MTSThis week
OMT Martin Rowson makes iTunes
modernism and hardboiled fiction.
In the image included here, we just barely
identify Eliot himself in the middle
background, apparently researching his
poem by a copy of Jessie L. Weston’s
‘From Ritual to Romance’ - a work that
fulfills the same function for The Waste
Land as the Odyssey did for Joyce’s
‘Ulysses’. Framing the foreground are
(left), the instantly recognizable Ezra
Pound (‘il miglior fabbro’, who famously
edited the poem) and Chandler’s hero
Philip Marlowe (played by Bogart in so
many movies) clutching his copy of a pulp
magazine.
You can buy the app at https://itunes.
apple.com/gb/app/martin-rowsonswaste-land/id438535843?mt=8
Last year, the iPad “app” of T S Eliot’s
canonical high modernist masterpiece,
‘The Waste Land’ was launched to
much acclaim. Now, OMT comic artist
and satirist Martin Rowson’s graphic
adaptation of the poem is also available
for iPad. Trekking through the ruins of
London is the shadowy figure of Marlowe
(Kit, rather than Philip); a detective
attempting to shore up “these fragments”
into some sort of meaning.
Rowson’s treatment was inspired by
Raymond Chandler’s section on the
Wasteland in ‘The Long Goodbye’. A
Butler asks Philip Marlowe (the hardboiled detective immortalized on screen
by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum
and Elliott Gould):
“`I grow old... I grow old.../ I shall wear the
bottoms of my trousers rolled.` What does
that mean, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Not a thing. It just sounds good.”
The Butler smiled. “Here’s another one. ‘In
the room women come and go/Talking
of Michelangelo’. Does that suggest
anything to you, sir?”
“Yeah — it suggests to me that the guy
didn’t know very much about women”.
Rowson maps the characters and
situations of Raymond Chandler
and Dashiell Hammett onto the
thematic concerns and motifs of the
poem, revealing the parallels between
05
Merchant Taylors’ School Weekly Newsletter
Scissorum Mar 08 2013 Issue 20.indd 5
March 08 2013
08/03/2013 18:04