X4: Uses of William Blake in Popular Culture
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 27th, 2011
The graphic novel From Hell, by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell, is a speculative story about the murders, identity, and motives of Jack the Ripper. It takes as its premise Stephen Knight’s theory that the murders were part of a conspiracy to hide the birth of an illegitimate child of the royal family, [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 27th, 2011
In his song “Blake’s View,” singer-songwriter M. Ward boldly states, “Blake said it first.” Implicit in both that line and the title is that Ward has some grasp over exactly what Blake attempts to say, that Ward not only understand Blake, but can [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 27th, 2011
William Blake was a man and a poet. The two archetypes he represented are not one in the same. He was an individual with a life and a journey yet to others he existed solely as a literary icon, an organic machine churning our creative produce to satiate the appetites of fans and critics worldwide [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 27th, 2011
When C.S. Lewis wrote The Great Divorce he set out to contradict a notion that had been present for centuries. He wanted to “divorce” good and evil once and for all and illustrate that one simply cannot be made into the other, no matter what resources are available (The Great Divorce). He created his title [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 26th, 2011
The Cincinnati indie rock band, Walk the Moon, released their debut album, “i want! i want!”, in November of 2010. An engraving William Blake included in his 18-piece compilation called For the Children: The Gates of Paradise inspired the title of the album. For the Children: The Gates of Paradise is a series of tiny [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake on Oct 26th, 2011
The opening scene of the 2010 film Get Him to the Greek presents the eccentric band Infant Sorrow’s lead singer, Aldous Snow, engaging the camera in the filming of their music video for their new song “African Child (Trapped in Me)”. I will not go into the specifics of this satirical song, targeting Hollywood’s obsession [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 26th, 2011
February 5, 2011. An English teacher, Chris Pearce, posts on his blog this observation: “Great poems should paint pictures in the mind.” [1] It is taken from the introduction of the innovative graphic novel by Dave Morice, Poetry Comics: A Cartooniverse of Poem (1980). This passing remark, made to Morice by a friend, stimulated his [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 26th, 2011
Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man is best described by the director himself as a “psychedelic Western”. Though the typical qualities of a Western are present – Indians and cowboys ride horses in a rocky 1800’s Wild West – the black-and-white movie is anything but typical. The soundtrack consists solely of atonal splatters of electric guitar; the [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 26th, 2011
We serial killers are your sons; we are your husbands; we are everywhere. Ted Bundy, 1986 The year is 1982 and the first black-and-white edition of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta comic series hits the market. 6Nearly three decades later, Warner Brothers Pictures releases a cinematic reproduction of the popular graphic novels. [...]
Posted in Refiguring Blake, X4 on Oct 26th, 2011
William Butler Yeats once wrote that, for William Blake, imagination was “the body of God” and that “the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations.”[1] Northrop Frye, another Blake devotee, added that childhood was the best incubator of imagination. “Childhood to Blake is a state or phase of imaginative existence,” Frye wrote, “the [...]
