Size Ten In One Circus Side Show and Tent Revival's LiveJournal -- Entries (original) (raw)
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[05 Nov 2005|10:47pm]
Writing fiends of all calibres!
Reality Is Overrated has finally arrived
to a web space just one click away.
We have editors and writers, and hopefully you will also come across some publishing opportunities.
So, why not join now!
Warning: may contain nuts and insane persons alike.
Ps: please read the rules when you get there. Wouldn’t want too have too send you all to hell.
| The Queen of Tears | [25 Oct 2003|11:52am] |
|---|---|
The Queen of Tears was pale as milk. She fairly glowed in the darkness, alone in her little corner of the world, waiting for people to pay their ten cents to come and gawk. She hated them, yet still she waited for them with a strange sense of anticipation. She was only real when they pointed and whispered among themselves.
They completed each other -the Freak and her Audience.
Sometimes she lifted her white lace veil, to show them… On this day, one woman stayed after the other gawkers had scattered pell-mell. She boldly stepped closer to the Queen’s tiny domain, and slowly reached up to touch the Queen’s alabaster hand.
“I know you” was all she said, a single blood-red tear rolling down her cheek.
2 penons on the tent|raise a flag
[06 Sep 2002|11:52am]
There's a new community for writers that y'all might enjoy.
It's about taking a word and creating something around it in approximately 50 words.
Have fun.
[25 Apr 2002|10:06pm]
In the lab, Doctor Lilliput Parnassus was exactly as you would expect him to be: gaunt, sober, and a sliver too tall. He had strayed from the archetype of wild-haired scientific genius, preferring instead to apply a thick coating of Dapper Dan's hair pomade to keep his black hair slicked back against his head. But true to form, there was always one errant curl that would droop down over his brow in times of stress. He had thick goggles, a leather lab coat with wooden buttons, and double insulated rubber gloves. His voice existed only in a tense whisper or a hysterical shriek, depending on the positions of the dials in his laboratory.
However, oustide the Calliope Colosseum he was an entirely different creature, a fine Southern gentleman in crisp linen with a voice as smooth as a mint julip on midsummer. He had a whalebone cane and a pie plate hat that was off his head more often than it was on. He concealed his nerves by idly turning the hat end over end as he spoke, and rolling it from side to side as he listened. When he walked and the hat served its intended purpose, he clacked the cane crisply on the ground with each step.
There had been no allegations of grave robbing, rumors of inhumane experiments, or any suggestion that he had ever kidnapped anyone for anything, but everyone at the carnival feared him. They could feel the clock spring wound up tightly like his errant curl, and they did not want to be the one that finally caused him to strike twelve. The ones who had seen him in the Calliope Colosseum in a pseudo-scientific passion were twice as careful.
Of course, it was probably this tension that kept him safe from the fractal plague. He worked with a powerfully built ambulance driver and kept a shotgun between the seats. After Dr. Parnassus gave his diagnosis, the patient was offered the ambulance or the shotgun. As rumors of the plague spread, more and more people chose death over life, even though the plague itself had never made that choice itself. This might have contributed to Dr. Parnassus' dangerous reputation, although he never touched the gun himself. His driver would hand it to the patient and let him self-medicate.
He worked six nights a week in his laboratory, and spent the daylight in pursuit of the ultimate cocktail. On the seventh, he would take in the weekly shows of the Zeitgeist Follies where Cherry Groove would gyrate seductively center stage and take him back to her trailer, making the stainless steel house shake like T-minus-Zero and then some. Life, death, love. It was all in a day's work for the good doctor.
[25 Apr 2002|10:02pm]
"How dare you make me errand boy!" Hatchishi Nanakuku raged when Brother Terethel handed a second letter for the woman in Martinique. Not quite enraged enough to crumple up the friar's missive and toss it aside, he just shook the scrolled up letter in his fist. He always sounded stilted when he talked, but the accent was hard to place. Firm, subject-verb-object phrases exploded from him easily, but when explaining or exploring, he always faltered. "And worse, you think yourself better. All you do is hide and think. What good is that?"
Brother Terethel tried to explain that he was not hiding, just waiting, but the samurai refused to see the distinction. In broken words, he continued to rail against the menial task set before him, while pacing back and forth. "You have seen the ruin here. We have to do things. We have to build things. We have to make things. We do not have to sit and hide. Nothing will get better like this. When the place it built, when the place is better, when the place is prospering once again, yes. You are much better at making things last. Until then, do not treat me like a servant. Until then, I am the more important one. You should carry your own messages!"
The friar was obviously hurt by this and withdrew into himself to sulk, which only made his friend angrier. Luckily, Hatchishi was out of words for his anger and only fumed. Finally, with a small voice that only gathered strength when he got going, Brother Terethel convinced his friend that he would only need to carry one more message, so long as he would bring someone back with him. The friar had a way with words and way of pouring so much feeling into his words that you couldn't refuse him anything. In any case, Hatchishi had no other tasks.
[27 Mar 2002|03:39am]
Toulouse�s uncle, Pierre Renard, knew more about the volcano than anyone else in Martinique. He was writing two books about it, one an advanced geological survey, and the other a sentimental recounting of the events of 1902 as told to him by locals, including Trivia�s grandfather.
People talked. Maybe Pierre wasn�t really Toulouse�s uncle, but rather his great-great grand nephew. Maybe Toulouse, like so many others, had been swallowed by Pelee�s anger. Or maybe that was Toulouse�s namesake, a family legend that he liked to live out. Maybe nobody could tell the difference between the ghost of the boy from a hundred years ago and his ancestor, as they both had gnashing pearl teeth like Peter Pan, and preferred to wander the beaches alone, letting glass and driftwood lie sacred where other boys might have taken it and made up some elaborate false taxonomy. Toulouse, however many he was, had a profound distaste for disruption. Trivia didn�t know which boy she followed up the path to the great volcano, rising just as a craggy breast of an old mastectomy patient would fall if she bent towards the ground, puckered, spotted, lonely. She didn�t care which boy she followed.
Toulouse was singing something in French. They were resting on a large, almost level plain that the path blazed through. �C�est un dinosaur aerial!� Toulouse exclaimed.
Trivia�s hands flew automatically to secure her hat. The wind picked had picked up. She expected maybe to follow Toulouse through some portal to an alternate dimension from whence her message had arrived. But instead, there was a helicopter. Toulouse smiled one last time at Trivia, and handed her a hibiscus flower as a silent farewell. It seemed to have sprouted from the thin air in his palm. If rocks proved everything, she wondered, what did flowers, on this island of them, prove? She had never believed in quintessence.
[24 Feb 2002|10:59pm]
Trivia wanted to reply to Brother Terethels letter. She had paper like heavy cream clotted with a rough tooth, and new pens poised holding their ink like mouthfuls of saliva or tobacco juice. At her desk, which was really just a piece of glass resting on two antique plant stands, she moved her hands over her letter paraphernalia with an entranced sadness.
She missed her blonde nieces, billowed full of sunlight, wind, and Nancy Drew. She missed Jurgen and graduate school. She missed sneaking off in the mornings, decades ago, to watch her grandfather wreathing the statue of her grandmother with purple flowers.
She would tell him Martinique was real, and send him volcanic rock to prove it. Rocks proved everything; that everything was true. She would tell him she knew Toulouse, knew his uncle. She would forget to mention that she still had a handful of the contents of that pi�ata stored in her treasure chest, which was an old card catalogue from a library. She would tell him that she didn�t know much about women, but she did know that you should never tell them that you weren�t writing them a billet doux.
But instead she slowly packed, first tying up her letters with pieces of cord from the string drawer in her treasure chest, then her clothes, mostly white, white shirts that made her look more than half native, and a large collection of sarongs from Sri Lanka. She took about five files out of her filing cabinet, mulling through them with a focused, analytical expression that was the quintessence of her professional life.
Trivia had worked her whole life to become a minimalist. It was different than loving simplicity. She didn�t. It was visual and spatial nutrition, allowing her capacity for complexity to work elsewhere.
She went outside and knelt down, lying both hands lightly on the sand at first, and working them downward with a slow vibration. Rocks and wind. Kinetic glass, silicone. Marrow. 1902.
When Toulouse came up behind her, she stood and drank in the dignity of his half-smile. She knew they were going to the volcano.
[21 Feb 2002|10:10pm]
The most curious thing about Toulouse St. Martin was that he was already dead, and he was still the friendliest child in St. Pierre. He had danced the can-can with Orpheus and the lost souls and escaped with the help of a winged clown who never told him his name. Or, more to the point, he always told Toulouse a different name when he asked and no two people ever seemed to address him the same.
Nowadays, Toulouse understood that his body was more of a suggestions than a rule, and while he rarely strayed far from the blueprint he had been handed at birth, he sometimes decided that it might be more effective to appear as an ethereal mist that only hinted that he was a boy. Other times, he would use a trick the clown had taught him as they passed through Port Au Prince and appear as a zombi, gruesome and decaying. But most days he was usually just a boy.
[19 Feb 2002|06:51pm]
To say that Gullifoyle was a fat man would be misleading. In the technical parlance of the sideshow, the fat man conjures up the image of someone who is all over huge. Often one who must be shifted with weights and pulleys, and who carries around badges like "glandular problem" because there is no way under a merciful God that a normal man could become so obese. Gullifoyle was not a fat man, but he did have a pronounced roundness about his middle and the sort of rubbery disposition best left to butchers.
Most days you could find him around Fat Boy's Twenty Four, a perfect 1950's style diner that was dropped incongruously in the middle of the Size Ten in One pavilion. There was even a perfectly maintained rectangle of asphalt with white lines painted for cars, even though everyone walked when they needed to get somewhere. The outside was a stain resistant high chrome and gleamed in defiance of the run down fin de siecle architecture around it.
When you got to be of Gullifoyle's age and gastronomical stature, Henry Miller started to mean a lot to you. You either became a Tropic of Cancer man, hiking your belt up north to cover your gut, or you became a Tropic of Capricorn man, letting the belt slide down south where the globe of your stomach could be consulted for directions, usually on where to eat. The old talker had chosen the latter.
Like other, more famous showmen before him, he was obsessed with the electrical light, and it's younger cousin made famous by Bugsy Siegel's eye sore metropolis in the Nevada desert, the neon light. The pavilion had long ago been cut off from the power grid for its abuses, and so the old man had taken a correspondence course and was trying desperately to become an electrician. When he discovered the hot springs in the caverns beneath the pavilion, he knew there would be a way to make his neon live again, power grid be damned! And so, whenever he wasn't warming stools at Fat Boy's, he had his sleeves rolled up and his leather apron on, working like a mad scientist.
Like other, more famous men who had used his name, he was also fixated on revenge. Whenever he snuck a hip flask of gin into Fat Boy's or if you found him at the Milk and Cheese on a late night bender, he was always full of truculent but vague curses. Was it over money? Authority? A woman? He often threatened to cut off his unknown nemesis' genitals and keep them in a jar, which flavored the idea of the crime, but provided no solid evidence. Some whispered that it was a Hammuarbian instinct that compelled this curse, and that accounted for the swell of his gut and why the burlesque girls always felt so safe around him. Still, there was no way to tell if someone had ratified a missile reduction treaty under his loose trousers, cut as they were for a flapper's companion.
Some of the Harlequin Lost flocked around him when he travelled from place to place, but something always kept them from following him inside. Perhaps when they saw him pitch a show, especially his pride and joy, the Tiki Goddesses Dance Sensation, they saw the fire of a preacher and flocked like moths to the flickering light. But mired as he was in his cavern, resuscitating the Lazarus of his neon dream, he would not be the one to pull the Carnival back from ruin.
[19 Feb 2002|06:48pm]
Trivia's next letter was not delivered by samurai, although she did think she saw the plumes of his garish mask disappearing behind the sand dune when she bent to pick up the sugar skull and the sealed letter. After wating several weeks for a reply to her letter, she was intrigued by the strange correspondence, she broke the seal and stood, leaning against the doorjam of her trailer as she read:
Dear Trivia,
It took some convincing to send this dispatch to you through my friend, though he assures me that he will not make the trip again no matter how much I implore him. Instead, he has instructions to meet with a local boy and one of your greatest admirers there in St. Pierre. He is called Toulouse St. Martin, though it is unlikely that you know him by either of his names. He is the one who favors tributes of seashells and stones when he calls on you. His uncle is a geologist, and brings the boy samples of things from across the world. With luck, I will be able to teach him the road between you and I, though I am sure many of our missives will get delayed, since he is a curious boy and there are many things to be seen between here and there.
I am saddened to hear about Papa Deuxcheveaux, but at the same time, knowing that he has probably joined Cousin Zaka and Ogoun, driving a taxi or playing piano, I feel it may be easier to speak with him now than before.
It is not my fault that the pinata was filled with hearts (I am ashamed to say that between blindfold and rum that is all I remember of it), though I can imagine why you would mistake my first letter for a billet doux. I assure you that I am not in the business of breaking hearts, and those I mend, I do not mend for myself. Though, like a love letter, it was an invitation to make something greater than yourself. What curious notions you have, believing that your imaginary Martinique is any more real than the fiction where I live! On the other hand, the geography of a fiction bears more ressemblance to origami than cartography. As is my place imagined, as is your place imagined, as is the distance between us imagined as well. Amen.
The next time you see Toulouse, he will know the way back to me. Until then, hope that the beach is warm and the breeze is cool.
Best Wishes,
Brother Terethel di Golias-Elegua
[19 Feb 2002|06:27pm]
The first time I descended into the aquarium, I brought my own pomegranate to assure myself that I would not be trapped there. The building was fashioned to look like a proud steam vessel built for midgets. More than just metaphor, the pedant who constructed the place had, in fact built several half-scale staterooms above deck full of refugees from the Sacking of Tinytown by some splinter sect of Chango Cola, LLC. As if this were not strange enough, a band of pranksters had stolen a crane and uprooted the octopus ride, dropping it and it's scallop shell gondolas on the aft of the ship, shouting "Viva Nemo! Viva Nemo!" The midgets could do nothing to stop the industrial behemoth and it crawled noisily away into the night unharmed. The finishing touch was the Christ figure, removed from his cross and put in a dress, leaned up against the railing on the prow of the ship. It took eight reduced size pall bearers to bring the wooden savior to the place of his ressurection and several more to perform the annunciation. And he still looked sad, in spite of his chiffon dress.
The stairs were cut down under Christ's forlorn gaze, and as you passed under him into the aquarium you would sometimes feel a phantom drop of blood or a tear on the back of your neck. Inside was where Doctor Lilliput Parnassus moved the worst victims of the fractal plague. The darkness was better for them because it gave them less to contemplate, and kept their minds blank and kept the whorls from eddying across their skin. The raised areas felt almost like someone had sprinkled blue salt crystals over them in intricate patterns. It was rumored that the doctor could read the whorls like gypsy ladies read tea leaves, but I made sure to visit when he was away on a triste with Cherry Groove the coquettish space girl in the burlesque. He would not have taken well to a holy man entering his place of science. Or pseudo-science at least.
By some miracle, the fish were mostly still alive, though the glass wall of their tanks had been allowed to grow over with algae except in the case of the catfish who kept it clean themselves. Almost every one of the patients stared blankly at the algae mumbling a steady stream of chemical chains as though they were prayers. The disease is not an airborne contagion, but a thoughtborne one. As long as I remained confident and focused, I was in no danger, but the more you tried to break things down, the more susceptible you became. I briefly wondered what purpose this plague could serve, then realized that such wondering was the first step to infection. There was nothing I could do for them, though I wanted to see their condition first hand, so I left passing under the sad eyes of Our Lord of Drag Queens.
[19 Feb 2002|12:49am]
Monsieur,
True, it is not my custom to speak to strangers. I came here to listen to the Island, to the old ones, to the fleeting voices of the flowers. I am afraid I am still listening.
The man who made our pi�ata was a curious fellow, Herr Jurgen. His father was a German clockmaker who left all of his children and his family to make terra cotta sundials in Mexico. He married a senorita 30 years his junior and never wrote to his family again. He left Jurgen the shop, but alas he had no skill for mechanization, only the thickets and feathers that adorned the clocks. After his mother died, he moved here and started making
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Monsieur,
True, it is not my custom to speak to strangers. I came here to listen to the Island, to the old ones, to the fleeting voices of the flowers. I am afraid I am still listening.
The man who made our pi�ata was a curious fellow, Herr Jurgen. His father was a German clockmaker who left all of his children and his family to make terra cotta sundials in Mexico. He married a senorita 30 years his junior and never wrote to his family again. He left Jurgen the shop, but alas he had no skill for mechanization, only the thickets and feathers that adorned the clocks. After his mother died, he moved here and started making <a href="pinatas" title="undefined" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://journal.dadahero.com/users/sizeteninone/link.php?about="pinatas">pinatas. Pi�atas, you see, have very little to do with Martinique. They aren�t French or native, but the tourists buy them anyway. One likes to bring color home from the islands. Jurgen had a queer little corner shop full of papers from all over the world that he used for his art. He would sit me down on three-legged stools, carried on a boat from Germany, and I would wrap streamers round and round my fingers as he told me stories. We drank mint tea with Papa Deuxcheveaux. We both knew never to ask him the time. They are both dead now, I think.
The night you speak of I wore red tule like a fighting fish. Earlier that day, in preparation for Mercredi des cendres, Jurgen made a special pi�ata with Japanese paper. Do you remember what it looked like?
�Lieblingskind,� he called me, always, �the man who breaks this pi�ata will break your heart three times and mend it once.� And he filled it with his roughly-hewn hands and gave it to petit Nicholas to carry to the celebration.
I don�t believe in such prophecies, Monsieur. Your messenger made me smile, he liked my trinkets and I showed him the most precious ones. We walked to Montagne Pelee. But I cannot blindly follow. Believe it or not, �Bluebeard's daughter� has a real job here, although few know that. I do not spend my days in idleness, dreaming of those who lumber in to footprint my beach and bring me carnations.
My little trailer outside of St. Pierre is not so irrelevant as it seems. It dispatches information to points in the outside world which desire it. From here I can discern which mythologies I want to tangle myself in. Maybe not a pirate�s daughter, but a descent of the most important drunk Martinique ever knew. I await elucidation. I thank you for the remembrance of my friend Jurgen.
I presume we are not done talking yet.
With overdue regards,
Trivia
[17 Feb 2002|10:50pm]
To have the fractal plague is to be mired in specificity. It is to have all five hundred channels on at once. It is to count the black and white spots in the channel static. It is to separate your raviolis. It is recurses, foiled again, and again, and again.
[17 Feb 2002|10:49pm]
Dear Trivia,
Please forgive the rather outlandish appearance of the man who handed you this missive, for I assure you that in spite of his attire he is the only one who could be trusted to deliver my posts. He claims to be samurai, though he has never once removed his mask, so I have been unable to even begin to discern his nationality, let alone his lineage. Whatever the case, he will not stand to questioning. When asked which daimyo he serves, he simply replies "Tawagoto." At first, I took this for a truthful answer, but I later discovered that it is simply a word for "nonsense." For his name, his reply turned out to simply be a list of numbers which I cannot see any pattern in.
But do not let me get carried away (though I confess that it is my intention to do just that with you). If any of the things they say about you are true, you may not remember me. I may have been just another face in a procession of hopeless boys lined up at your doorstep. Many years ago, though, we burst a pinata together, do you remember it? I was an amateur with the local rum and you had to shout instructions to me once the blindfold was on. "To the left, to the left!" And then the squeal of delight once I swung that I could only take to mean that I had swung true, scattering heart shaped baubles arcoss the cobbled street. Of course, by the time my besotted fingers managed to work the blindfold free you had gone, but the astounded faces around me announced with more than a little trepidation, "That was Trivia! Bluebeard's daughter! And she spoke to you!"
Or perhaps the next day when there was a knock and you discovered the carnations on your doormat, you glanced up, expecting to see the form of a dark-skinned child in cut-offs rolling behind the dune behind your home, but instead caught a glimpse of a broad shouldered man who seemed altogether too pale to be found in Martinique?
Perhaps you looked into this curious fellow. Perhaps you found out that he disappeared the next day to speak to Papa Deuxcheveaux. I am sure you have heard of him. The crackpot Frenchman who is said to be able to be ridden by the loa of his automobile? He was a scraggly fellow even when I knew him with only a few teeth to claim as his own, but he could play jazz piano like a man posessed. I would not think automobiles would be good for such things, but these are the stories. And every bit as true as yours, I am sure.
Your life in Martinique is only the first step. The offerings, the whisperings, and the mythology are blooming around you and if you pack your things and follow my outlandish messenger, he will lead you to your next step. Or at least to another path for you to walk.
Yours sincerely,
Brother Terethel di Golias-Elegua
[16 Feb 2002|01:10pm]
When Trivia lived in Martinique, she barely ever spoke. She smiled at the fruit vendors, and she sent vivid floral postcards to her nieces in Iowa, and a vials of sand. She told them that when they were in high school they would spend magic summers with her, and touch the ocean, and speak French, and fall in love with islanders who would talk about the color of their cornsilk hair.
People made up stories about her, and children ran up to the door of her trailer and knocked, left strange offerings of crushed flowers and dog toys, and ran away. They said she was the daughter of Bluebeard. They said she could see all the treasure buried in the sand. They said she would never die, that she was a witch, that she enchanted men into her lair during Carnaval, and threw their wasted bodies in the sea when she was sated.
None of this was true, but it pleased her nonetheless. It pleased the children, and she put the crushed flowers in a book.
If she ever had another name, or a surname, nobody knew it, not even the postal carrier. Nobody knew how old she was, or if she was an American or a Laplander. During Carnaval, she did drink sweet drinks until dawn and dance on the street. She wore red. She stumbled home alone.
She lived simply, without many memories or knick knacks. She liked edges. She never used the phone. She only read letters and poetry. Nobody seemed to matter to her. She seemed to have found that transcendent solitary peace that fleets from people�s eyelids after waking.
But there were some people who mattered to her, besides the fruit vendors and her frothy landlocked nieces, besides the children who said she had pirate blood�who thought her ancestors had seduced native girls and ravaged empires.
One day, after long years of waiting--or hiding--a message came, or rather a messenger, and she knew she had to leave.
[10 Feb 2002|06:02pm]
When my travelling companions and I first arrived at the Size Ten In One Circus Sideshow and Tent Revival, it was little more than a glorious ruin. The once opulent outbuildings, furnished with the finest notions in Christendom were all tarnished and calcified from a long period of disuse. The performers we little more than spectres, even the ones in brightly colored finery. Many of them had contraced a fractal plague which, while not fatal, made the movements mechanical and their decisions algorithmic.
The carnival had not been open in years, apart for visiting dignitaries who wanted a glimpse at what was once a name spoken across the world in the same breath as words like "decadent," "outlandish," "revolutionary," or at least "subversive." It pleased them, it some ways to see that this sort of energy did not last so they could unfold it into "could not last" and return to the regulation of empires knowing they had done the right thing by returning to the fold when they did.
Without the revelations of a demented visionary to rally around, the dissenting voices which had once played off each other, each one pushing the other to do something better, had once more folded into themselves. Cliques became cults, and each one had appropriated part of the former fairgrounds for the worship of their own idols.
The three of us were allowed to stay and while we grew close to some of the organizations there, the fellowship shared amongst us was of a stronger mettle. We were the first outsiders to arrive and help rebuild the carnival to its former glory. What follows are our accounts of what we and the other outsiders encountered when they arrived as well as the ideas that they brought with them to mend the disrepair that we found.
HOW TO READ THE SIZE TEN IN ONE CIRCUS SIDESHOW AND TENT REVIVAL
[27 Jan 2002|07:39pm]
The management sense that perhaps there is some concern or consternation on the part of readers of the Size Ten In One. As such, we have assembled this hand guide to help you enjoy the experience more fully. We understand your concern, as the environment is both linear and hypertextual, but we hope that with this simple guide, you will feel more at easy in our world of topsy-turvydom.
IN YOUR FRIENDS VIEW: For the cautious traveller, we suggest simply adding the Size Ten in One to your friends list. Entries will be presented to you on a sporadic, but linear fashion. If you feel so inclined, you may also leave comments on the journal, telling the intrepid wordnauts about your reactions to a piece. Be advised, however, that there will be hyperlinks leading you to other stories in many of the entries! Do not follow these unless you feel you are ready to graduate to a higher level!
AT THE SIZETENINONE COMMUNITY: More adventurous and cosmopolitan readers can travel to the Size Ten in One community page, where they will find that at the end of every entry there is a small form to fill out. Whenever the urge strikes you, we strongly encourage you to write a word or a phrase that you think describes the entry you have just read, in order to provide guidance for future readers. Following the hyperlinks will guide you on a path that others have already blazed for you, filling out their own thoughts into this aforementioned box. Occasionally, you will find yourself on the Size Ten In One web site. Do not be afraid, this page exists to help contributors to the Size Ten in One brainstorm ideas for future assaults on the narrative environment. You will still have a direct line to the author, should you want to leave a little note.
AT THE SIZE TEN IN ONE WEB SITE (forthcoming): Those of you who wish to leave the world of the LiveJournal behind can go to the forthcoming Size Ten In One Circus Side Show and Tent Revival web site. It has many of the features of the Size Ten In One Community, and may, in future, have storage space for multi-media, or diversions created by the members of the community. However, be warned, the linear structure of the Size Ten in One story is tossed aside at the site, so that explorers can have the most carnival-like experience.
We hope that with these guidlines, you will be able to enjoy a safe and healthy stay in our hypertextual environment. Thank you for your time.
[18 Jan 2002|10:13pm]
Gullifoyle the talker was standing on the gazebo overlooking a throng of fine upstanding rubes who were all mentally projecting the PTA-goers version of a psychic pitch fork and torches. Sure, they had given him a week's worth of permits for his carnival, but the week was supposed to be for running running the carnival, not setting it up.
By now, it was clear that the carnival was something quite unlike anything they'd ever seen before. A brightly colored wall of canvas surrounded the place, splashed with the most outlandish claims about what lay inside. The ferris wheel, they could see, poking up from the thicket of tents and makeshift structures inside. And then there was the gigantic clown statue, standing five stories tall with a smile that shifted from pleasant to menaciing as the light of day dimmed. No one had seen them move it in, or anything large enough to have provided the parts for such a garish thing. And then there were the people. Strange folks wandering around the town at night, some of them ladies of the evening, for sure.
But that was the way it worked, and Gullifoyle knew that. It was the magic behind the carnival, the hook, line and sinker that got them every time. He began his speech, "Now, I do apologize, ladies and gentlemen, but the Size Ten in One Circus, Sideshow, and Tent Revival is no ordinary entertainment. It is a total experience that you simply must see to believe. We have jugglers and stiltwalkers, lions and tigers, giants and midgets, wild men and half-men. We've got more thrills and excitement in one place since the Great American Exposition..."
The speech never failed. By the time he was done, everyone was either outraged or desperate for a ticket.
antecedant - "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges
[18 Jan 2002|02:05pm]
In the "Eleventh Volume" which I have mentioned, there are allusions to preceding and succeeding volumes. In an article in the N.R.F. which is now classic, Nestor Ibarra had denied the existence of those companion volumes; Ezequiel Martinez Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle have refuted that doubt, perhaps victoriously. The fact is that up to now the most diligent inquiries have been fruitless. In vain we have upended the libraries of the two Americas and of Europe. Alfonso Reyes, tired of these subordinate sleuthing procedures, proposes that we should all undertake the task of reconstructing the many and weighty tomes that are lacking: ex ungue leonem. He calculates, half in earnest and half jokingly, that a generation of tlonistas should be sufficient. This venturesome computation brings us back to the fundamental problem: Who are the inventors of Tlon? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor-- an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly--has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of subordinating this inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed Tlon was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it. The popular magazines, with pardonable excess, have spread news of the zoology and topography of Tlon; I think its transparent tigers and towers of blood perhaps do not merit the continued attention of all men. I shall venture to request a few minutes to expound on its concept of the universe.
antecedant - Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter p 49
[18 Jan 2002|01:09pm]
'And the curtains had never been opened in all my memory of the place, nor could a single one of the other girls recall when those curtains had last been opened, either, for with those drapes there had been made the artificial night of pleasure which was the perennial season of the salon. But now, with the Mistress of the Revels departed into darkness it seemed only right and proper that we should give it all back to common day.
'So we threw open the curtains, and the shutters too, and then the tall window that opened above the melancholy river, from which came off a chill yet bracing wind.
'It was the cold light of early dawn and how sadly, how soberly it lit that room which deceitful candles made so gorgeous! We saw, now, what we had never seen before; how the moth had nibbled the upholstery, the mice had gnawed away at the Persian carpets and dust caked all the cornices. The luxury of that place had been nothing but illusion, created by the candles of midnight, and, in the dawn, all was sere, worn out decay. We saw the stains of damp and mould on the ceilings and the damask walls; the gilding on the mirrors was all tarnished and a bloom of dust obscured the glass so that, when we looked within them, there we saw, not the fresh young women that we were, but the hags we would become, and knew that, we too, like pleasures, were mortal.'
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