25 November 2007

A Shaggy But Nonetheless Exquisite Blorpse


As you may know, "Exquisite Corpse" is a game invented by those madcap modernists known as Surrealists in which a group of people contribute sections of words or images to produce a collaborative (and monstrous) artwork. The rub is that they make their contribution sight unseen, so the artist continues the drawing using only the most minute portion of the previous one (hidden by folding the paper over) or the writer uses just the last word of the previous writer's contribution. According to legend (that or wikipedia), the name comes from the first game played, which resulted in the phrase "The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine."

NOW: it has been suggested by the entity the people at ghost of paper will henceforth refer to as "Pulp Zombie" that a version of this method be launched into the blogosphere. As we are 1) touched by the connections being made across space, across people, across blogs ... the implications of minds stuck on the web, and 2) worried about the current distance between posts, we decided perhaps it's worth a shot.

THOUGH: Of course, the circumstances make a true "exquisite corpse" unfeasible, as each contributer will be privy to what came before, our beast will be built in sections and without blueprint. A virtual narrative daisy chain.

OR: Perhaps a better model would be the beloved so-called "shaggy dog joke," that brand of comic jazz in which the teller stretches his story out to include absurdly specific and tangential details, building and building a palace of useless information until finally the punchline ("fuck you clown," for example ... if you know that one) is the height of anticlimax.

IDEALLY: A goodly number of peeps will contribute - in large amounts, small amounts, named or unnamed, tamed or untamed, putting as much or as little time and effort into it as possible.

SO: as to what goes here ... here goes nothing. A shaggy, but nonetheless exquisite blorpse.

So there's this really fat beekeeper named Gary. And Gary lives in this old house way up on a hill by himself. He has no wife, no friends, and no pets - other than the bees, but they're more of a vocation. In fact when his sister Melinda, who lived in town with her family, suggested they go see Bee Movie, it took him a while to register why she'd done so. When he's not making sure those bees are kept, his hobbies involve other minature microcosmic worlds - he builds model ships in bottles, he collects model trains, and he reads political science voraciously. Anyway one day he's eating Hamburger Helper (which he liked) and watching that new reality show Kid Nation (which he didn't) and the doorbell rings...

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

...so Gary yells out, "Hey! Why are you doing that to my doorbell?"
Honey spun around to find the voice.
"Up here. In the tree." Gary's voice was weird.
Honey looked up into the large, dying tree adjacent to the house. Gary was leaning out from a branch about ten feet up, covered in Hamburger Helper, gripping a pair of binoculars with one greasy hand and clinging to the thick trunk with the other (and slightly less greasy) hand. "What are you doing up there?"
Gary slowly raised the binoculars to his eyes and looked towards the house. "I'm watching Kid Nation. It's on in my house. On my TV. In my house. Right there."
Honey held a delicate hand to her wrinkled brow. She was squinting. A lot of people squinted at Gary. "Why don't you just watch inside? You know...'cause the TV's in there."
Gary's eyes peeled from the binoculars and focused on Honey. "Because my bees are up here."
Honey stepped back and looked over Gary's shoulder. She saw...

kris said...

. . . a bulbous beehive, swarming with activity. A bee buzzed past her ear. Then another. She darted her head up, left, right, catching glimpses of bees as they hurtled through her field of vision. This is bad, Honey thought. “This is bad!” Honey said.
Gary had his binoculars trained to his window. “Yeah, I mean, hasn’t reality TV gone far enough?” he said. “Will they just keep pushing the limits of decency--”
“The bees!” Honey said. A bee landed on her cheek. She swatted her face and ducked.
“The bees won’t hurt you,” Gary said. “Bees are herbivores.”
A bee landed on her shoulder and Honey twisted around frantically and flailed her arms through the air. “Bees!” Honey said.
“Please. You didn’t even notice the bees until I mentioned them!” Gary called down from his perch.
Honey tried the door and it clicked and swung wide. “Hey!” Gary said. She dashed inside and closed the swarm out behind her. She thought for a moment about Gary on his branch, the swarm of bees, and the book Lord of the Flies before deciding to call . . .

Viva La Muerte said...

...a spade a spade. "Hey, that's a spade." She was looking at a rusty garden spade leaning against the couch.
"If you're wondering about the spade, I can explain that!" Gary was shouting from the tree. "I have an indoor gardening permit!"
Honey crept over to the window and looked out at Gary. On his branch. In his tree. The bees were buzzing about his delicately balanced body. He looked frustrated as he labored to slide his considerable girth down the thick trunk. "I'm coming down."
Honey watched, rapt, as Gary lumbered towards the porch, trailing bees and wheezes. She was leaning out the window, urgently trying to get Gary's attention, "Wait, Gary! You forgot to..."

Anonymous said...

"...take off your pants before entering the house. Can't you read the sign?" She pointed to the sign, which read: "Take Off Your Pants, All Ye Who Enter Here." And Gary responded, "No."

Because he couldn't read the sign.

Because he was an illiterate. Or, as he would say, "a illiterate," because he didn't even know that rule.

People usually regarded him as a pretty keen fellow, but what they didn't know was that those hours pouring over poli sci were in fact hours spent pouring over picture books of poli sci. He especially loved "Mao, Freud, And The Law Of Diminishing Returns, The Pop-Up Book."

"Okay, lady! I'm taking them off!"

"Good. Now get in here so we can..."

Unknown said...

blog!" It was what all the cool kids were doing.

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