Friday, May 30, 2008
Bathroom Monologue: Ogre-Brained, Or, “And chances are that your kids are not getting enough art —in or out of school.” –Americans for the Arts ad
They didn’t know where the ogre came from. Some of the village children said they saw him walk out of a forest from east of the hills, but when the adults went to look, there was no forest to see. What they did see was a fifteen-foote ogre with shale for skin and shite for brains. He could only remember one word at a time, and for the first few weeks all he said was, “Moose.” The village people had no idea why. They had practical ideas, though. Since he was such a docile monster, they put a harness on him, dangled a turnip in front of his face from a fishing line, directed him through the fields. After dozens of man-hours of labor he captured his turnip and one of the village children replaced it with a drawing a moose. It tripled his productivity. He really wanted that drawing. The drawing saved him from being classified as livestock, for one day while chasing it and dragging the plough he changed his favorite word changed from “Moose” to “Paper.”
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That is SO awesome. I love that the ogre is smarter than his vocabulary suggests - enough to know that a representation of a thing is not the thing.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of the Lilly Tomlin routine in "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe", where the baglady's trying to teach her alien friends the difference between an Andy Warhol painting and an actual can of soup. "Soup, Art. Art, Soup. No, no that's Art, not Soup."