A Blog of Bosh

Devices and desires
Tennessee Williams once said that his plays were built on the wreckage of the American family. This is true, of course - the same could be said of Theodore Dreiser’s immensely gloomy novels - and yet the wreckage of Williams’s own family life comes carefully concealed, its frets and fractures covered up with [...]

Here are a couple of articles with references to Edward Lear:
PET TRADE BLUES (the efforts and moral problems involved in attempting to save Brazil’s Lear’s macaws from extinction), by Richard Hartley, from International Wildlife, March-April, 2000.Voyage of a painter (Charles-Alexandre Lesueur), by Errol Fuller, from Natural History, April, 1998.

artnet.com Magazine Reviews - Drawing Notebook
He called himself “The Painter of Poetical Topography,” but the world knows this superb draughtsman better as the inventor of the limerick. He was the Englishman Edward Lear (1812-1888).

John Gould (1841-1881)
John Gould (1804-1881) was the most prolific artist and publisher of ornithological subjects of all time. In nineteenth century Europe his name was as well known as Audubon’s was here in North America. Unlike Audubon, whose life’s work focused on one region, Gould traveled widely and employed other artists to help create his [...]

Land of make-believe
Eggs on legs and free booze: Marilyn Corrie enters a medieval fantasy in Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life by Herman PleijGuardian Unlimited Books

Biography choice: Inventing Wonderland by Jackie Wullschlager
Edward Lear lived a solitary life, preferring children to adults as an escape from his homosexuality. Lear�s attitude to children is presented as being the kindest, his nonsense limericks having none of the menace of Carroll�s work.The Times

Twentieth-Century American Children’s Literature