I Found a Penny Today, So Here’s a Thought
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You've seen people at a table, all looking at their phones. This isn’t a new phenomenon. As Pamela Taylor has said, "We keep looking at all of the ways that technology pulls us apart from one another—we should start thinking about ways it can bring us together." (Photo via KULTÚRA.)
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Here's our take on "going with the flow."
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They say that everybody has a novel inside them, but that's patently false. If you don't have a novel inside you, there may at least be an article that inspires someone else's novel.
We're gobsmacked that our groundbreaking research into the relationship between pirates and parrots ( "Buccaneer Birds and Parrots of the Caribbean," first published in Amercian Cage-Bird Magazine, March 1993) went on to be an inspiration for acclaimed author Gary Barwin's novel that's narrated by a parrot pirate, Yiddish for Pirates. This qualifies as a Retroactive Lifetime Goal (phrase used courtesy of literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt). Unrelated except in the sense of the Barwinism that underlies all that we see and hear, Gary Barwin has dreamily transformed our recording for the Poet Laureate of Calgary, in which we set to clockwork music the punctuation of an otherwise-erased page from Andy Warhol's a: A Novel. Here's an mp3 of the otherworldly Barwinian transformation:
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We’re so glad that our cloud-busting app hadn’t been invented when this postcard came out. Don’t you just know that there’d have been somebody on the street who’d have taken delight in dissolving that bunny?
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This is really something: the Hamilton Public Library has categorized as non-fiction our book of imaginary Kafka parables, Franzlations. As library patron Selway noted, " What higher commendation for a book of parables could there be?" This qualifies as a Retroactive Lifetime Goal (phrase used courtesy of literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt). Here's a page from Franzlations, which symbolically shows that chickens' eggs are oblong in accordance with the earth's elliptical orbit around the sun. Chickens are famously linked to the sun, as the rooster announces each dawn.
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We thought we'd stumbled upon the most scathing satire of prejudice against other cultures when we saw a Vice " documentary" about a gay man and lesbian visiting Japan to criticize that nation's heteronormativity even as they film themselves getting married to each other in an extraordinarly welcoming Buddhist temple. "This is going too far," we gasped. "This is too sharp a commentary on gays' embarrassing desperation to be mainstreamed."
We laughed when the filmmakers decried Japan's attitude toward public displays of affection, as if being inappropriately intimate on the street is somehow a mark of societal freedom and "progress."
We presumed the piece was satire when they purported to depict a typical night in Tokyo's gay club district, when it was anything but genuine given non-hidden cameras and pre-arranged permissions for faces to be filmed (not to mention the ludicrousness of foreigners presuming to witness an underground culture when they're not part of it and when their very presence changes everything). Here's the elephant in the room: the filmmakers note that in Tokyo there's a gay club for every possible proclivity, which presumes there's at least one gay club for judgemental upstart westerners with cameras to make documentaries about how non-progressive ancient civilizations are.
We thought the piece was obviously a send-up when the newly wedded gay man and lesbian exploited a young Japanese man who was ready to tell his mother about his sexuality — they shoved their camera into the mother's face as she heard the news and then got exactly the reaction they were hoping for: she fled the room in mortification, presumably (and legitimately) insulted that her son had so little respect for her that he'd put her on the spot in front of strangers and a camera. This obviously wasn't an example of Japanese homophobia but of American-style rudeness. But here's another elephant in the room: the man ready to come out had hired someone to accompany him from a company that provides actors to fill up wedding parties, funerals, and such, so how do we know that the mother wasn't also a hired actress for the son to practice coming out? Or what if it was the mother who had hired someone to play a gay son on the verge of coming out, because that's an experience she wished to role-play? How do we know they weren't all actors (beyond the fact that "all the world's a stage," of course) hired by said company in a paid advertisement spot? Any which way you frame it, it's unbelievable.
We laughed when the filmmakers scratched their heads over the culture of Japanese heterosexual women who read manga about male lovers (since we all know that heterosexual males are interested in lesbian lovers, so it's a direct parallel to a famous phenomenon). "Westerners aren't that clueless," we cried in indignation.
We tittered uncomfortably when the filmmakers asked a Japanese trans woman if she was offended that the people at a cross-dressing bar (featuring racks of clothes to try on) are 70% heterosexual. Why would anyone expect the Japanese to share America's bizarre attitude toward so-called cultural appropriation? The Japanese woman was delighted that people felt free to experiment with expressing themselves. Duh. (Oops ... is our attitude showing?)
Wow -- this documentary calls homophobic a nation with a wildly thriving gay literature market with customers of all sexual orientations, flamboyantly gay actors on television (just pick a show at random; enough said), an extraordinarily long history of institutionalized gay relationships (such as samurai/apprentice, sempai/kohai, Buddhist priests/acolytes [and while we're at it, Shinto sports at least four guardian deities of male-male love]), cross-dressing in both theatrical and hostess settings (kabuki, anyone?) ... and so on and on. The filmmakers decry marriages of convenience even as they get married to each other for the convenience of their documentary and to experience mainstream heteronormativity. It would be so very funny, Ellen Page and Ian Daniel, if only it were a deliberate joke.
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So we're reading surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun's enigmantic novel Goose of Hermogenes and were delighted to encounter the Hermetic secret of drawing a straight line all the way to the horizon. Before revealing that, here's the novel's official description: "The heroine of this story (described only as 'I') is compelled to visit a mysterious uncle who turns out to be a black magician who lords over a kind of Prospero's Island that exists out of time and space. Startled by his bizarre behavior and odd nocturnal movements, she eventually learns that he is searching for the philosopher's stone. When his sinister attentions fall upon the priceless jewel heirloom in her possession, bewilderment turns into stark terror and she realizes she must find a way off the island. An esoteric dreamworld fantasy composed of uncorrelated scenes and imagery mostly derived from medieval occult sources, Goose of Hermogenes might be described as a gothic novel, an occult picaresque, or a surrealist fantasy." (By the way, we disagree with the word "uncorrelated" in the description.) ( 50Watts has discussed the novel and author here.) Back to the Hermetic secret, from page 53:
And he dying near by, dying in life, living in death, spending and wasting and dying each time he was with me, each time a step nearer death and death a thought dearer. He was hungry once with that phosphorescent look about him and asked to be kept alive and I gave him stony gifts; I heaped those stones above him, I laid him in that bed of boulders. We were held together at last by slanderous bonds, by ridicule, hatred, contempt, but there were older bonds than those, the sulphur, the phosphor, the salt. Now lying in a small graveyard near bones of kings and beaten gold, he is learning the length of the horizon and drawing perhaps where the worms twine a straighter line than ever before; drawing perhaps the straight wand of Hermes, with the snakes making spirals around it to right and left, the red and the blue, gyres that I must try to compas. Lying there far from the shrine of a pillow, he is echoing that distant day when the first words he spoke were Listen to me! And crying a far cry out of a six-foot cradle he is saying again Listen!
Indeed!
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