Matt Kish

Gorgeous book. Matt Kish created an illustration (one-a-day) for each page in the Signet Classics paperback edition of Moby-Dick. Hopefully someone at Signet will be smart enough to produce a new edition of Moby-Dick with at least some of Kish's illustration. This is exactly the kind of wonderful project that works well as a web site, but then is also worth the price of a book to have and hold.

I've posted a few of my favorite illustrations on my pinterest Art board: rel="nofollow" target="_top">http://pinterest.com/jaldous/art/ but you can find the entire collection at Kish's site. http://www.spudd64.com/.



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The Desert Places, by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, illustrated with eery satisfaction by Matt Kish, is “… an incomplete history of what passes for evil …” It can be read as a fabulist sequel to the Biblical Book of Job. In that ancient story — part folk-tale, part radical theology, part traditional Wisdom Literature — the “perfect and upright” Job dares to challenge God about the problem of evil. Why do the innocent suffer? Like a claimant in a lawsuit, Job files his complaint directly against the tribal god Yahweh. A courtroom drama follows, during which Job argues his case. We hear interminable examination and cross examination of Yahweh’s priests and wise men, until, at chapter 38, the big guy Himself takes the stand. Yahweh delivers from “out of the whirlwind” his blistering, sublime, majestic rant. I have always thought it the Bible’s greatest poem.
Job is smacked down. He bows and back-pedals and blubbers about “things too wonderful for me,” and then, having admitted his ignorance, his insignificance, is awarded damages. Case closed.
What Sparks and Kloss have done in The Desert Places is materialize a sublime, powerful voice capable of answering back to God. Job was just a mortal and out of his league. This voice emerges from what we call evil … Evil personified … a power on level with what Western religion thinks of as the “good” God. But God, Himself, had to be young once, “a nervous god, still virgin to creation,” who invented physical reality in which a fundamental element was this “negative, a dark absence, a clump of cells crying to come together. … a pause in the flickering before consciousness.”
“What passes for evil” was born as the “Clumsy thumbprint of an awkward deity.” (Kindle loc. 49)
Lyrical, frightening, and redundantly grotesque, The Desert Places allows “what passes for evil” to talk freely, to describe its terrible arc through history. “Once I thought I could be the lonely void, the hollow pit in the stomach, the vapor left behind by man’s voyage through the clouds. Once but no more. I am the counter-weight of the world.” (loc. 272) By the end, the reader knows Evil as a character in a character-driven story. That ending is not predictable.… (more)