Chum

Near a pond in the center of the forest lived a family of gnomes. Each day, Father Gnome would go fishing at the pond while Mother Gnome stayed home with their twin daughters, Hirrie and Dirrie. Father Gnome would always catch enough fish for everyone to eat, and the gnome family would always be well-fed and happy.

So, it was a surprise when Father Gnome went to the pond one morning and by noon hadn’t caught a single fish. He continued to cast his line, but by dusk had still failed to make a catch. With his head hung in shame, Father Gnome returned to his family empty-handed.

“Don’t worry, dear,” Mother Gnome comforted. “Everything happens for a reason. Bread crusts will suffice for tonight.” So the gnome family ate bread crusts, and Hirrie and Dirrie felt the pangs of hunger for the first time in their lives.

The next morning, Father Gnome set out to the pond, doubly determined to catch some fish. By noon, he had not had a single bite. When dusk fell, Father Gnome’s bucket was empty. He returned home with an even heavier heart than before.

“Don’t worry, dear,” Mother Gnome continued with her encouraging words. “Everything happens for a reason. Potato peels will suffice for tonight.” So the gnome family ate potato peels, and Hirrie and Dirrie cried as their grumbling stomachs intruded on their sleep.

Later that night, Hirrie turned to her sister in bed, “This hunger is driving me mad! Why hasn’t Father been able to catch any fish?”

Dirrie looked pale as she answered her sister, “I don’t know, Hirrie. But if he doesn’t catch something soon, we’ll all starve.”

Hirrie jumped from the bed and pulled her sister along, “Come, Dirrie! Let’s go to the pond ourselves and find out what's the matter.”

So, in the middle of the night, the sisters went to the pond and shouted, “Pond! Why have you stopped giving our family fish?” At first, nothing happened. Then, the night-darkened waters began to ripple and churn until from the middle of the pond rose an ancient glowing catfish.

“Gnome sisters,” the catfish bellowed, a thousand hooks tinkling on its scarred lips, “we have given to your family from our own for many years. We, too, are hungry. Would you do for us as we have done for you?”

Dirrie, horrified by what the catfish was suggesting, stepped away from the pond. But Hirrie was calm as she addressed the catfish, “If we give you one of our own, will you continue to feed us again for many years?” The catfish nodded and descended back into the pond, the dark waters closing over his glowing scales as he disappeared once again into its depths.

Dirrie turned to her sister with a pleading look, “We couldn’t do what that monster says! I’d rather live on bread crusts and potato peels.”

Hirrie was very calm as she spoke to Dirrie, “But isn’t it the fair thing to do? They’ve been sacrificing to our family forever.” She took a step towards her sister, “You say you’d rather starve? I’d rather not.”

-

The next morning, Father Gnome set out to the pond, triply determined to catch some fish. Before he left, his daughter Hirrie surprised him with a gift. “Father, I’ve been thinking about what to do about that stingy pond. I’ve collected some mushrooms and beetles to make a special chum. Sprinkle it in the pond and maybe the fish will start biting again.” With that, Hirrie handed her father a small jar, "If it works, I've got dozens more."

So, Father Gnome went to the pond with his daughter’s gift, and when the fish had not bitten by noon, he decided to dump Hirrie’s foul-smelling chum into the water. Immediately, the pond seemed to boil with a thousand fish, and by dusk Father Gnome had filled his bucket to the brim.

Lacuna Matata

"(W)hen a work of art ceases to be discussed, it suffers a gradual blackout." ('Velázquez' Las Meninas,' by Leo Steinberg, October, Vol. 19, 1981)

October 19, 2081

Eli's earbud hissed gently -- as did the buds of a thousand other students -- signaling that today's lecture was about to begin. Eli was simultaneously sipping from his Veg@BeV and cycling through his usual hologs as the lecturer's bio-bot droned its perfunctory preamble:

"...AT THE VIRTUVERSITY OF VERIZOOGLE. A REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR TO ART HOLOGS LIKE ARTFUTURES, R00TINGS, AND CYSTEM+, DR. DOODAD DOPPELGANG ENGAGES THE COMPLEX, EVER-CHANGING META-STRATOSPHERES THAT CONSTITUTE THE..."

Eli had updated the bio-bot's feed five minutes earlier to mention the holog Cystem+, since he and his friends had been slowly and stealthily revising the content of the derelict holog throughout the previous months.

As the bio-bot concluded its prerecorded introductions, Eli activated his mouthpiece and, double-checking that the voice modulator was set to "DR._DOO_DO," began his throat-clearing to follow his bio-bot's preamble:

"Thank you and good morning -- or afternoon, or night, I suppose, for some of you -- and thank you for inviting me here again. It's raining where I'm speaking from -- a little holog-hostel near New Cairo -- so my apologies if you're hearing what sounds like static. I don't think the audio-diffusers here work as well as they should..."

Of course, New Cairo was as "new" as Cystem+, audio-diffusers, and Dr. Doppelgang himself. In his last lecture, the good doctor spoke from the seaside town of MiddlingVille and spoke about his ongoing studies of how the unique crustaceans inhabiting Middling Bay responded to a regular diet of finely-attuned codon rays beamed into the crustaceans' ("Blue Middling Lobsters," actually) habitat. Since students were required to write responses to the lectures, Eli made sure that every figment, lie, and neologism had at least a dozen differently-styled hologs that would satisfy the more intrepid student's sedentary research.

Of course, his holog-counter rarely showed that less than a dozen students would visit these homespun decoy-logs, though he didn't want to risk being negligent (and he and his colleagues rather enjoyed making them).

There was always the extremely outside-chance that a student would attempt to thoroughly research -- or, actually try to visit -- one of these little nowheres. But travel was such a luxury these days - and of such little interest, and there were so very many places, and so very little time - that Eli barely entertained the possibility anymore.

Dr. Doppelgang had exhausted his wandering pleasantries and self-interruptions, so Eli turned to the scan of some old "journal" fragment that he had unearthed during one of his usual holog strolls. He read from it verbatim, pausing arbitrarily here and there for effect:

"The recovered papyrus contains little punctuation, no divisions between words, very few stage directions, and frequent mistakes in meter and spelling; some leaves are slightly torn so that syllables and occasionally words are lacking, and in three or four places there are gaps several lines in length. The manuscript has been edited by a noted Swiss scholar..."*

Eli had become expert at folding these kinds of fragments into whatever discourse he was weaving, and managed to carefully omit words and names that might lead him into a dead end. Then again, being that it was all a kind of dead end, it seemed that Eli's eloquence was the only thing necessary to keep the charade moving forward.

That, and the fact that his voice modulator remained set to "DR._DOO_DO." So when Eli reached to finish off the dregs of his Veg@BeV and absentmindedly shut off the modulator, he proceeded to the end of Dr. Doppelgang's lecture not in the voice of the transient scholar, but in the somewhat less impressive voice of a very clever, but very lost young man.

*(Excerpted from the introduction to 'The Dyskolos of Menander,' translated by Gilbert Highet, Horizons, Vol. I, 1959)

Hating/Trolling/Bored/God Here

Even though I feel a bit ill-equipped to engage in this conversation at Rhizome, I thought it was worth starting an account there so I could remind this verbose "multimedia arts" professor how to use the Google to answer his own question (he doesn't recall getting into it with another commenter, and despite his crushing knowledge of all things interwebular, he can't seem to figure out how to "I'm Feeling Lucky" his way to this).

Well, my comment hasn't been posted yet on the "unmoderated" Rhizome thread, so whatever. Everything seems (un)necessarily complicated over there. Deleuzeian, even (and, I guess, Guattarian as well).

I also felt compelled to respond to this artist's comment on this other artist's blog, because I'm (place your choice from this post's title here, or feel free to make suggestions in the comment section).

Update: My comment was posted to the Rhizome thread (and the dump.fm-found treasure/key GIF that's accompanying this post, which is nice).

A Looming Anaphylaxis

"Depending our personal sensitivity, at any time. it is only done if we stay away from this so puzzling & real dangerous 44.000+ latex filled world." ("Chrysta," from latexsens.com)

Who knew that flanking a "Twin Soul Mates" heart/jellyfish with dice would bring me to this site? It's a difficult site to describe: it's paranoid, obsessive, New Age, depressing, hopeful, and mostly about latex allergy hypersensitivity (a very real and scary thing). It's Yanni meets Safe meets scrolling-forever meets "seriously?" meets "maybe I have this" meets "I shouldn't make fun of this" meets stock-photography meets... a lot of super GIFs?

Just spend a little bit of time on the site. Or at least until the music stops playing.

The Good Old Days

One of the things I like(d) most about dump.fm is (was) being able to "illustrate" my posts with links to images (and image combinations) directly from my and other dumpers' "logs" (examples of such dump.fm-"illustrated" posts include my last post, Rhetoric as Magic, and The Ecstasy of Link[s]). Now, unless you're signed-in to your dump.fm account, any link to the site will be obfuscated by Super Mario clouds and a central screen urging you to sign-in and/or register for an account (which you can minimalize, but still). Boo. Of course, I can't fault the site's makers for wanting to get more people to "officially" engage with the site, but I'm bummed that my copious links to dump.fm will bring the unauthorized linker to mostly clouds and advertising. Then again, dump.fm routinely undergoes format makeovers, so maybe I'm just kvetching over a temporary inconvenience.

Update: I appear to have been kvetching over a temporary inconvenience, which is not unusual for me.

Breakdowns

"Among other consequences, this either/or structure prevents Barthes from imagining a cinema like the one for which Brecht argued and which Godard tried to put into practice -- a cinema which would itself become analytic, fragmenting diegetic flow through a meta-discourse which would qualify immediate realities, to speak 'as if quoting,' as Juliette says in Two or Three Things I Know about Her. In 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,' Barthes expressly deals with Brecht's fragmentation of scene into representative social gests. He argues that even if such fragmentation means that 'at the level of the play itself, there is no development, no maturation... no final meaning, nothing but a series of segmentations,'nonetheless this fragmentation leads not to an alienation effect, an analytic distance, but to a fetishized involvement." ('Roland Barthes and the Moving Image,' by Dana B. Polan, October, Vol. 18, 1981)

October 18, 2081

Everything in Jenna's parlor seemed to move, to flow, to evanesce. Despite the irresistible sensation of motion conferred by these exorbitant and altogether convincing illusions, even the dullest citizen knew that all of these effects were set to a perpetually-cycling loop.

Being of course top-notch, Jenna's programs offered neither a stray pixel or jerky, awkward stuttering to belie the sweet and total farce of smooth continuity that only her circlet of gilded oligarchs could afford to maintain.

Outside of her sanctuary -- where the floor seamlessly undulated in subtle perpetuity from deep azure to royal blue, as picture-screens glowed with lulling scenes of waves eternally breaking on long-dead shores -- the howling citizenry roiled in their own miserable loop, a dirty and descending spiral that was remarkably devoid of color, calm, and any semblance of some reassuring aesthetic order.

Following the assassination (a privilege I've earned after years of intricate deception, as well as the obligatory sacrifice of annulling my original identity), I'm required to override her programs -- to have them rapidly, violently accelerate, to pock them with glitches -- as a supplemental sacrilege and calling-card for my revolutionary employers. I don't enjoy this petty vandalism. For all the crass ironies and inequities that have engendered the pretty deceptions of Jenna's cell, there is a sense of cohesiveness -- however false -- bestowed by the totality of her elite programs. In our zeal to cut the heads of power and assert our noble difference, we've begun to affiliate anything that alludes to wholeness with corruption, even art.

Jenna's execution is an unfortunate necessity. But to sink her temple into our indistinguishable brokenness constitutes, I believe, a double murder.

Gypsy Logic

Six or so years ago -- and for three or so dollars -- I bought the 518-page hardcover book "Dictionary of Gypsy Life and Lore" from a thrift store in Hell's Kitchen. The book's author/compiler, Harry E. Wedeck (who appears to have written several "exotic" dictionaries and texts, including the "Pictorial History of Morals" and his "Triumph of Satan"), delivers a barely two-page introduction. An abbreviated gist:

"The very term gypsy denotes, in a generic sense, a restless, unsettled, foot-loose person... Hence, then, is their diversified story, shot through with lamentation and merriment, with catastrophes and resilience. It is the epic of their wanderings, their beliefs, their characterial peculiarities, their mythological creations, their ceremonials and their loyalties. It is a tale compounded of history spiced with picturesque legend, with colorful sagas and episodes. It is a survey, in short, of the last anomaly in a progressively conventionalized world."

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more effective way to "conventionalize" any culture or people than to parse "their diversified story" into an alphabetized miscellany. However, the sheer length of the book and somewhat perverse inclusiveness of its entries lends itself to being a "wandering" read (although it's probably not a useful book to learn anything about actual Gypsies). Some of the notable entries are as follows:

CRUCIFIXION There is a legend that the Gypsies are the descendants of the smiths who made the nails for the Crucifixion. Hence they were condemned to be perpetual wanderers over the face of the earth.

DEXTERITY The Gyspies were generally praised for their dexterity and quickness in working with metals, despite the wretched tools they had to operate with. When any piece of work required much time to finish, they were apt to lose their patience, and in that case became indifferent whether it was well executed or not. They never submitted to labor so long as they had a dry crust or anything else to satisfy their hunger. They frequently received orders to fabricate different articles. But if not, no sooner were a few nails or some other trifles manufactured than man, woman, and children dislodged, to convey their merchandise from house to house for sale, in the neighboring villages. Their trade was carried on sometimes for ready money, sometimes by barter for eatables or other necessities.

DICTIONARY DEFINITION An eighteenth century French dictionary defined the Bohemians, that is, the Gyspies, as itinerant vagabonds who live by theft and cunning and particularly by fortune-telling.

GYP This expression, listed in some dictionaries with the meaning of to deceive, to steal, to cheat, is a traditionally prejudicial use of the term. It is in line with other such terms, of an ethnic origin, that have been discriminatingly used in a markedly pejorative sense.

HARDINESS The Gypsies are lean, since they are seldom guilty of excess in eating or drinking. They have iron constitutions, because they have been brought up hardily. A mother takes her child on her back, wandering about in fair and foul weather, in heat and cold. Children live a rough open-air life. They acquire good health by hard-

The last entry actually ends with the hyphen, which was likely intended to be followed by "work," although the entire tone of "HARDINESS" seems in direct contrast with the roguish flits described in the preceding entries. There are countless errors, redundancies (though none appear to rival "DICTIONARY DEFINITION" above, which is confused further by the earlier "BOHEMIAN GYPSIES" entry), and contradictions like these throughout the book, which only intensifies my interest in the dictionary as a kind of textual "Gypsy" itself -- that is, a wandering, ill-defined entity cloaked in dicey mystique, exuding strength in its sheer (or perceived) voluminousness. Just be glad that I didn't include the entry for "BULWER LYTTON AS A ROMANY RYE," as it rolls on for nearly eleven straight pages...

I should also mention that my interest in purchasing the book stemmed almost entirely from my parents teasing me as a child: I was infrequently told that they had "bought" or "traded me from the Gypsies" (I've heard of other children being told this very same lie). I can also recollect stories which claim that my Sicilian, blackjack-playing, Bruce-Lee-loving great-grandmother was versed in reading tea-leaves. Inevitably, these yarns intertwined and coalesced to instill in me a phantom -- if not thoroughly fictional -- connection to my Gypsy brethren.

Spontaneous Curation VII

Edit, Edit, Edit
Perpetual Motion Machine (Glitter Spank)
The Garden of Forking Paths
Double Fantasy
Hell on Earth
Four Rooms
O Canada
Repeating Forms
Bucky Babbage
The Cosmos
Übermensches
2012
Ur-Form