Pynchon, cartoons, Hamzanama
Doug Millison
pynchonoid at yahoo.com
Wed Aug 7 19:11:34 CDT 2002
"The Hamzanama is a popular collection of dramatic
stories based loosely on the exploits of Hamza, uncle
of the Prophet Muhammad, who traveled the world
spreading the teachings of Islam. Neither historical
nor doctrinal in substance, the stories were born of
the tradition of Persian oral literature that
entertained audiences around nomadic campfires and in
urban coffee houses with elaborate tales of fantastic
derring-do.
"The huge paintings that together compose Akbar's
Hamzanama were apparently held up to illustrate
dramatic oral presentations by court storytellers. The
stories describe heroes bravely confronting a host of
formidable and menacing giants, sorcerers, demons and
dragons, while other characters were depicted using
more guile than force to rescue princes or maneuver
their hapless foes into comical predicaments. Painted
on cotton, the manuscript originally contained 1,400
roughly 2-foot-high unbound illustrations and
accompanying text."
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/hamza.htm
"The characters in his books are all cartoon
characters. He writes in frames just like a comic
strip. He’s writing cartoons instead of drawing them.
They’re not two dimensional but holograms. They’re
real people who go in and out of being cartoons. They
go back and forth between the real world and the
cartoon world."
--attributed to former Pynchon companion, Christine
Wexler in Lineland:
Mortality and Mercy on the Internet's
Pynchon-L at Waste.Org Discussion List http://www.cafecancun.com/bookarts/lineland.htm
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