Sunday 4 April 2010

G is for Greenworld ( Greenworld III)

Click to enlarge
It's been only a few days since my last post here, and I normally try to post at intervals of one week or a week and a half. The present post is an extra: it is short, did not require any research, and is a kind of Easter egg. The occasion is Greenworld again. Dougal Dixon sent me an email about my earlier post on his new book, Greenworld. As that book is in Japanese, I had to guess a bit at what was happening here and there. Dougal wrote an email about my guesses; rather than just adding it as a comment, I decided to give the book some additional attention. That's why you will find the other half of the children's alphabet above. The 'G' of 'G is for Greenworld' can be found in the provious post. There is 'D for Dixon' though. So here is his email: "Dear Gert, I would just like to express my appreciation of what you are doing for GREENWORLD on your blog. As to your speculations, you are quite right in the interpretations of what you have seen. The TAME YOUR OWN STRIDA poster is indeed an advertisement for a service that allows the customer to train this animal and use it as we would use a horse. In the book it is followed by another poster that implies that the industry has moved on and that now all the training is done by the kraal itself, and the customer does not need to bother himself with the dirt and inconvenience. The subtext here is that the colonists are still using the living resources of the planet but, but bit by bit, are moving away from any connection or empathy with those resources. (And there is a suggestion that one of the partners has ducked out of the business in protest at the way things were going.) And this item is South African in background - there is a whole multicultural spread throughout the book representing the cosmopolitan nature of the settlement. The ARTEMIS poster is a bit of fantasy, showing an idealized relationship between settler and animal life. The reality of taming one of these beasts involves hobbles, muzzles, blinkers, whips, goads, force-feeding and all the rest. The illustration labelled "17" is meant to be part of a series of "survival guides", this one being how to trap a rogue spitter - one that is not part of anyone's herd. The lure is based on sexual attraction. These guides tend to emphasize over-exploitation and waste. I have just thought - I should be putting all this on your blog site. Please feel free to do so if you wish. Dougal"

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

This one might be a little off-topic, but I'm dying to know what's that nautilus-like aquatic creature is supposed to be (featured for sometime ago in the front of your website). It seemed that you made a lot of of incredible paintings and designs for Furaha and yet not all of them managed to come out as full-fledged pages.

By the way, thanks a lot for the update on Greenworld; such a woe that Dixon did not publish the whole series in English. Keep going!

Sigmund Nastrazzurro said...

Hello Anonymous,

I have at times been a bit careless about which plates I used for the 'splash screen'. There are indeed more paintings than are shown on the website; I wish to keep a good number for the book (if that ever gets published). For that reason I will only tell you its Latin name: "Vanus sursumvergenspropterpenuriaponderis" (really!).

About Greenworld: I don't think it was Dougal's wish that the book has not been published in English yet.

Anonymous said...

Well then, best of luck on publishing your whole work! I -- we shall be waiting for that. Hope it could ship well to countries outside U.S. and Europe.

puyamaster said...

I think GREENWORLD is a side story of "Man after Man - an anthropology of the future -".

http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/library/Dixon_3/01_en.htm

Unknown said...

Sorry to bother you, but do you know if the green Greenworld book on Amazon.co.jp or the red one is the first volume? I was thinking of buying the first one (even though I can only read english) and looking at the illustrations and reading the little english snippets, and then piecing the rest together with google translate.

Sigmund Nastrazzurro said...

Hello Helix,

No bother: the first volume is the green one. I cannot read Japanese either, but still liked the books.

Buft before you go on, are you certain that you will be able to use 'Google Translate'? As far as I know, text to be transl;ated have to be offered in a machine-readable form, meaning as digital characters. As the book is on paper, I do not see how you can do this. But if I am wrong, please let me know, as I would like to read the texts as well.

Unknown said...

Oh sorry, my bad! I got confused and forgot how translate worked. Oh well! I think i'm still going to buy it. Do you suggest it?

Sigmund Nastrazzurro said...

Hello Helix,

Yes I do, but you should realise that there are not that many images, and they are printed at a fairly small scale. I guess that you have to be a big fan, or have money to spare.