rupa

there are words that are defined using their antonyms.

characters who embody their opposites..

and then there’s shit like this, which is just hilarious.

Some of what came to mind during the “sonic eruptions, video hallucinations, and aggressive, entrancing mediascapes” of the Shadow Puppies performance tonight.

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Popcorn….FrOM the FUTURE!
‘My haircut just ran out of batteries.’
Monsoon season comes early on Mars
Fuck me gently with a pulse width modulated chainsaw
Shake vigorously to erase reality
Sim city becomes sentient
Jack the ripper’s fingerprints
Lava as lubricant
Gasoline-flavored ice cream. Sugar cone.
Mach 73 razor
Polyhedral bulldog
Janis Joplin has a posse
Ghosts of treefrogs past
Hauntological putty
This cake is off the richter scale
These claws were made for walking
Fred & Ginger in the octagon
Nerd rope harp strings
Wax parasite
Isaac hayes is melting, melting
Self-destruct once if you hear me
Incense mushroom cloud
Basilisk or Astro-basilisk?
Equus dreams
Revenge of the masks
Chopsticks and blobfish
Diablo jr
The man in the black castle
I whip my bike back and forth
Grating a stress ball
The moon threw up
This s’more will fuck you up
Jumping rope with wings
Edgar Allen poe, de-rez-ing
Sauron and helium
Moonshine river
Subway tunnel superman
The girl who couldn’t stop shaking
White man group
Kazoo hero
The radishes have eyes
Spaghetti western, hot dog noir
Japan on tumble dry
Remote control skyline
Snowfall on mt. Doom
We can Osterize it for you wholesale
Bring the noise, bring the pastoral countryside
All the pore refiner in the world won’t save me now
My heartbeat is out of tune
My mirror is throbbing
Dead Whale klaxon
Piano, meet liquid nitrogen

Instead of asking in bewilderment why people loved Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl so much, perhaps I should just explain why I didn’t like it.

Something that struck me from the very first page – the heavy-handed, blatant Orientalism, particularly in regards to language. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that had so many words in italics because they’re in the language of the region and something would apparently be lost if they were to be translated. Actually, I take that back. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies had a very high word-in-italics count also. The difference, however, is that not only did Ghosh almost always follow the italicized word or phrase of Bengali with a translation -

- the book also has an extensive glossary in the back. WUG (I know that TWG would be a more appropriate acronym for the book, but I’m rather fond of WUG), however, has no such glossary, and the text is littered with Thai words and phrases that are never quite explained. This begins on the very first page:

On that first page alone, there are about 15 Thai words and phrases that are not clearly defined. At this point Bacigalupi has already started to lose me.  There is no glossary in the back, of course. So one has to ask – what is the point of littering the text with all these mystery words? One cannot help but notice (well, I can’t anyway) the curious way that race plays into this – Amitav Ghosh is Indian, writing a book set in India. Paolo Bacigalupi is American & white, writing a book set in Thailand. Ghosh is a native speaker of Bengali and tries extensively to share his exuberance about the language with his readers, explaining not only the definitions but also the origins of words & expressions in many instances. Bacigalupi, I’m guessing, is not a native speaker of Thai – I’m assuming that he had to actively seek out the Thai words & phrases that appear in his book. Why then does he not share their meanings with the reader? By not doing so he contributes to the ‘otherness’ of the Thai, making certain that they remain alien and unknowable. Pointing out how different another culture is but not making any attempt to understand it is what exoticization is all about.   I’m sure the response to this will be that by not explaining what the Thai are saying, the writer is playing up the alienation that the white male ostensible “protagonist”, Anderson Lake, feels in this exotic foreign land. First of all – I couldn’t stand that ‘feel sorry for the Western foreigner” crap in Lost in Translation, and couldn’t stand it in WUG either.  Secondly, it becomes clear quite early in the book that Anderson is an opportunistic imperialist asshole who I have no desire to identify or empathize with, so I really don’t need or want to feel what he feels, thank you very much.

(more soon. believe me.)