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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.
J. R. Carpenter - 28.01.2012 - 23:17
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Elys, The Lacemaker: The Book of Hours of Madame de Lafayette
The story of Elys, the Lacemaker to the Princess of Cleves is a double-true fiction. First, a lacemaker is not mentioned in the text of Madame de Lafayette's Princess of Cleves. However, the Princess surely had both seamstresses and personal fitters for her couture. It was not uncommon for a proper trousseau to be many years in preparation. Elegant ladies were sewn into their gowns before setting off to the ball. Also, no record attests that the Viscount of Chartres had a natural child--or certainly not one named Elys. But it was customary to donate unwanted souls to the service of the many needs of the Court. As a fictional lacemaker, Elys would certainly have heard the folktale, "Little Red Riding Hood." Early, oral versions of the tale include the wolf asking Riding Hood if she planned to take the "path of pins" or the "path of needles." The Grandmother, too, is blind--attesting to the fate of the real lacemakers who worked from age four until their sight failed in adolescence. I have adapted the Cinderella story for Elys' mother, Elle.
Dene Grigar - 08.11.2021 - 20:25
