The Owlstain SCAT
Melos e Artes
Owlstain, FZ 23632
Skid Slekton, Editor and Publisher (EP)
Mona Coltrane, Managing Editor (ME)
Adam Trembart, Art Director (AD)
S’apparaît tous les mercredis depuis 1987.
27 January 2010
ADA ROMER, 1984–2010
D. I. Swopes
Native of Tixpu and daughter of Ada Kidjaki née Lara Monterroso, an artist of entropic media coterminous with said faubourg, Ada Romer, herself an incomparable explorer of the somatosensorium as well as novatory scholar of schizomythia and taboo, was born 29 January 1984. To the many who knew her intimately, and perhaps also to those who did not, Ada’s life refracted that of her mother, whose self-portrait, Full-Frontal Matriarch, purportedly captures the emergence into this world of the late birkîyâm herself, and who died in mysterious circumstances following the première of her entropicollage about the erotics of childbirth.

Contingent upon this tragic foreshadowing of her own demise, Ada’s mother’s fraternal gimmals, Rick and Djuma Kidjaki, pocket magnates of a handy line of trans-Arathusean yawls sailing out of Agua Prieta’s Porto Viejo, took her on as their own little seaworthy mascotte, the settings of whose petites histoires excluded neither the insular raffinements of Aseli and Abenaseli nor the wilder shores of Port Astri Bay, Wyoming.

Formal schooling harked, however, calling her back to the dusky heights of Tixpu where she would matriculate bottom form at that barrio’s Tiliar Boarding School, but not, however, before taking a crawl-on part in A Tara T. Dirty™, Gal V!, the fifth of that auteur’s infamous Gal series of kinæsthesioscopes starring Cratti D’Aruntles. Upon completion of shooting, Ada remained on with her uncles in that flick’s sex logur, Paris, haply there to estivate, and thus elude the parochial savagery of the first Berdi War, before returning to Tixpu upon that conflict’s clôture.

While still sub-top form at TBS, our avid young authoress-in-the-bud put out Divastigations, “a small tri-monthly multilingual journal of arts, writing, and whatnot.” Later, in lieu, however, of matriculating top form, Ada, sponsored by that school’s principal, Dr. Avílano Bimkov, opted for a year of heterolexical fieldwork in Iagip and Iaqip, Wyo., work upon which she later grounded an article communicated by Prof. Bernard Vighdan for publication in the Journal of Sociophysiology’s instar of August 2003, “Grammaticalization of schizomythia and taboo in Mountain Fukari root class: Confirmation of a functional proximal–distal quantal continuum of ligativity in affixival clitics of womaninity and pronominal control.”

Ada published this translexicological time-bomb, not under the pseudonym she had constructed from her mother’s nom de guerre and that of her father, Olantaros Romer, an itinerant Norlian musician, but rather under the name she was known by to the majority of our largely gallo-, appalacho-, intrussyo-, and fukarophone conspecifics: Ouida Willoughby Johnson.

As Ouida, Ada studied sociophysiology, schizomythology, and translexicology at our city’s Institute of Sociophysiology (ISOCPHYS), where, in addition to reviving Larry Lath’s lost play of 1926, Aunt Smaragdina’s Parandrus, as her own sort of homage entropicollagiste to her late mother on Glamporium’s panoptical Playground of Taboo, she also fronted a popular musical grope called Ishtar’s Hand that so often engaged us with its own unict brand of RITM, a form of Ritually Induc(t)ive Transe Musique.

This heroic frenzy of creative sociophysiological toil did not, however, forbid Ouida from debarking frequently at her kinsmen’s urging upon Mar Arathu’s farther shores, where, under the sobriquet of Ada, and souvent au AGSAD du Vieux Port d’Agua Prieta, she and her comely cast of sportive co-houri’s in Romer’s Samba, a variety song-and-dance act commandeered by her paternal polymath (Hammond organ, argol, ktar) as well as her avuncular duo on drums and bass, typically neither slouched nor flagged upon a generous bulk of that copious city’s angular girons.

A year and a half before her fatal fall, Ouida’s sometime comparse Sagarch Flawndol tells us, Ada attained majority and thus was enabled to set up on her own and begin renovating an old farmhouse outside Blorhn, Wyo., which barn, alas, would proove ultimately her undoing, as it was down its rickety colimaçon from mansard to a clattering of shattered mason jars that she plunged, so it is reported, into les petites heures du samedi soir au dimanche matin of 23–24 January, never to rise again.

Ada aka Ouida leaves behind us her compositional vagabond of a father M. Romer; her two loving uncles Rick and Djuma; her cousin J. W. M. Methuen, founder of Melos e Artes; and her incomplete sociophysiological swan song, Towards a Schizomythology of Ritual, the mss. of which, it is said, contain an account of antlion larval silk production in Fukariland.

In addition to donating plume duty for our SCAT, cosmopolitan wordist D. I. Swopes corresponds transarathumariously with both Tiliar Tracks! and the Agua Prieta Piste, and pancontinenaciously with INTEC in Paris.