The bad thing about sharing these images from my sketchbook of Drawing Prompts is that I must always add a lengthy explanation: for if I were to post the thing without any description, then the viewer would wonder, “Why does it say ‘Voodoo doll’ in the top right corner?” But if I inform you that this book contains a number of pages of paper, & all are blank except for a phrase stamped in each page’s corner which is supposed to prompt the artist to create, then you understand that ‘Voodoo doll’ was the given subject, and the rest of the image is the result of my skill as an illustrator.
Dear diary,
Today I awoke with a burning desire to learn the backstory and all the behind-the-scenes facts about the video game Q*bert, but I quit after learning only the names of the enemies – so here they are:
Coily is the egg that becomes a snake; Ugg and Wrongway are the two purple creatures; and Slick and Sam are the two green creatures.
Now I’ll move on to another topic.
Let’s recall what the universe looked like before the last major development. Instead of the U.S.A. sandwiched in between Canada and Mexico, there was only Canada up north and Mexico down south: no middle. Canada’s boundary looked like a hamburger bun, just a semicircle with a curved top and flat bottom; and Mexico’s northernmost territory ended at the flat part of Canada’s bun—that’s their shared border, very hotly disputed—and the rest, that is to say, the lower part of Mexico’s outline, resembles a cone-shaped pastry: the kind that’s made of a wafer similar in texture to a waffle, which enables ice cream to be held in the hand and eaten without a bowl or spoon – you simply lick it with your tongue. Thus is the kingdom of Mexico: a large waffle cone weighing 29 grams and having 121 calories. Sodium 74 mg. That’s 3% of the daily recommended value. Magnesium 2%. Iron 5%.
So we have Canada and Mexico: a burger bun on a sugar cone. Now what? Here’s the problem: Canada wants Mexico to become South Canada; whereas Mexico wants Canada to become North Mexico. We can use one of the tales about King David, from the First Book of Samuel (chapter 27), to flesh out generally what happened. Or I should say: what REALLY happened.
Filibuster. From the Dutch word for pirate. “Free” + “booty”: David the freebooter. David the filibuster. Where should David originate? I don’t want to offend anyone; but, as a reluctant Francophile, I’ll have David hail from a Canadian manger. Now we all know David as the most famous King of ancient Israel. But this story takes place before his royal title became official. So, like we established, David was born in Canada. And the leader of Canada, in these pre-ancient times, was “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And the Emperor of Mexico was Aaron Burr (from the novel Burr by Gore Vidal). OK, now we can start.
To begin a story, simply pull the plunger at the side of the machine. (“Montague Redgrave’s popularization of the spring launcher and innovations in game design are acknowledged as the birth of pinball in its modern form.”)
David said in his heart, “It is clear to me now: I shall certainly perish one day by the hand of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.” (For he and David had had an awesome argument last evening.) “The best thing for me to do, therefore, is that I should speedily escape into the countryside of the Mexicans; then ‘Kubla Khan: A Fragment’ will despair of hunting me any more throughout the coasts of Coromandel, where I now live, deep in the Canadian woods. Like so, I shall wriggle out of his hand.” And David arose, and he rounded up the 600 pirates that were with him, and they crossed over to the side of Aaron Burr, the Eternal Emperor of Mexico (& former V.P. under Thomas Jefferson). So David dwelt with Emperor Burr in Mexico—he & his freebooters—every pirate with his harem, even David with his two wives, Ahinoam the Jezreelitess, and Abigail the Carmelitess, Nabal’s wife.
And when “Kubla Khan; a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” was told that David had run off to the province of Mexico, the Canadian King decided to call off his manhunting expedition. The jackals were kenneled, and they were fed the choicest scraps and thanked for their service.
Then pre-king David said unto the Mexican Emperor Burr, “If I have now found grace in thine eyes, let your country offer me a mansion, just a small one for me and my gang of filibusters, in some town in the highlands. I need a place to set up shop. You don’t want MY gang dwelling in the royal city alongside YOUR gang – believe me.” And Emperor Aaron Burr agreed, and he offered David the city-state of Texas: wherefore Texas pertaineth unto snake-wranglers and oilmen unto this day. And the time that David dwelt in the empire of Mexico was 1.33 years.
During which time, David and his freebooters rose up and despoiled the Winnipeggers, as well as the British Columbians of Vancouver, and also the Californians: for those provinces were of old the inhabitants of the land; from where Eagan is now, all the way to Burnsville. And when David pillaged a territory, he left neither man nor woman alive; he stole all the livestock—sheep, oxen, asses, and camels—and all goods and apparel. Then, whenever David returned back to Mexico, Emperor Burr would inquire of him, “Whither now have ye made a clusterfuck?” And David would answer variously, for instance: “Against the western woodlands of Manitoba”; or, “Round about Maine”; or, “As tho it was one big chicken, we fried Kentucky.” And, like I said, David’s custom was to leave neither man nor woman alive to return with him to Texas; for he reasoned: They might tattle on us, saying, “David & his thugs are even worse than Glanton’s gang from Blood Meridian.” And this was his practice during the whole of the time that he spent in the country of the Mexicans. And Aaron Burr trusted David, saying: “He hath made his native Canadians utterly to abhor him; thus he shall never cease to be my vavasour.”
*
That’s it!—THE END: that’s the entirety of 1st Samuel chapter 27. Can you believe these tales that God tells us? So bloody, so heinous. And what seems to be the point? (I love this shit.) So brief, as well.
The King James Bible translates that final word of my rendition (the last term above the asterisk) as servant. The New Jewish Publication Society opts for vassal. So I went with vavasour, which apparently denotes “a villein owing allegiance to a lord and having other villeins under him.” (I am the first scribe to utilize this word, by the way, since 1900 A.D.)
Now I’ve schooled myself on both Q*bert and David the Freebooter. Is that enough wisdom for a blog post, or too much? I think it is. But I’m still enjoying the Wallace Stevens bio (The Whole Harmonium by Paul Mariani) to such a degree that I can’t resist sharing one quote, out of the many I loved from last night’s reading; after which I’ll embed a rap track and press the PUBLISH button. This is from near the end of chapter 8:
In between waiting for his New York insurance associates to wake up and get down to business, he spent hours in a dentist’s office having his teeth drilled and working evenings on some poems he’d brought with him. This batch would appear five months later in the October issue of Poetry under the collective heading of Pecksniffiana and go on to win the Harriet Levinson Prize, worth $500.
Pecksniffiana. As in Dickens’s unctuously hypocritical character in Martin Chuzzlewit. “Some people likened him to a direction-post,” Dickens writes of Pecksniff, “which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.” Stevens loved inventing or reimagining his characters and then peppering them throughout his poems, early and late, so that they seemed a mixture of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Dada, resisting interpretation—as he said good poetry must do—almost successfully.
Carroll, Lear, and Tzara: my own Holy Trinity. So I like this passage because it shows how a beloved poet’s beloved poets match my own. I also like his stance on “good poetry”. Now I gotta go bye.
P.S.
Here’s another rap demo that I made all by myself:
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