studied. Can we see his dissertation?)

Just as the drawing is not a pipe (it's a drawing of a pipe), it cannot be Mohammed even as it insists it is. Even more, it is plainly not even a drawing of Mohammed or of any human figure.

Similarly, the invocation of the popular Where's Waldo? series forces the viewer to ask Where's Mohammed?, and to begin a hunt for a figure in the midst of an overstuffed scene. One assumes the black-robed character in the upper right-hand quadrant of the image is our quarry, but then what does it mean to confer on a small dot any significance whatsoever?

Second, each of the images forces the viewer to actively participate not simply in the creation of meaning but of actually constructing the image itself. This is clearest in our grand prize winner, the image below, which pushes iman and infidel alike to do the work that would condemn them to death under the most extreme reading of injunctions against representing Mohammed.

I like the way the winner — with a connect-the-dots puzzle — avoided drawing Muhammad altogether. Man, if I entered a "draw Mohammed" contest and the winner didn't even draw Mohammed, I'd be kind of pissed... and reading Gillespie's revelation of the highly intellectual but previously secret standards would not calm me down. "Reason"?! Bah!

What is life like for a graveyard tree, rooted in death?

Are their psyches distorted?



But what is any soil composed of...



... if not the dead?

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat."

That's a funny way to put it, isn't it? As if we'd stopped talking about Watergate long ago and the memory of it had gone all fuzzy. W. Mark Felt is 91, and his family thinks he ought to have the experience of hearing what people say when they find out he was the historical mystery man. He says he's not proud of it himself, so maybe he wanted to avoid hearing criticism, but his family seems to have assured him he'd be celebrated and seems to have wanted to share the experience with him.

UPDATE: Anyone else having that Joe-Klein-wrote-"Primary Colors" feeling? The hidden identity was fascinating, the actual identity quite boring.

In the comments: I see I'm being sentimental in assuming the family is motivated by a desire to share a celebratory experience.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Amba finds comparisons to "Jaws" and "The Little Prince."

Drawn in a café in Paris. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's plane was found in the Mediterranean, as acknowledged here yesterday. Here's a drawing from one of my sketchbook trips, taken a few years ago:

The Little Prince. So they've found Antoine de Saint-Exupery's plane in the Mediterranean Sea, where it crashed in 1944, when the brilliant author was only 44 and while he was on a wartime reconnaissance mission. There were no bullet holes in the plane, and no body was found. I believe he merged with the stars.

It's interesting to see that "Le Petit Prince," which I read in French class in high school, was originally written in English! So I guess I should have been saying "The Little Prince" all these years, when I thought I was being true to the source.

Nina contemplates the fact that The Little Prince is third on the all time best seller list after the Bible and Das Kapital. I find that impossible to believe, but okay.... Nina wonders if the same people are reading The Little Prince and the Marx tome:

After the eyestrain of paging through Marx, ‘The Little Prince’ may well offer the perfect antidote.

‘The Little Prince’ is one of those books that makes you think that surely there is a subtext, a Great Meaning of some sort. It’s not hard to imagine a Great Meaning hidden in simple statements about our planet –as seen from the eyes of an interstellar traveler.

I'm guessing Das Kapital is bought a lot more than it's read and when it's read, many words are skipped. The chance of reading every word of The Little Prince is infinitely greater. Many read it over and over.

Speculating about Communists reading The Little Prince reminds me of the discussion in My Dinner With André, when André, totally fixated on the book, starts speculating that Nazis would love the book and goes off on a strange rant. Nothing on the web to link for that, so you'll just have to watch the movie yourself. Oh, but a Little Prince quiz did turn up--a really great Quizilla. As for me:

UPDATE: The link has gone dead but my answers identified me as the fox.

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.... It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.... Men have forgotten this truth... But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . ."