打开狗儿，看到新的涂鸦，原来今天是Edwards Gorey的生日（1925-2000）。我不熟悉这个名字，但看那些画有趣，就Wiki了一下，发现他真的有趣，说自己的作品“没意思”——卡罗尔（Lewis Carroll）和里尔（Edward Lear）的那种literary nonsense。

    有篇文章谈Gorey，题目是“Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense”（The New Yorker, Nov.9, 1992），题目有趣，可惜没找到全文（也许我还有那期杂志呢，可这会儿懒得去找了），里面引Gorey自己的话说

If you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that’s true, there really isn’t. And there’s probably no happy nonsense, either.

不过在别人看来，G的作品却有着Gothic式的惊险恐怖和神秘。2011年3月的纽约时报有篇文章（Nightshade Is Growing Like Weeds——又一个有趣的题目，nightshade是有毒的，而weeds没毒。这个对比应该有更多的植物学内容，我不懂），说老G在去世10年后还像幽灵一样在我们的“集体无意识”里游荡（haunting our collective unconscious）：

Gorey was born to be posthumous. His poisonously funny little picture books — deadpan accounts of murder, disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in a voice that affects the world-weary tone of British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett — established him as the master of high-camp macabre.

受老G刺激的艺术家很多，他们都从他的作品中找自己共鸣的东西。而老G早就警告过大家，When people are finding meaning in things — beware！不过，从他的绘画里，我也感觉不到Carroll式的nonsense，也没有Lear式的无聊。也许从意义里发现没意义，是更难的事情吧。