Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls
When I began writing Mythologies in 1995 I was thinking about gender in language and, informed by a poststructuralist feminist critique of the representation of the female body as landscape, I set out to explode these stereotypes by using over-the-top geological metaphors. I wanted to convey a moment of realization, when a number of ideas come together at once. It mattered little to me what order the ideas came in, only that they came together in the end. The narrative structure of this non-linear HTML version was influenced by the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The interface was based on the placemats you get at many restaurants in Nova Scotia, which depict a map of Nova Scotia surrounded by icons of purported interest to tourists: lobsters, whales, lighthouses, beaches and the Bluenose. The found images and texts came from a geology course I took in university, a civil engineering manual from the 1920s and a random assortment of textbooks found in used bookstores. The deadpan technical descriptions of dikes, groins and mattress work add perverse sexual overtones to the otherwise quite chaste first-person narrative. Between the diagrammatic images and the enigmatic texts, a meta-narrative emerges - an entre space - where the absurd and the inarticulate, desire and loss may finally co-exist.
In some other millennia the southern shores of Nova Scotia likely kissed the lip of Morocco or nuzzled beneath the chin of Spain. The force of their embrace was evidenced by the great mountain range that slid down the long fault of their tectonic bodies.
At the height of their union these mountains were greater than the Rockies, a range just now rising to take a better view of her lover the Ocean.
These are strange times indeed, when mountains love oceans...
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