Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
A blog meme with fangs
Candy, my second favorite smart bitch (sorry, Candy, but my wife takes the cake on this one), has tagged me with a blog meme. Here are the rules:
1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas…
5. Tag five people to do the same.
My twenty-third blog, “And you thought Metallica was a head-banger band“, concerned the history of the tarantula Poechilotheria metallica. (Beth alert! Don’t click that link!) Here’s the fifth sentence:
A bloke named Hendriks braved Bengal tigers, heavily armed Indian outlaws, and worst of all, the Indian Customs Export Bureau to take seven tarantulas back to Europe.
If I may be permitted a few liberties with the deconstruction, I hazard that ‘Hendriks’ is, here, symbolic of Everyman, Everyman in the Kierkegaardian sense, that is to say, Kierkegaard post-Derrida, and the ‘Bengal tigers’ are intended as Jungian shadows, or perhaps a masculinized version of the Triple Goddess. One might conclude that the ‘Indian Customs Export Bureau’ was Hoffman’s way of invoking the Freudian superego, but one would be erroneous. Rather, the ‘Indian Customs Export Bureau’ is a figment of an unfathomable Fahrvergnügen-deprived zeitgeist, an ersatz Bildungsroman as it were, and should be viewed in the context of the author’s angst regarding his recent unsuccessful attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation.
Lastly, what are we to make of the ‘seven tarantulas’ taken ‘back to Europe’? Taking into consideration the author’s Hebraic roots, we note that ‘seven’ is Yahweh’s special number signifying perfection and completion (e.g., Leviticus 23: 23-25). Yet a perusal of Hoffman’s personal library reveals a well-thumbed copy of T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and so the ‘seven tarantulas’ may signify his latent desire to bugger boys in the desert. That Hoffman has an extensive William S. Burroughs collection would only seem to corroborate this hypothesis, and ‘back to Europe’ might be rearranged, to wit, ‘European backdoor’, with obvious implications.
In summary, Hoffman, for all his heterosexual rantings, was, here, outing himself “in code”.
On the other hand, he may have been sharing a fun bit of tarantula lore.
I tag: Gabriele, Beth, Debi, Maureen, and Christine.
Oops! I want Demented Michelle in that group, too. Yeah, yeah, I know I can’t count.
D.
Aw, fuck you, man. Yours is way funnier than mine. Now I wish I’d psychoanalyzed my entries, too.
*sulk*
When I saw that you had tagged me, I began chortling. I didn’t know what I would do with it but I knew I could work with it.
Noticing my glee, my son asked me for an explanation. Afterwards, he said, “I don’t see how this is any fun.”
Oh, well. He’s simply not as evil as I am.
Hey Doug, a question for your wife that’s completely apropos of nothing: are there any spiders with bright colors on them? I ask because I was reading Anansi Boys this week and remember wondering about this when reading American Gods – so now I’ve got two books’ worth of curiosity built up.
Are the bright colors just an invention of Neil Gaiman’s to help flesh out characterization (the bright yellow gloves and bright green fedora), or is there some basis for it in the physical world?
Thanks.
The answer is yes. I’ll have Karen find me some links for you.
ROFL. That totally kicked ass, Doug. Much better than my own dumb psychoanalysis. You rule.